Word: mulligans
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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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...
...however, it is the kids themselves who provide the ring of truth. Mulligan did his casting on the city's streets, and coaxed from a group of inexperienced youngsters (some of whom showed up for work with switchblades) a series of magnificent life studies. One unforgettable moment: Ellen O'Mara as the Fat Girl, at a school dance in the arms of the English teacher (Patrick Bedford) she idolizes, her square pudding face aglow in awe and beatification. At such moments, rare in cinematic annals, the camera uses unadorned reality as its point of departure and comes around...
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...