Robert Mulligan, 1925-2008

Posted by Phil Nugent
The Hollywood director Robert Mulligan died yesterday at the age of 83. After attending Fordham University and serving with the Marines in World War II, Mulligan broke into directing for television, working his way up from a job as messenger boy. During the era of live TV plays, he directed such notable broadcasts as Gore Vidal's 1954 adaptation of William Faulkner's Barn Burning; Vidal's The Death of Billy the Kid starring Paul Newman, which would provide the basis for the Arthur Penn movie The Left-Handed Gun, also with Newman; the 1955 A Man Is Ten Feet Tall, starring Sidney Poitier; and, in 1959, The Moon and Sixpence, which marked the first of Laurence Olivier's rare appearances on American TV. (Both Mulligan and Olivier won Emmys for it.) By then, Mulligan had already made the leap to feature films with the 1957 Fear Strikes Out, a biopic starring Anthony Perkins as the emotionally troubled baseball player player Jimmy Piersall. That success helped established his reputation as a gifted director with actors who could apply a delicate hand to sensitive material.

Those virtues would come in handy with Mulligan's best-remembered film, the 1962 To Kill a Mockingbird. Staging Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Mulligan had to deal not only with the racially charged material but with then challenges presented by using child actors at the center of the production and trying to convey that the story was unfolding as filtered through the eyes and memories of the six-year-old Scout (played by Mary Badham). The project could have easily ended in disaster, but instead it wound up as one of those movies now seems to have been made for the express purpose of showing up on AFI lists: it made it to #25 on the Institute's list of greatest American movies, and to #1 on their list of courtroom dramas. The movie's star, Gregory Peck, won the Academy Award for playing a character, Atticus Finch, was selected by the AFI as "the greatest hero of American film." The performance, which inspired Harper Lee (who based the character of Atticus on her father) to say of Peck that ""Atticus Finch gave him an opportunity to play himself," gave the actor a Lincolnesque aura for the rest of his life and career. The movie is also notable for including the screen debut of Robert Duvall as the brain-damaged redneck boogeyman Boo Radley, a character that Duvall, lucky for him, was able to step away from in later roles.

Nothing else Mulligan did would loom as large in film culture, He made Love with the Proper Stranger and Baby the Rain Must Fall with Steve McQueen, who he had directed for TV in the Studio One drama The Defenders; the high-pitched Hollywood expose Inside Daisy Clover, with Natalie Wood; Up the Down Staircase, starring Sandy Dennis as a young teacher in a violent New York high school; and the 1969 Western thriller The Stalking Moon, which reunited him with Gregory Peck. He had a big, unexpected hit with the nostalgic Summer of '42, a big make-out movie in the spring of '71. But his other work in the '70s and '80s mostly left the impression that material suited to his gentle touch was getting harder and harder to find. He retired after 1991's The Man in the Moon, one more love story about coming of age in an earlier, presumably simpler time and place, noteworthy as the film debut of Reese Witherspoon.
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Posted Dec 22 2008, 11:30 AM
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