American Cinema in the '70s: The Pursuit of Happiness

by Tom Ryan

Tom Ryan has been the film critic for The Sunday Age in Melbourne since 1989. He has written widely for newspapers and specialist film magazines in Australia, the US and Europe and lectured on the subject in Australia and the UK.

(This essay first appeared in Movie 21. Reprinted by permission of Tom Ryan.)

One of the major problems facing contemporary film criticism, which is demonstrated by the discussion in Movie 20, is that of finding some way of coming to terms with contemporary films. It is all very well to pay homage to the qualities of Letter From An Unknown Woman or On Dangerous Ground, but to see these films as representative of an era is quite ludicrous. And the situation becomes worse when a familiarity with their stylistic richness stands in the way of detailed analyses of what has been happening in movies during the last decade. The question of style, the expressive use of the details of mise-en-scene, is as important now as it ever was, yet we have scarcely scratched the surface of the issue for recent cinema. The Pursuit of Happiness is unlikely to win much critical acclaim, but simply because it is not a special case, it is perhaps a good starting-point from which to tackle the problem.

The ‘seventies have marked a decline in the critical reputation of Robert Mulligan. The emergence of Alan J. Pakula as a director of note seems to have encouraged the view that Mulligan’s better films (To Kill A Mockingbird, Baby, The Rain Must Fall and The Stalking Moon) owe as much to the presence of Pakula as producer as they do any contribution he might have made. (See, for example, Robin Wood’s essay on Mulligan and Pakula in the forthcoming ‘Encyclopaedia of Directors’, edited by Richard Roud). The tendency has been to patronise Mulligan’s subsequent work, an attitude which seems to have been assumed in the absence of any detailed analysis of the films. Richard Combs’s thumbnail review of The Pursuit of Happiness in the Monthly Film Bulletin (August 1974) is a case in point, offering glib comments about ‘behind the times pandering to the market’ and ‘overall amorphousness’, and making no attempt to confront the film’s visual qualities.

Yet it is this feature of Mulligan’s work which most needs to be discussed. John Belton observes—in his excellent article, ‘Direction By Indirection’ in The Velvet Light Trap (No. 13, Fall 1974)—that ‘Mulligan views people in terms of place’, and the point is particularly relevant to The Pursuit of Happiness. Unobtrusively and unselfconsciously, Mulligan constantly relates his characters to their environment: whilst William Popper (Michael Sarrazin) can never articulate his feeling of displacement, except in the vaguest terms (‘There’s a nervous breakdown going on out there and I don’t want to be part of it!’), it nevertheless receives precise visual definition—something which could easily be glossed over because the film, at a casual glance, looks as if it could have been made for TV.

In the film’s opening sequence, behind the credits and accompanied by Randy Newman’s melancholy song about a contrived innocence (‘Let me go, let me go, let me go/Don’t give me the answer, ‘cause I don’t want to know’), Mulligan intercuts shots of William walking through a park and of his model yacht drifting on an artificial lake, drawing an obvious connection between the two. The credits end as William collects his boat, and the following sequence establishes both a recurrent visual motif in the film and one of the sources of William’s condition. The location is a university campus, and from a close-up tracking shot of the boat under William’s arm, Mulligan cuts to a high angle shot of him lost amongst the milling crowds, before three consecutive cuts shift the perspective to a low angle. The emotional force of each shot is directed towards William’s sense of being enclosed: in the first, a sharp-pointed fence becomes prominent in the foreground as the camera pans with his movement; in the second, the university buildings tower over him, before he moves back into the crowd; and in the foreground of the third, a negro student harangues her companions in a semi-hysterical tone as William passes behind them to the table where his girlfriend, Jane (Barbara Hershey), is seated, collecting signatures for a petition, the low angle camera panning ahead of William to take her in at eye-level.

With an admirable precision and economy, Mulligan has placed the film’s central figures—the constantly changing camera angles and the structure of the frames which observe William stress his discomfort amidst the campus activity, just as the undisturbed angle underlines how easily Jane fits in with it. The subsequent cutting between William and Jane as they greet each other continues the low-angle/eye-level opposition, and only when they head off together to the apartment they share does our perspective on Jane alter. In a series of two-shots, shifting from a low angle to a higher one, and in the nature of their exchange, Mulligan points to their discomfort—this time a mutual one—in the world outside the university, and, at the same time, to the tensions in their relationship, which are themselves closely related to their different views on what is important in coming to terms with this world. As we learn later, during her talk with William’s father (Arthur Hill) when he visits the apartment after William’s accident, Jane had been attracted to William by the quality of his commitment to political issues (he had been ‘clean for Gene’ in 1968, had been arrested during the Chicago riots of the same year, and then again in a march on the UN building in September 1969), but his refusal now even to attend the local meetings she has organised has cast a barrier between them which remains unresolved, even when she hesitantly joins his flight at the end.

The film’s structure, leading up to this flight, again underlines Mulligan’s acute feeling for place, and his treatment of minute details of décor is central to this. All the locations in the film both provide a way of looking at the characters who inhabit them and add to the claustrophobic atmosphere which seems to be pressing in on William. His apartment, with its collection of fashionable pop and protest posters seems far more in tune with Jane, and the painting (his father’s) and his model yacht seem quite out of place there. In fact, when Jane and Mr Popper meet in the apartment, she is framed with the posters, whilst Mr Popper is linked with the model yacht. Both clearly represent aspects of William’s life, though in his present frame of mind he has far more in common with his father. The connection between them is visually sustained in the similarity of their dress and manner, and is noted later by his disapproving grandmother: ‘You and your father haven’t a drop of your grandfather’s blood in you. You’ve got no sense of responsibility…’ The disillusionment which William is suffering is not one which is unique to his generation.

The grandmother (Ruth White), a living embodiment of the history of ethnic prejudice, but still an attractive figure, with her personal vitality and her intuitive trust in her grandson, lives in the family mansion which is like a fortress of the past. The plush interior, whose décor has been born of previous generations, suggests how her mind works to afford her a protection against the incomprehensibility of a changing world (which William, at least partially, represents), just as her barred windows, high walls and savage dogs are supposed to protect her from the vandalism of ‘those little black hooligans’. It is no coincidence that when William visits her to beg financial support for his escape, he gains entry to the house like an intruder—clambering over the walls, fleeing the dogs, scaling the exterior of the house, and finally coming through an upstairs window.

The evocative presence of the places through which William passes offers a disturbing perspective on the impossibility of the characters’ ever coming to terms with contemporary realities. Like William’s grandmother, they are all as much trapped in their limited way of seeing the world as they are in their homes or their places of work. Each seems to find security in grasping an inflexible set of assumptions, based on an idea of the past. The officer who books William for automobile manslaughter designs his questions according to a formula idea of modern youth, quite unaware of William’s separate identity as an individual, and not at all interested in any statement which contradicts the ‘evidence’ he has before him. The accumulation of material—William’s expired licence, the unpaid parking tickets in the glove-box of his car, the faulty brakes, and the poor tread on the tyres—points to a case of irresponsibility, and William’s claim that ‘the brakes engaged straight away’ falls on deaf ears. Mulligan shoots the sequence in a series of one shots, his cutting fragmenting the exchange and asserting the impossibility of communication, whilst the soundtrack records the oppressive sounds of the office activity off-screen.

The judge who sentences William delivers his verdict on the basis of this sort of evidence of William’s past, and even though the justice he administers is in accord with judicial practices—there is no other way the court could approach the fact of the accident—it cannot be seen as the application of fair treatment. The concern of the court is with appearances, something which William’s lawyer, Daniel Lawrence (E.G. Marshall), recognises and accepts as he insists that William dress and behave for the occasion (‘In my ball park you play my ball game my way’). Yet whilst this view of American justice is only one feature of the general malaise which afflicts the characters in the film—where the Statue of Liberty can only come ‘alive’ in a dream—it gives a bleak irony to the phrase from the Declaration of Independence which gives the film its title. And it is not just William who has fallen foul of forces outside his control, for, in endeavouring to maintain out-dated beliefs in the face of a frightening alternative, those who participate in the enforcement of the laws (Lawrence, ‘the fuzz doing his duty’, the cop in the traffic jam) also assist in the creation of their own prison.

Subjected in this way to the demands of their environment, each of the characters in the film can be seen as representative of a particular ‘type’; which is not to say that they lack a personal dimension, for there is a beautiful collection of little cameos in the film (notably Robert Klein as Melvin, William’s hippy friend, and Ted Beniades as the cop on duty when William’s car breaks down). It means, rather, that the notion of characters fitting into roles becomes central to the film. Thus Daniel Lawrence, adopting what he thinks would be William’s terminology, describes himself as ‘a black Republican lawyer’ and ‘a conservative, reactionary bastard’, whilst his son, Terence (Peter White), follows in his father’s footsteps, just as William does his father, and William’s Aunt Ruth (Sada Thompson) does her mother. Those roles are virtually inescapable and seem designed at least as much by circumstance as by individual choice, which is testified to by the family pairings and by the chain of events in William’s life.

In such a context, the film’s final sequence provides an exhilarating if precarious feeling of liberation, as the tiny plane carrying William and Jane rises with the dawning of a new day and soars away from the urban landscape filled with skyscrapers, endless rows of cars and a veil of smog. The only possibility for escape in the film has seemed to rest with individuals’ ability to move away from the places with which their roles are linked—appropriately, Daniel Lawrence’s tacit acceptance of William’s plea that he has been the innocent victim of fate, and of the legal system, occurs in a downstairs locker room, away from his offices and the court-room where any view of the individual is lost in a legal ritual. Thus William’s hope lies in his getting away from the places that have induced his feeling of imprisonment. Defending his escape through the unguarded open window of the court-house toilet, he declares, ‘I followed my instincts, and right now they’re the only things I can trust,’ and it is only in the endeavour to reach beyond a particular social consciousness that the individual can hope to find any personal freedom. Though the shadow of the past constantly hovers over any such endeavour—the film significantly closes on a freeze frame of the Statue of Liberty—it is in the attempt that William is able to move towards the discovery of an independent identity.

Like the central characters in so many of Mulligan’s films, he is only able to achieve a partial understanding of his relationship with his environment. His actions are guided by his emotions and he becomes something of a romantic hero whose innocence, contrived as it may be, allows him to retain the sort of noble purity to which Jane is attracted (she tells Mr Popper that she intuitively trusts in William’s judgments). But whilst William is a figure who invites both admiration and sympathy in one way, he is also presented as one totally out of touch with the demands of the immediate situation. The policeman who books him is right to be amazed when William uses his one phone call to try to contact his girlfriend rather than a lawyer who could have him released on bail; William’s grandmother is right when she expresses impatience with her grandson for not having had the presence of mind to have demanded a blood test on the victim of the accident; Lawrence is right in ordering William to behave ‘properly’ before the trial; and Jane is right when she observes that William is ‘getting hung up on details’ when he expresses his intention not to wear a suit to court. William is no simple identification figure, and Mulligan nicely balances his noble instincts against his almost wilful naivety.

This quality of perspective, which characterises so much of Mulligan’s work, and which finds expression through the ‘strategy’ of his visual style—a strategy in which performance, décor, camera placement, and the method of cutting all play their part—stresses the inappropriateness of the disinterest and complacency with which his films, especially the more recent ones, have been greeted.

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