Word: mulligans
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...over that's worth experiencing if you can; it's just that the film doesn't depend on it. All at once those little doubts you had at the beginning--and forgot as you were led up the farmyard path--take their rightful place as legitimate uneasinesses that Robert Mulligan's skillful direction made you ignore. Eschewing the period songs, posters, and movies he used in Summer of '42, he has recreated intact a childhood world that is separate from the wider-ranging life of surrounding adults. There is no hint of city life: the biggest crowds (barring a short...
...Mulligan has taken great care with his ten-year-old actors and they have two quite separate identities. With a little help from the other characters, who frequently call them by name--either Niles or Holland--the "bad" twin and the "good" twin are easily distinguished. The Udvarnokys play the twins with amazing unselfconsciousness. They consider themselves people, not cute objects-to-be-admired (as actors or as children). Their matter-of-fact acceptance of the increasingly frightening world around them contrasts with the histrionics of their grandmother (Uta Hagen). Many critics have complained of her overacting, but I liked...
This leads to Mulligan's single major lapse of judgment, a dazzling but obtrusive set piece in which Niles imagines himself into the mind of a crow swooping over the farm. The camera swoops with the crow, showing us trees and roofs in a magnificent track through the air--and momentarily suspending the story...
This otherworldly kind of evil--the action cuts straight from the crow sequence to the pitchfork death--is what we get hints of here and there, but ultimately the evil is resolved in terms of psychology, without recourse to metaphysics. The feel of the film is almost excessively human: Mulligan's intense personal involvement with his characters keeps The Other from being anything more than a momentarily mind-boggling thriller, albeit one of the best in recent years. His attempts to transcent the actual events fail; the world he creates is too immediate...
...night off, Radio City Music Hall opened its doors at midnight for a four-hour jam session that saw Ben Webster, Zoot Sims, and Milt Jackson tapping toes where the Rockettes usually toe-up to tap. Uptown at Yankee Stadium, the likes of Ray Charles, Dave Brubeck and Gerry Mulligan made a far more winning team than the stadium's usual inhabitants...