This is Part Two of a four-part series that looks at the career of director Robert Mulligan. You can find Part One here.

After the success of To Kill a Mockingbird, Robert Mulligan and producer Alan Pakula made five straight films together to close out the 1960s, before Pakula departed to become a director himself. Using Mockingbird as a template, the duo chose projects that dealt with hot button issues (Love With the Proper Stranger and Up the Down Staircase), or were prestigious literary adaptations (Baby the Rain Must Fall and Inside Daisy Clover). Their final collaboration, The Stalking Moon, with a story taken from a Western novel, is the exception. Regardless of their middlebrow origin, these are films sensitively attuned to the social and geographic landscapes of their subjects, to the ebb and flow of urban overcrowding and the oppressive emptiness of the open plains. These films also continue Mulligan’s interest in outsiders adapting to new realities, in “dramas of experience intruding upon innocence”, as Kent Jones eloquently put it.

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There is one cinema gimmick that always works for me and can sometimes lift a movie out of the ordinary and take it somewhere unexpected. And this usually occurs when someone either puts on a mask or appears in one. The simple act of doing this immediately brings something theatrical and visually arresting to the scene that taps into our subconscious on an almost primeval level.      READ MORE

Last week we visisted with Fantomas, the Lord of Terror.  This week it’s his opposite number’s turn in the spotlight—the Gentleman Thief, Arsene Lupin.

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Our friend Steve Ryfle takes the wheel today in candid conversation with film and TV actress (and Turner Classic Movies fan) Diahann Carroll, which he offers to us as a Movie Morlocks exclusive…

Diahann Carroll (b. 1935) will always be thought of, first and foremost, as a groundbreaking actress on television, having been the first African-American woman to topline a network TV series in a non-stereotypical role, in the dramedy JULIA (1968-71, NBC). She also was the first African-American diva on a primetime soap, chewing much scenery as Dominique Deveraux in DYNASTY (1981-1989, ABC) in the 1980s. In a career spanning six decades, she’s done one-offs and recurring parts in innumerable series, hosted network variety specials, worked the talk show circuit. Carroll has done it all, from THE STAR WARS HOLIDAY SPECIAL (1978) to GREY’S ANATOMY (2005–, ABC); she was and is a television fixture.

Carroll has had an equally impressive, if less prolific, film career. She came from New York to Hollywood in 1954 and landed a small part in Otto Preminger’s CARMEN JONES (1954), the first of three pictures she would make with the hot-headed filmmaker. Preminger also gave Carroll a supporting part in his much-maligned, never-on-video adaptation of PORGY AND BESS (1959), in which she sang the Gershwin classic “Summertime,” and a starring role as a teacher confronting racist land barons in the Deep South in the Civil Rights-era misfire HURRY SUNDOWN (1967). But the film that showcased her acting ability more than any other was John Berry’s CLAUDINE (1974), which recently aired on TCM. The film saw this most sophisticated of ladies convincingly portraying a welfare mother struggling to raise her kids in Harlem. It was an Oscar-nominated performance and something of a crowning achievement, though her career continues today, nearly 40 years later.

Diahann Carroll spoke to Turner Classic Movies in 2009 during a publicity tour for her book THE LEGS ARE THE LAST TO GO. This is the first time this interview has been published. READ MORE

One of the best films I saw last year was Tomas Alfredson’s TINKER TAILOR SOLIDER SPY (2011) based on John Le Carré’s novel of the same name. It stars Gary Oldman in a career defining performance that’s earned him an Oscar nomination. I hope Oldman takes home the award but I’m not here to talk about TINKER TAILOR SOLIDER SPY. I’m here to discuss another spy film based on a John Le Carré novel, Frank Pierson’s THE LOOKING GLASS WAR (1969).

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In early 1973, The Godfather took home the Oscar for Best Picture of the year 1972.   The story, in both the novel and the movie, revolves around “good son” Michael Corleone (played by Al Pacino) as he goes from war hero to head of the family.  Michael drives the entire story.  He is the character we follow and the character who undergoes the dramatic change and conflict necessary for any true protagonist.  Mario Puzo himself even referred to it as “the story of Michael.”   In Michael’s life are the members of his family, including his father, Vito Corleone (played by Marlon Brando) and his brothers and sister.  The film adaptation was a triumph of design and execution on the part of Paramount, Francis Ford Coppola, Mario Puzo and producer Robert Evans.    When it came time for the Oscar nominations, it was clear The Godfather was going to get several and it did.  As you might expect, Al Pacino, playing the lead role of Michael, the central character to the story, received a nomination for Best Supporting Actor and Marlon Brando, in the secondary role of Vito Corleone, received a nomination, and award, for Best Actor.

Wait, what?

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As part of the 100th Anniversary of Universal Pictures, the studio is remastering a series of classic library titles for Blu-Ray, including a 50th Anniversary edition of To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), which comes out today. The movie has become embedded in American culture, but the quiet craftsman behind the adaptation has been largely forgotten. Over the next four weeks I will be doing an exhaustive (but hopefully not exhausting) film-by-film analysis of Robert Mulligan’s directing career. You have Kent Jones to blame for this, who organized the revelatory 2009 retrospective at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, in which I discovered Mulligan’s masterful use of point-of-view and his innate, deeply affecting sympathy for society’s outsiders. He was trained in television like Sidney Lumet and John Frankenheimer, but his elegant style and temperament is straight out of the old studio system. Today I’ll cover his work from Fear Strikes Out (1957) through To Kill A Mockingbird (1962).

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For my birthday, I treated myself to the 31^st Annual B-Fest, a 24-hour marathon of b-movies held each year in January at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. “B-movie” is a generous distinction for most of the films, some of which are so bad they stupefy. But, fans of B-Fest revel in the ridiculous because attending is a participatory experience in which audience members yell, cheer, and shout a running commentary at the screen. As my friend Al explained, “It’s like Mystery Science Theater 3000 on steroids or cocaine.”

Al, who has attended B-Fest for 14 straight years, is fairly perceptive about its appeal to regulars, noting that audiences are simultaneously in awe and aghast at how bad, cheesy, insipid, or tedious the films are. The worse the film, the more inspired or inventive the commentary is. Also, watching nonstop movies into the wee hours of the morning with like-minded movie lovers inspires a camaraderie that is infectious, an observation made by Spencer, a 14-year B-Fest veteran who has made a tradition of attending.

I was delighted to see that the audience for B-Fest was a mix of males and females, with an age range from teens through seniors. Some come for the old creature features from the 1950s; some come for the classic bad movies, like the perennial Plan 9 from Outer Space; others prefer famous flops. Though Becky, who has attended B-Fest for three years, is a science fiction fan, she really enjoys those legitimate Hollywood movies that turned out to be “train wrecks,” like Cool as Ice, the Vanilla Ice vehicle that showed at least year’s B-Fest.

I managed to stay for about for five features, one short, and the raffle before bailing on B-Fest in the wee hours of the morning. I scribbled a rough diary of my observations and impressions, which I hope captures the spirit, fun, and craziness of B-Fest.

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Louis Feuillade was the Christopher Columbus of cinema—a pioneer explorer of newly uncovered lands, a touchstone to all who followed in his footsteps.  Generations of filmmakers after him called him out as an inspiration: Fritz Lang, Georges Franju, Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard… French film auteur Alain Resnais said simply, “He is one of my gods.”

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