Dig A Hole: Robert Mulligan
December 22nd, 2008 by Scott Marks
Robert Mulligan, the talented filmmaker who was a master of the art of camera placement and had an uncanny flair for eliciting sensitive performances from young actors, died Friday of heart disease at his Connecticut home. He was 83.
In his most famous film, To Kill a Mockingbird, Mulligan achieved the impossible: he pulled a good performance out of the generally immalleable Gregory Peck. Peck plays Atticus Finch, a small town southern lawyer and his scenes with daughter Scout (Mary Badham) are so effective that you can’t wait until Brock Peters catches the cup and we can move away from the trial and back to family matters. Mockingbird was Mulligan’s only Oscar nomination.
Mulligan was born August 23, 1925, in New York and worked for six months on the copy desk of The New York Times before before entering Fordham University, where he majored in journalism and literature. He became one of the first students to enroll in the school’s radio department. Mr. Mulligan kicked off his show business career as a messenger boy at CBS, became a production assistant and in the early 1950s begandirecting such live TV productions as Studio One and Playhouse 90. Mulligan’s first film as a director was Fear Strikes Out (1957), which starred Anthony Perkins as mentally unbalanced baseball pitcher Jimmy Piersall.
Mulligan formed a collaboration with Alan J. Pakula who served as a producer on several of Mulligan’s early films, beginning with Fear Strikes Out. Their partnership, which spanned eleven years and seven pictures, ended in 1969 when Pakula branched out to become a respectable director in his own right.
According to the Hollywood Reporter, “Sensing a kindred spirit, Francois Truffaut was a vocal champion, particularly cognizant of what he perceived as undue criticism of Mulligan’s work for lacking a particular ’style.’ Mulligan himself was dismissive of critics/cineaste talk: “I don’t know anything about ‘the Mulligan style,’ ” he told the Village Voice in 1978. ‘If you can find it, well, that’s your job.’ Mulligan was known for working side-by-side with screenwriters in shaping a cinematic story. “The attention which has been paid to directors is flattering but overrated,” he noted in the same Voice interview.
It had been almost twenty years since Mulligan directed (his last feature, Man in the Moon, was also Reese Witherspoon’s first) and he’s one of the few Hollywood directors never to have a critical volume dedicated to his films. Robert Mulligan will probably not be remembered for his discernible visual style. His films may all look different, but there is a consistency of themes that make him an unmistakable auteur.
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