Word: mulligans
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...Pakula-Mulligan tandem's biggest hit was the 1967 Up the Down Staircase, based on the Bel Kaufman book about a New York City teacher's attempts to connect with her hard-hided students. The movie landed its leading lady, Sandy Dennis, on the covers of TIME and Newsweek the same week. After a Gregory Peck Western, The Stalking Moon, the producer-director team split. As it happened, Pakula became a director with a broader, deeper palette and somewhat greater success than his old partner (Klute, The Parallax View, All the President's Men, Sophie's Choice, Presumed Innocent...
...Mulligan had a few more hits - and good films - in him: Summer of '42 (1971), the romance of a teenage boy and a lovely young war widow; The Other (1972), a spectral mood piece about nine-year-old twins involved in murder; and Same Time, Next Year (1978), with Alan Alda and Ellen Burstyn as annual adulterers. As his career wore on, and Hollywood jettisoned sentiment and subtlety for sharks and light sabers, Mulligan's aura dimmed. He had outlived the mood he so delicately captured...
...Universal Pictures, the sponsor of To Kill a Mockingbird, wanted the role of Atticus to go to its top star, Rock Hudson, whom Mulligan had directed the year before in the romantic comedy Come September. But Pakula and Mulligan held out for Peck, the screen's flintiest rock of movie rectitude. Lee was in enthusiastic agreement, for she had based Atticus on her lawyer father and saw a kinship between him and Peck. On the first day of shooting she told him, "Gregory, you've got a little potbelly just like my daddy," and Peck replied, "Harper, that's great...
...seen through a child's eyes. This is the perspective that Foote's Oscar-winning script faithfully transposed to the screen, and that Mary Badham, who played Scout Finch, embodied with such unaffected clarity that, at 10, she received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress. As for Mulligan, no one has cited him for anything but the sensitive handling of story, actors, camera and mood...
...never really understand a person," Atticus says, "until you consider things from his point of view. Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it." Tolerance ripening into fascination, and then to empathy: that was Mulligan's strength, especially in his psychological portraiture of the young. You could call him the J.D. Salinger of directors and be grateful that, in his movie heart, he stayed so young so long...