Mockingbird Director Robert Mulligan Dies at 83

The obit headlines have it right. For all of Robert Mulligan’s impressive credentials in his 40-year career as a director of television and movie dramas, his signature achievement was the 1962 film version of Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird. The picture — which won three Academy Awards, including Best Actor for Gregory Peck, and earned Mulligan his only Oscar nomination — had an immediate and lasting impact. Back then it provided a Hollywood echo of the civil rights agitation that had roiled the South and seized the nation. But Peck’s role as Atticus Finch, a crusading attorney who is also a gentle single dad to his two young kids, had staying power. In 2003 the American Film Institute chose Atticus as the top hero in U.S. movie history. (See TIME’s All-Time 100 Best Movies.)

Mulligan, who died Saturday at 83 of heart disease, had been Finch’s gentle shepherd, and deserved at least a share of Peck’s Oscar both for casting him and for eliciting the actor’s best work. But the director’s heart, here as in so many of his films, was with the Finch children. If Mulligan had an abiding interest, it was troubled youngsters on the cusp of discovering themselves by confronting the world around them. This theme occupied him from his first feature film to his last. The 1957 Fear Strikes Out gave Anthony Perkins his first lead role as Boston Red Sox star Jim Piersall, reduced to bipolar rage by a domineering parent (sort of a Psycho in Center Field). In The Man in the Moon, Mulligan’s swan song in 1991, Reese Witherspoon made her film debut as a 14-year-old wracked with first love for a 17-year-old boy who covets her older sister.

Born in the Bronx in 1925, Mulligan served in World War II and attended Fordham University before entering the TV industry in its New York infancy. He was a prominent member of that first generation, the so-called Golden Age of Television, that birthed directors who would win Oscars (Sydney Pollack, George Roy Hill, Franklin J. Schaffner, William Friedkin) or be nominated for them (John Frankenheimer, Norman Jewison, Arthur Penn, Arthur Hiller, Robert Altman). Directing scripts by such comers as Gore Vidal, Reginald Rose and Horton Foote, he learned a reverence for the word and for the midcentury liberalism it embodied and ratified. Solid, non-Communist, arguably paternalistic, this was a liberalism more social than political. A better word would be humanism. That was the tone and worldview that Mulligan’s best films would radiate.

From the start he was skilled in finding young actors and locating their emotional acuity. Mulligan directed Paul Newman in his second TV appearance (Suspense, 1952), and three years later in the Vidal TV play The Death of Billy the Kid, which Newman replayed on the big screen as The Left Handed Gun. Steve McQueen, Sidney Poitier, Walter Matthau, Rosemary Harris and George C. Scott did potent early TV work under his guiding hand. Scott made his Broadway debut in the only play Mulligan directed, the 1958 Comes a Day. He was no slouch with veterans either, winning an Emmy in 1960 for directing Laurence Olivier (in his first TV production) in The Moon and Sixpence.

Moving to the big screen, Mulligan found a happy partnership with producer Alan J. Pakula. Together they made seven films, most of them centered on young people with the will to rebel but not always the means. In Love with the Proper Stranger (1964), Natalie Wood is an Italian Catholic shopgirl who becomes pregnant in the one-night-stand immaculate conceptions familiar in movies of the ’60s (and today; see Knocked Up). But since she had the good fortune to be impregnated by McQueen, true love is assured. The plot is Hollywood hokum with a patina of New Yawk grit, but Mulligan was always an ace at revealing the subtle starlight behind the Kleig lights.

Once Mulligan and Pakula found a congenial performer, they wanted to do it again. They reunited with McQueen for a Horton Foote drama, Baby the Rain Must Fall (1965), about an ex-con singer who has problems staying out of criminal or domestic trouble. And in Inside Daisy Clover (1966), Wood is a thornier soul: a ’30s waif who becomes a movie star. (The young man in her grim life was played by Robert Redford, again at the beginning of a big career.)

The 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, The Pelican Brief).

But 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.

Bittersweet Bird of Youth

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 acting.” Forty years later, on the star’s death, Lee emerged from seclusion to testify, “Gregory Peck was a beautiful man. Atticus Finch gave him the opportunity to play himself.”

Tom Robinson (Brock Peters), a black man, has been accused of raping a white woman, and Atticus takes on the case — a perilous assignment in an Alabama town in the 1930s. He offers brilliant arguments, demolishes the opposition, convinces each member of the movie audience…and loses. But Atticus has shown courage by putting his reputation on the line. Later in the film, he embodies a kind of pacifist resistance. The white woman’s racist father sees him with some blacks and spits in his face. Atticus, with ferocious dignity, takes out a handkerchief, wipes off the insult and walks away. In this battle, he is the victor by refusing to fight. The force of eloquence, the power of restraint: in his display of these qualities, Atticus was a Caucasian equivalent of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Critics of the movie, most prominently Roger Ebert, say that its emphasis on the white man’s burden of nobility betrayed a willful ignoring of Tom Robinson, the real person in peril. Atticus loses face; Tom loses his life, but his case is seen not as his or his race’s tragedy but as one step on his lawyer’s Calvary. Then the plot shifts to the Finches’ eccentric neighbor Boo Radley (Robert Duvall, in his first movie role), and Mockingbird forgets about the black man, unfairly convicted by a racist society, to concentrate on the white man who is brought into civilized society.

All these vectors are at play in Lee’s novel, which after all is cast not as a Scottsboro Boys-style docudrama of racial injustice in the ’30s but as a daughter’s loving evocation of her dad, 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.

“You 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.

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