Introduction, The Films of Robert Mulligan

by Peter Tonguette

Peter Tonguette was Staff Critic for The Film Journal from 2002 to 2005.  His writing has also appeared in Senses of Cinema, Bright Lights Film Journal, Contracampo, and 24fps Magazine.

Robert Mulligan speaks at the beginning of his classic film, Summer of ’42. In the adult voice of Hermie, the protagonist, he says of Dorothy, the older woman he is in love with, “And nothing from that first day that I saw her, and no one who has happened to me since, has been as frightening and as confusing, for no person that I have ever known has ever done more to make me feel more sure or insecure, more important and less significant “ Wonderfully spoken, the beauty of the language is nevertheless surpassed, in the final summation, by the beauty of the mise-en-scene. After an over-the-shoulder shot of the young Hermie lurking beneath a cliff to observe Dorothy and her husband’s sea-side house, Mulligan cuts to a shot of Hermie’s face as he’s watching. The camera zooms in to a big close-up. Cross-cutting between Hermie’s face, and slow-motion shots of Dorothy and her husband, Mulligan has set up the key relationship in Summer of ’42 in his opening sequence. We wouldn’t need his narration to understand what’s going on.

But I sometimes want to paraphrase Hermie’s words, as spoken by Mulligan, when talking about the director’s films. What Hermie says about the uniqueness of Dorothy also applies to the inimitability of Mulligan’s cinema. Just as there has never been a filmmaker like him—one with his particular use of cinematic subjectivity (discussed by John Belton in his essay); with his appreciation of the ways in which places inform our notions about people (discussed by Tom Ryan in his essay); or with his singular abilities with the camera (discussed by every one of the writers who contributed to this feature)—it seems to me, as I write this late in 2004, almost impossible that there are many Robert Mulligans in the current or future generations of American filmmakers. As Sidney Levin, the editor of Clara’s Heart, said to me in my interview with him, “The rhythm and pacing of his films are not of this time.”

It is my hope that this feature devoted to Mulligan’s cinema elucidates the aspects of his work which make it so special. John Belton’s essay perceptively takes on Mulligan’s body of work as a whole up to 1978’s Blood Brothers. Zach Campbell selects two Mulligan films which have a great deal in common both thematically and stylistically--To Kill a Mockingbird and Clara’s Heart—and contrasts them with great insight. Richard Armstrong, Robert Keser, Gabe Klinger, Adrian Martin, Mark Pfeiffer, and Tom Ryan devote themselves to analyzing individual works: To Kill a Mockingbird, Summer of ’42, Clara’s Heart, The Man in the Moon, and The Pursuit of Happiness, respectively. My own interviews with Mulligan collaborators Sidney Levin and Else Blangsted hopefully round out their critical work with documentation and insight into what went into the making of one of his films. Indeed, Blangsted affirmed Belton’s comment that “…Mulligan lets his audience imagine rather than see the violence and, as a result, magnifies it in their minds,” when she said to me, “You know, if you recall in To Kill a Mockingbird, there is such a little snippet of the actual brutality—because you felt the brutality in the courtroom!”

Undeniably, some readers will have only seen Mulligan’s most prominent movie, To Kill a Mockingbird. I hope that they will read the articles and interviews contained herein and seek the director’s other films out on video, DVD, and at revival screenings. If they do so, they will quickly grasp that nearly every one of his other films shares with Mockingbird similar themes, a totally consistent style, and an idiosyncratic, instantly recognizable mise-en-scene. They will even realize that the oft-discussed child’s eye view of Mockingbird is something Mulligan has returned to in subsequent films. As Belton notes, writing of The Other, “Again Mulligan’s camera work leads us into the child, into the reality of his world.” Indeed, his final two films, Clara’s Heart and The Man in the Moon, have children as the lead characters; it would be tempting to connect Mulligan’s sympathy with them to Levin’s observation about how he will always see “the little boy” in Mulligan.

In closing, I must thank all of the writers who generously contributed articles and Filipe Furtado, an ardent student of Mulligan’s work, for first suggesting the idea of this feature to me.

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