Robert Mulligan, 1925 - 2008.

"Robert Mulligan, who was nominated for an Academy Award for directing the 1962 film classic To Kill a Mockingbird died Saturday at his home in Lyme, Conn. He was 83.... His first film, Fear Strikes Out, was released in 1957 and told the story of mentally ill baseball player Jimmy Piersall, played by Anthony Perkins. Mulligan directed 19 more films, including Summer of '42, The Other and Same Time, Next Year before capping his career in 1991 with Man in the Moon, featuring actress Reese Witherspoon in her movie debut.

Claire Noland, Los Angeles Times, via Dave Kehr.

Updated through 12/23.

[To Kill a Mockingbird] - which won three Academy Awards, including Best Actor for Gregory Peck, and earned Mulligan his only Oscar nomination - had an immediate and lasting impact.... But the director's heart, here as in so many of his films, was with the Finch children. If Mulligan had an abiding interest, it was troubled youngsters on the cusp of discovering themselves by confronting the world around them."

Richard Corliss, Time.

See also: The January 2005 special issue of the Film Journal devoted to Robert Mulligan.

Update: "The director worked in just about every genre except the epic - what links all his films together is a kind of intimacy, achieved largely via a camera that seeks to establish a strong link between the viewer and a particular character," writes Glenn Kenny.

Updates, 12/22: Flickhead on Summer of '42: "It may not be Mulligan's best film - it may not even be that good a film at all, to some people. But I'll be forever in Mulligan's debt for all it contains, especially Michel Legrand's music."

Phil Nugent in Screengrab on Mockingbird: "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" and gave Peck "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."

Edward Copeland on Same Time, Next Year: "[E]ven now, decades after I first saw it, if I catch it on TV, I have to watch it until the end."

"Though best noted for his country credits he never left the city far behind," writes Robert Cashill: "1960's The Rat Race, with Tony Curtis and Debbie Reynolds slumming for showbiz work, 1963's Love with the Proper Stranger, with Steve McQueen trying to do the right thing by Natalie Wood as she considers an abortion, the frank teacher saga Up the Down Staircase (1967), and the lusty Bloodbrothers (1978), with Richard Gere in an early part and Marilu Henner as the self-admitted 'town pump,' all poke at the teeming underbelly of Big Apple life."

"Robert Mulligan will probably not be remembered for his discernible visual style," writes Scott Marks. "His films may all look different, but there is a consistency of themes that make him an unmistakable auteur."

Update, 12/23: "Mulligan was one of the new wave of American moviemakers who emerged from the heyday of postwar television, enjoying initial acclaim but erratic subsequent careers," writes Brian Baxter in the Guardian. "Together with Sidney Lumet, Martin Ritt, John Frankenheimer and others, he maintained an uneasy balance between commercialism and personal works, often missing out on critical attention."

"If some critics took Mr. Mulligan to task for lacking a strong or consistent directorial vision, others praised his narrative ability and his fealty to the source material of his films," notes Margalit Fox in the New York Times.

Posted by dwhudson at December 21, 2008 12:47 PM