Film Career: 1950s-1960s
In 1957 Mulligan directed his first motion picture, Fear Strikes Out, starring Anthony Perkins as tormented baseball player Jimmy Piersall. The film was the first feature he would direct alongside longtime collaborator Alan J. Pakula, then a big-time Hollywood producer. Pakula once confessed that "working with Bob set me back in directing several years because I enjoyed working with him, and we were having a good time, and I enjoyed the work." After the release of Fear Strikes Out, Mulligan briefly disbanded with Pakula and made two Tony Curtis vehicles, The Rat Race and The Great Imposter, as well as two Rock Hudson vehicles, Come September and The Spiral Road.
In the early 1960s, Pakula returned to Mulligan with the proposition of directing To Kill A Mockingbird (1962), based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Harper Lee. Mulligan accepted the offer despite the awareness that "the other studios didn't want it because what's it about? It's about a middle-aged lawyer with two kids. There's no romance, no violence (except off-screen). There's no action. What is there? Where's the story?" With the help of a screenplay by Horton Foote as well as the pivotal casting of Gregory Peck in the role of Atticus Finch, however, the film became a huge hit, and Mulligan was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Director.
Mulligan and Pakula followed To Kill A Mockingbird with five more films: Love With the Proper Stranger (1963), starring Natalie Wood and Steve McQueen; Baby the Rain Must Fall (1965), starring McQueen; Inside Daisy Clover (1965), starring Wood; Up the Down Staircase (1967), based on a humorous novel by Bel Kaufman and starring Sandy Dennis as the schoolteacher Ms. Barrett; and The Stalking Moon (1968), based on a Western novel by T.V. Olsen and reuniting Mulligan and Pakula with Peck, this time in the role of Sam Varner, a scout who attempts to escort a white woman (Eva Marie Saint) and her half-Indian son to New Mexico after they are pursued by a bloodthirsty Apache. After this film, Pakula broke ties with Mulligan to pursue his own career in directing.
Read more about this topic: Robert Mulligan
Famous quotes containing the word film:
“The woman’s world ... is shown as a series of limited spaces, with the woman struggling to get free of them. The struggle is what the film is about; what is struggled against is the limited space itself. Consequently, to make its point, the film has to deny itself and suggest it was the struggle that was wrong, not the space.”
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