Robert Mulligan | Fear Strikes Out | Baby the Rain Must Fall | The Nickel Ride | Same Time, Next Year | The Man in the Moon
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Robert Mulligan is an American director, who started in out in live television during the Golden Age of TV in the 1950's. He has directed 21 feature-length films.
Common aspects of Robert Mulligan's buildings include:
Landscapes:
Visual style:
Characters and subjects:
Images:
Several Mulligan films have unusually poetic titles. These might reflect his TV background. Such poetic titles were favorites on TV drama shows circa 1960. The writers did not need to produce titles that could easily be marketed the way theatrical film titles were, and were free to let their imaginations soar. In several cases, these titles are taken directly from source novels. Still, they are unchanged, unlike the frequent retitling of films.
Fear Strikes Out (1957) is Mulligan's first theatrical film. Like several Mulligan works to come, it is about an abusive father and the pressure he puts on his grown but still young child. It also resembles Same Time, Next Year (1978), in that it traverses many years in the lives of its characters, being constructed out of a series of episodes that chronicle the evolving nature of their lives at different periods. The film also exemplifies Mulligan's theme of fertility, with the wife getting pregnant and having a baby.
The family home at the beginning is visually similar to those in many later Mulligan works. Even though many later Mulligan films are set in rural areas, their family homes share a surprising similarity to this urban home:
All of the above are features that return in the rural homes that dominate so many Mulligan films.
There is also an unloading region for a bakery in the background, near the home. This anticipates the warehouse loading docks in The Nickel Ride (1974).
The bleachers of the high school ballpark are also wooden, and full of repeating units, such as the seats, and the sections of the bleachers.
Baby the Rain Must Fall (1965) is one of a series of films with richly realized Southern settings, including To Kill a Mockingbird and The Man in the Moon.
A central theme of Baby the Rain Must Fall is child abuse, and its effect on grown men. In this it recalls Fear Strikes Out, Blood Brothers and The Man in the Moon. Unlike all these films about abusive fathers, here the bad parent is a woman, the hero's adoptive guardian Miss Kate. As in Blood Brothers, the hero here tries to adopt a profession that is disapproved of by his parent.
Miss Kate's house has architecture typical of one strand of Mulligan, resembling the house in The Man in the Moon. It is wooden, with rich interior paneling. It is white outside, and two stories high. It has elaborate porches. It is full of "repeated modules", such as the pillars and sections of the porch, and the numerous window shutters in Miss Kate's room. All of these features are Mulligan trademarks. The cut-off corners of the door under the stairs recall and anticipate the cut-off garage door corners in To Kill a Mockingbird and The Man in the Moon. However, while the house in The Man in the Moon is depicted as the heroine's normal living environment, here all these features are part of a Gothic mode. The house is as spooky as the Bates mansion in Psycho, or the Addams Family home. And such stylized areas as the porch, Miss Kate's room with the shutters, or the stairway door, are the centerpiece of the film's spookiest and most sinister scenes. The visual richness of the repeated modules in the porch and shuttered room, or the polygonal door, becomes the essence of the mise-en-scène in these scenes.
As a building, the Wagon Wheel roadhouse is also in the shape of a rectangle with one corner cut off.
The staircase shots in Miss Kate's house somewhat recall the staircase near the hero's office in The Nickel Ride. Both are wide, and nearly complete rooms in themselves, existing in deep stairwells. Dramatic moments take place on the staircases.
The cowboy clothes worn by the hero, the members of the band, and the sheriff Slim all make the Wagon Wheel scene the most Western in feel of the film's episodes. Everything else seems far more Southern. Slim's snow white cowboy shirt links him to other Mulligan men in white clothes, although he is not the protagonist of the film. The windows of the light colored Wagon Wheel exterior are painted in some darker color trim. Even in this black and white film, one sees multi-colors straining to break through.
There are some deep perspective shots near the opening: the road seen through the front windows of the bus, and the downtown sidewalk with its awning. The crossroads shot from the bus is geometrically complex.
Many of the film's scenes take place outdoors. These tend to be on home lawns with vast vistas. There are often trees, and other buildings seen in the middle distance. Such stagings recall Mulligan's other Southern films, To Kill a Mockingbird and The Man in the Moon. They cast a uniquely Mulligan mood. Such settings allow complex visual patterns to be created. The varied views Mulligan presents also relate to the feelings of the characters, and the developments of the plot. The film opens this way, with the woman standing by the roadside, waiting for the bus.
However, there is a sinister touch in Baby the Rain Must Fall that is not present in these other Mulligan films. The outdoor vistas frequently include the town's courthouse, or its cemetery. Both are ominous controlling factors in the life of its hero. They are foreshadowings of the tragedies that dominate his existence.
By contrast, the hero and heroine's own home is in an isolated field. There are few buildings anywhere around, and the ground has no grass - very atypical of a Mulligan outdoor locale. At first, this looks spooky, perhaps too barren. But as the film progresses, it leads to a welcome sense of relief. It shows the family being free from sinister outside influences, and attempting to start a new life.
Other locales in the film anticipate The Man in the Moon. The exterior of the Western music bar, with its numerous cars parked out in front, is like the country club with its row of cars. And the downtown also is like the downtown in the later film. Both of these public locales offer the characters an all too brief respite from their problems at home.
The screenplay here is by Horton Foote. The opening, with the heroine talking to an older women on a bus, recalls the opening of Foote's most famous work, The Trip to Bountiful.
A digression: the rollicking TV spoof of Dirty Harry style cops, Hard Knocks (1987), had Bill Maher send his detective partner Tommy Hinckley out to the video store for a movie. No one was sure what the maniacally gung-ho tough guy Hinckley would bring back - everyone expected some ultra-macho action movie. It turned out to be his "favorite film", The Trip to Bountiful!
The Nickel Ride (1974) is a gangster movie, a genre one does not typically associate with Mulligan. Several of Mulligan's films deal with "criminals who are really not such bad guys": The Great Impostor, Come September, Baby the Rain Must Fall and this movie.
This film is full of remarkable compositions and camera movement. Mulligan is especially good at exploring urban landscapes. These include both exteriors, and traditional urban interiors such as warehouses, old office buildings, bars, etc. The slow, stop and start camera movements are remarkably vivid and atmospheric. Its visual beauty and inventiveness stand revealed.
After just the first viewing, I was unable to follow the gangster plot of the film. This does not matter. The characters and emotional mood of each scene come through loud and clear. I've never been able to understand the plot of Tokyo Drifter (Seijun Suzuki), either, although I love that film's color! The Nickel Ride has a cryptic, surreal quality. It seems as close to such avant-garde plays as Waiting for Godot or Tiny Alice as it does to traditional gangster movies as Howard Hawks' Scarface or The Public Enemy. There is little violence. Instead, we are loose in a strange, dream like world we do not understand, drifting from one emotionally compelling scene to another.
To Kill a Mockingbird and Baby the Rain Must Fall are also full of surreal touches, and a pervasive sense of strangeness.
When Mulligan spoke after the preview of Summer of 42 (1971), he was wearing a dazzling Mod white suit, that was typical of the fashion of the era. At the time I thought, "So that's how a glamorous Hollywood director dresses!"
Jason Miller is sporting a somewhat similar off-white suit during the first third of The Nickel Ride. He looks very similar to how I remember Mulligan. One wonders if the protagonist is in some ways a stand-in for Mulligan, drifting through a surreal, dream like experience. The whole film is full of Mod fashions of the era. Atticus Finch (Gregory Peck in Mockingbird) also wears a lot of white suits.
Throughout the first half of The Nickel Ride, Mulligan employs color schemes of white, offset by swaths of some other bright color - yellow, red or blue. Usually only one bright color appears in a sequence. A section of the film will be all white and yellow, followed by another long stretch that is all white and red, followed by another sequence in turn that is all white and blue. This sort of color architecture a personal color pattern - it shows up again in The Man in the Moon, which has major sequences of white and green, and shorter sequences of white and red.
The early scenes of The Nickel Ride are designed in shades of white and yellow. White is perhaps a more predominant color, with big swaths of yellow, gold, or light beige tones. These scenes include hero Cooper at home, first in bed, then on the phone, then getting breakfast and getting dressed. The idea of opening a film with a character in bed, full of intense feeling and pondering about issues in his life, will recur in Same Time, Next Year and The Man in the Moon.
The still life on the cop's table, with phone, badge, book, etc. is a memorable composition. Much of it is in shades of yellow.
When the action switches to the street, with Cooper fully dressed in his suit, we have a new color scheme: white with swaths of red. The red includes Cooper's dark red tie, the red jacket worn by the street peddler, red frames and stools in the bar, the red and white shirt and tie worn by the man sleeping in the office, and the red cap of the man by the pool.
While in the middle of the pool scene, the colors suddenly shift. They now become blue and white, beginning with the boxer and the blue accents and trim on his clothes. This color scheme persists back at Cooper's office, with the black characters in the blue shirts, and in the birthday party bar scene. There are even blue candles on the chocolate cake. The bar scene occasionally has flashes of the other color schemes: the peddler in red shows up, the middle cake is slightly yellow, etc. But most of the color accents and clothes in the bar are blue, against a white background.
When Carl (John Hillerman) shows up, we shift to red and white again. Carl's car is a dark red, nearly as dark as Cooper's tie, and Carl's clothes are reddish in shade as well. We return to the warehouse, with its red brick. The shot where the car moves in parallel to the walking Cooper and Carl is a symphony of dark red and brick red tones.
The red and white persist in the shots at the concession stand at the boxing arena, and in the kitchen scene following it at the bar. Mulligan loves kitchens, and people getting food. The kitchen table in front of Cooper is another of Mulligan's carefully composed still lifes.
I suspect that Mulligan prefers color to black-and-white. When Mulligan talked after the screening of Summer of 42, he reminisced proudly about his television drama about Gauguin, The Moon and Sixpence (1960). Mulligan mentioned explicitly that this film was in color. (Color TV was something rare for the era.)
The bar is rectangular, but with a corner cut off making an angle. Later, the garage door in The Man in the Moon will have similar cut-off angles; and the door under the stairs in Baby the Rain Must Fall has an angled top. Fritz Lang loved polygonal shapes, but the polygons in his film are often free form with lines connected at irregular angles. By contrast, all the Mulligan polygons seem to be rectangles with corners sheared off, a far more regular effect.
Mulligan's shapes tend to be bilaterally symmetric, as well: the bar has both corners cut off, as does the garage door; the stair door is paired with the hole it leaves when the door is open, making a pointed triangular top to the shape.
Mulligan uses many repeating architectural structures in the urban scenes in the first half of the film: the arches at the warehouse, the windows in both Cooper's home and office - each window with its own window shade - the facades of the downtown buildings. The wire fence along which Cooper walks in his first episode downtown anticipates the farm fence in The Man in the Moon. Such repeating structures make up a key aspect of Mulligan's visual style. The first shot of the countryside involves a series of repeating trees along the shore. These anticipate the repeating trees along the drive in The Man in the Moon.
Edgar G. Ulmer is also a director who favors repeating architectural modules in his settings. Ulmer's modules tend to be whole architectural units - the various cabins in the motel complex in Murder Is My Beat (1955), the different sections of the porch on different sides of the building in The Amazing Transparent Man (1960), the repeating doors and rooms at the opening of Isle of Forgotten Sins (1943). By contrast, Mulligan's modules of repetition are often individual windows, or arches, or storage bins in the barn in The Man in the Moon. Such windows or arches are large in an absolute sense, but still often considerably smaller and more "fine-grained" than Ulmer's architectural modules.
We are comparing Mulligan here to German Expressionist directors such as Lang and Ulmer. This comparison seems a bit outré, at first. Mulligan's sunny Southern scenes and outdoor photography seems remote from the studio-based Expressionism of Ulmer and Lang. But they intersect in their shared interest in architecture and the geometric patterns it forms on screen. Mulligan's heroes are often as doomed as Lang's and Ulmer's.
Same Time, Next Year (1978) is an adaptation of a stage play, by Bernard Slade.
Much of the film takes place in a motel suite. The opening, which sets the scene outside the hotel, is in a style recognizably Mulligan-like. There is a row of parked period cars, as in The Man in the Moon. The motel is in a lush, green, rural setting near water, the classic Mulligan exterior.
Mulligan's love of cakes emerges again. The couple's theme song becomes "If I Knew You Were Coming, I Would Have Baked You a Cake". And there is an anniversary celebrated with cake and candles, like the birthday cakes in The Nickel Ride and the party cakes in The Man in the Moon. Throughout the film, we also see traditional Mulligan still lifes, of tables set with food and cutlery.
The main opening is an elaborate scene of the couple waking up and getting dressed in the morning. This too recalls the opening scenes in The Nickel Ride.
There is a pregnancy here, as in The Man in the Moon. Both the man and the woman are highly fertile, with numerous children. Such fertility is a common characteristic of Mulligan characters. Although the couple's families and children are never seen - this is essentially a two character play - they are much discussed, and become important characters in the film. The difficulties young people have growing up, once again become a main theme of a Mulligan film. Both characters seem to be good parents, like Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird, but unlike the many abusive parents that run through Mulligan films.
The historical montages often show stills of famous films of their era. One is of Mulligan's To Kill a Mockingbird! This is an inside joke. But it is also appropriate - it was a famous film of its time. Same Time, Next Year recalls this earlier Mulligan work, in that both deal with significant political issues.
There are deliberately startling changes between the various sections of the film. Oddly enough, the technique reminded me of Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window. While the gap between scenes in Same Time, Next Year is around five years, and the gaps in Rear Window are usually just an hour or so, in both films the film and its point of view are often re-thought in surprising ways in different sections. These gaps in Same Time, Next Year give a surreal feeling to the film, a Mulligan tradition.
The Man in the Moon (1991) is a recent classic by Mulligan, that explores sensitively some of his most personal themes.
The family's house has prominent triangular gables, along its upper reaches. These are soon echoed by a similarly shaped triangular steeple at the church. Both the church and the gables are pure white, which adds to their echoing effect. The family house is seen as some sort of church. Just as the house is tied to nature through its colors, it is tied to religion through its shapes. There is a sense of the sacred here. Mulligan's stories often have a surreal tone, lurking just under their surface realism.
The fact that the mother is pregnant here adds to the sense of religious fertility. Even the church is flanked by huge masses of blooming flowers of its shrubs.
The films' focus on sisters living in a lush natural environment, and its concern with themes of awakening first love, birth and death, recall Jean Renoir's The River (1951). So do a number of plot elements in the picture: a large country house filled with young women on the brink of adulthood; innocent but powerful crushes on a young man in the neighborhood, the final destiny of a young man at the end of the film.
As is often the case with Mulligan, the characters live near water, and water or dockside scenes play a prominent role in his films. The swimming area recalls the river in front of the cabin in The Nickel Ride. Both are views from overhead angles, involving a firm shore area bordering a still body of water. The food shots here also recall The Nickel Ride. Both films have scenes of eggs cooking for breakfast. And the shot of the chocolate cake here at the picnic recalls the birthday cakes in The Nickel Ride, two of which are also chocolate.
There are echoes here of earlier Mulligan protagonists.
The difficult, demanding father here recalls other hard to get along with fathers in Fear Strikes Out and Blood Brothers.
The young hero meets the same ultimate destiny as Cooper in The Nickel Ride.
And the father's refusal to take part in organized religion here recalls the noble but atheistic doctor in The Spiral Road. By contrast, the wives of both of these characters are practicing Evangelical Christians. Mulligan treats the religious beliefs of both husbands and wives in these pictures with respect, a somewhat rare attitude.
The Man in the Moon is designed in a mixture of green and white. The house and garage exteriors are painted these two colors. So is the car driven by the young man. When we get to the country club, there are over a dozen cars, all in shades of green and white. Many of the clothes worn by the characters also fall into the same scheme, although there are also some pale blues. The lush green scenery also blends into this same color pattern. In fact, one suspects that the green and white is intended to make the human buildings, vehicles and clothes match the colors of nature. The world is one big seamless mass of natural lushness and greenery in this film.
There are exceptions. The pickup truck is brown, and so is the dusty road and drive at the farm. These are used for a color harmony at one point. And downtown, we get a store front that is a dazzling mix of red and white. The shots tracking along this store front makes a brief exception and change of pace to the rest of the film.
Mulligan likes repeating architectural structures in the backgrounds of his shots. The back porch where the girls sleep at the opening is an example. It is made up of a series of vertical sections, each one with its own blinds. The repeating posts and blinds make a sequence of zones, stretching across the screen. This is an archetypal Mulligan location. Soon, we see the inside of the porch. It too consists of a number of regions. Mulligan often frames his shots so that the different regions, each with its own vertical dividing posts, are spread out from left to right along the screen.
Later outdoor shots sometimes involve similar repeating structures. Mulligan does much with a wire fence, which has a series of repeating posts. Even when Mulligan shows the giant trees in the family's driveway, he pans along a whole series of them, stretched along the drive.
The barn at Court's property has a series of repeating wooden regions in its interior. These are all closed up, and probably contain stuff. They remind one of the storage bins in The Nickel Ride, with their unseen contents.
The film is full of Mulligan's languorous but powerful camera movements. These maintain a sense of propulsion, but also have a slow, contemplative feel.