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Robert Mulligan: Kill A Mockingbird
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In 1957 Robert Mulligan directed his first motion picture (Fear Strikes Out) and five years later received wide acclaim and Academy award and Directors Guild of America nominations for To Kill a Mockingbird. In 1972 he would be nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Director and another Directors Guild Award for the highly successful Summer of '42.
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Robert Mulligan's socially conscious drama charmed fans of the Harper Lee book, while almost singlehandedly redefining liberal-minded moviemaking. To Kill a Mockingbird actually plays better now than it did in 1962; although it sticks to the formula of appreciating the problems of minorities from a white perspective, it has a sensitivity uncommon even today. Gregory Peck's Atticus Finch may be a paragon of virtue but he's no superman, and the movie never stoops to easy emotional effects.
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To Kill a Mockingbird was the second of six films that Mulligan directed in collaboration with producer Alan J. Pakula. The collaborative duo was part of what John Belton identified as a school of filmmakers emerging at that time who largely came out of New York and had gotten their start in television. Belton himself singled out Mulligan for praise in part because of the element of detachment he brought to enrich his very sincere, socially conscious stories.
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Before they hit the big time with To Kill a Mockingbird, director Robert Mulligan and producer Alan J. Pakula made this realistic, stripped-down, black-and-white baseball story. Anthony Perkins gives a great, twitchy performance as Jimmy Piersall, the real-life outfielder who lands a coveted spot on the Boston Red Sox. But the strain of getting there -- plus the relentless pushing of his father (Karl Malden) -- knocks him over the edge and into a nervous breakdown. The lanky Perkins actually has a pretty good throwing arm, but sports a funny batting stance. Apparently, the real Piersall renounced the film due to its misrepresentation of the facts. Paramount's disc has no extras.
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In an era in which consistent visual style seems perhaps too uniformly held as the prerequisite of the valorized auteur, one can all too easily understand why Robert Mulligan's work has failed to evince any passionate critical interest. His films all look so different; for instance, To Kill a Mockingbird, with its black-and-white measured pictorialism; Up the down Staircase, photographed on location with a documentary graininess; The Other, with its heightened Gothic expressionism rather conventional to the horror genre, if not to Mulligan's previous work; and The Summer of '42, with a pastel prettiness that suffuses each image with the nostalgia of memory. If some would claim this visual eclecticism reflects the lack of a strong personality, others could claim that Mulligan has too much respect for his material to impose arbitrarily upon it some monolithic consistency and instead brings to his subjects the sensibility of a somewhat self-effacing Hollywood craftsman. Yet there are certainly some sequences in Mulligan's work that spring vividly to mind: the silent, final seduction in The Summer of '42; the almost surreal walk home by a child dressed as a ham in To Kill a Mockingbird; the high school dance in Up the down Staircase; the climactic camera movement in The Other, from Niles to that empty space where Holland, were he not imaginary, would be sitting.
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Kill A Mockingbird