Word: mulligan
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...Down Staircase is a skillful culling of memorable moments from Bel Kaufman's novel about a teacher's struggle in a New York "problem-area" high school. They have been assembled by Writer Tad Mosel and Director Robert Mulligan into an entertainment of high spirits, its sheen unscratched by the book's real point...
Even so, Staircase is a superior example of its genre. Much of its impact comes from Director Mulligan's eye for setting and atmosphere. His Calvin Coolidge High is an actual Manhattan school building, its rust and raunch unretouched for the camera, and his neighborhood is a horrifyingly typical New York slum street. His supporting cast, notably Sorrell Booke as the exasperated principal and Florence Stanley as a guidance counselor in love with instant evaluation, is ideal. So is Fred Karlin's musical score, in its ironic blending of baroque blandness and jungle throb...
Like Joyce, Strick doesn't follow a conventional, chronological narrative line. We are accustomed to flash-backs, but not to such brief flashes as those Strick introduces in his first scene: at the Martello tower, Buck Mulligan says "The aunt thinks you killed your mother," and Stephen sees, and we see, his mother's deathbed, an image that recurs in the drunken hallucinations of Nighttown. Except for Resnais's films, we are not at all accustomed to flash-forwards, and Strick uses them liberally: as Bloom leaves home in the morning, he imagines Blazes Boylan, his wife Molly's lover...
With some $4 million staked on a family-market product, Fox snipped out the footage-and thanked N.C.O.M.P. for the free advertising. But the studio could not help pointing out that the British-made Ulysses got away with displaying the bare bottoms of Buck Mulligan (T. P. McKenna) and Blazes Boylan (Joe Lynch). Well, yes, replied the Rev. Patrick J. Sullivan, N.C.O.M.P.'s director, there is a double standard-but not the one that Fox suggests...
...disposal, he devotes most of it to the principal episodes: Stephen's soliloquy on the beach, Bloom's trip to Paddy Dignam's funeral, Bloom's brangle with the one-eyed Fenian in Kiernan's pub, Bloom's meeting with Stephen at Buck Mulligan's brawl, the nocturnal visit of Bloom and Stephen to Bella Cohen's brothel, Molly Bloom's magnificent end-spurt of soliloquacity...