The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (295 page)

For American television, he was the Soviet commander of an occupied
Amerika
(87, Donald Wrye);
Killing Blue
(88, Peter Pstzak), and then
Music Box
. He was the father in
Avalon
(90, Barry Levinson);
Kafka
(91, Steven Soderbergh);
Night on Earth
(91, Jim Jarmusch);
Utz
(92, George Sluizer);
The Power of One
(92, John G. Avildsen);
The House of the Spirits
(94, Bille August);
Holy Matrimony
(94, Leonard Nimoy);
A Pyromaniac’s Love Story
(95, Joshua Brand); and an Oscar nomination for the musician father in
Shine
(96, Scott Hicks).

He then wrote and directed and played the hundred-year-old who might be Hitler in
Conversations With the Beast
(96), though it was not well received. He then made
The Ogre
(96, Volker Schlondorff);
The Assistant
(97, Daniel Petrie);
12 Angry Men
(97, William Friedkin);
The Peacemaker
(97, Mimi Fleder);
In the Presence of Mine Enemies
(97, Joan Micklin Silver);
The Game
(97, David Fincher);
The X-Files
(98, Rob Bowman).

He has spent more time, more profitably, back in German in the last ten years:
The Thirteenth Floor
(99, Josef Rusnak);
The Third Miracle
(99, Holland); redoing
Jakob the Liar
(99, Peter Kassovitz); as Joseph in the TV miniseries
Jesus
(99, Roger Young);
The Long Run
(00, Jean Stewart);
Pilgrim
(00, Harley Cokliss). He had a great success in Germany as Thomas Mann in
Die Manns
(01, Heinrich Breloer);
The Story of an African Farm
(04, David Lister);
The Dust Factory
(04, Eric Small); as the Israeli prime minister on
The West Wing; Local Color
(06, George Gallo);
Ich Bin die Ardere
(06, Margaretha von Trotta); as the Russian patriarch in
Eastern Promises
(07, David Cronenberg);
Buddenbrooks
(08, Breloer);
Leningrad
(09, Aleksandr Buravsky);
The International
(09, Tom Tykwer);
Angels & Demons
(09, Ron Howard).

Robert Mulligan
(1925–2008) b. Bronx, New York
1957:
Fear Strikes Out
. 1960:
The Rat Race; The Great Imposter
. 1961:
Come September
. 1962:
The Spiral Road
. 1963:
To Kill a Mockingbird; Love With the Proper Stranger
. 1965:
Baby, The Rain Must Fall
. 1966:
Inside Daisy Clover
. 1967:
Up the Down Staircase
. 1969:
The Stalking Moon
. 1970:
The Pursuit of Happiness
. 1971:
Summer of ’42
. 1972:
The Other
. 1974:
The Nickel Ride
. 1978:
Blood Brothers; Same Time Next Year
. 1982:
Kiss Me Goodbye
. 1988:
Clara’s Heart
. 1991:
The Man in the Moon
.

There is something wrong with a thirty-five-year career of twenty movies that is still indistinct and tentative. Mulligan appeared once to have the typical promise of the New Wave American director. After naval service, he graduated to TV where he won a reputation for prestige drama that soon admitted him to Hollywood.
Fear Strikes Out
was not only his debut but that of producer Alan J. Pakula, who was to collaborate with Mulligan on another six films. It has most of Mulligan’s virtues—an unusual setting within which he observes a young person under emotional stress; an effacing camera style that is pledged to intimate performances; and his besetting flaw—the preference for tastefulness rather than true rawness.

Just as he lacks artistic character, so his films do not live in the memory. Professional compromise seems always to round off initial promise. Although attempting to deal with anguish and loneliness, the films are irresolute, neat, and appealing—unwilling to probe their audience sufficiently. Thus, it is notable that
Klute
—made by the now independent Pakula—goes much deeper into its characters and emerges with more disturbing conclusions than Mulligan ever dared.

The four films made after Mulligan’s debut were all uneasy, especially
The Great Imposter
, a marvelous vehicle for Tony Curtis that stated rather than realized the black comedy of imposture. With
To Kill a Mockingbird
, Mulligan was reunited with Pakula (they worked together until
The Stalking Moon). Mockingbird
was a big hit, an important event in liberalizing attitudes, and it is sound work. The films that followed all flattered to deceive:
Love With the Proper Stranger
is as coy as its title;
Inside Daisy Clover
cries out for Minnelli;
The Stalking Moon
is earnestly slow; while
Summer of ’42
is a cunning piece of nostalgic romance, sadly minus the real period character of
The Last Picture Show
.

To make serious material easeful is Mulligan’s greatest fault and it is now more likely that he will succumb to a solemn and respectable sentimentality than surpass it. He has the sophistication and sensibility of a producer rather than a director. His tact is too infectious.

Mulligan’s career did not work out well:
Kiss Me Goodbye
was a remake of
Donna Flor and Her Two Husbands
, but it found no spark between Sally Field and James Caan;
Clara’s Heart
had Whoopi Goldberg as a Jamaican servant to an upper-middle-class family. But then Mulligan came back to life with
The Man in the Moon
, a lovely small film about children growing up in a rural setting—it was
To Kill a Mockingbird
again, and it left the intervening years seeming all the stranger.

Paul Muni
(Muni Weisenfreund) (1895–1967), b. Lemberg, Austria
Muni believed he was a great actor. And in the mid-1930s, at least, he managed to persuade his employer, Warner Brothers, the Academy of Motion Pictures, and a large part of the cinema audience. In retrospect, he looks owlish in his overacting, ridiculous in his makeup, and insanely awful in his feelings. Thus, he is a crucial negative illustration in any argument as to what constitutes screen acting.

The child of actors, he came to America early in the 1900s and played in Yiddish stock for many years. Only in 1926 did he play a part in English. This novelty and the greater one of sound prompted Fox to hire him: in 1929 he made
The Valiant
(William K. Howard), for which he was nominated for an Oscar, and
Seven Faces
(29, Berthold Viertel), in which he and his makeup box played seven people—including Don Juan, Schubert, Napoleon, and boxer Joe Gans (it was a movie about a waxworks).

Despite, or because of, such a virtuoso debut, Fox were happy to let him go and it was only after his Broadway success in Elmer Rice’s
Counsellor at Law
that Howard Hawks cast him as
Scarface
(32). It is remarkable that that film should have been considered a glorification of the gangster, since Muni’s flagrant overplaying is so remote from the sort of man that interests Hawks. Muni then excelled in Mervyn Le Roy’s
I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang
(32) and was contracted by Warners. He followed with two more Le Roy films—
The World Changes
(33) and
Hi Nellie!
(34)—with Bette Davis in
Border Town
(35, Archie Mayo), and in 1935 encountered a director worthy of him: William Dieterle, who indulged Muni in
Doctor Socrates
(35),
The Story of Louis Pasteur
(35), and an Oscar,
The Life of Emile Zola
(37) and
Juarez
(39). These films were born out of an attitude to Great Men of History—pious, unsubtle, and naïve—that is unlikely to be revived. What Muni brought to them was the unchecked confidence that a great actor was as noble as any other benefactor of mankind. He was also a self-conscious, well-cushioned radical who did much to push
Black Fury
(35, Michael Curtiz), a study of labor relations in mining that Hollywood muffled. Muni’s impressiveness came from the shameless heroics of identifying himself with Great Causes and Heroes.

Oddly, all this flourished at Warners where, in five years, Bogart would drive such myths from the temple. Muni also played in Litvak’s
The Woman I Love
(37), was a Chinaman in Sidney Franklin’s
The Good Earth
(37), and in the underrated
We Are Not Alone
(39, Edmund Goulding). By the time war came, his fashion had already faded. He was a Frenchman in Pichel’s
Hudson’s Bay
(41) and then made only another six films before his death:
Commandos Strike at Dawn
(42, John Farrow);
Counter-Attack
(45, Zoltan Korda); grotesque as Chopin’s teacher in Charles Vidor’s
A Song to Remember
(45);
Angel on My Shoulder
(46, Mayo); in Losey’s blighted
Stranger on the Prowl
(52); finally as the slum doctor in Daniel Mann’s
The Last Angry Man
(59).

Andrzej Munk
(1921–61), b. Cracow, Poland
1949:
Sztuka Mlodych
(d). 1950:
Zaczelo sie w Hiszpanii
(d). 1951:
Nauka Blize; Zycia
(d);
Kierunek Nowa Huta
(d). 1952:
Poemat Symfoniczny “Bajka” St. Moniuszki
(d);
Pamietniki Chlopow
(d). 1953:
Kolejarskie Slowo
(d). 1954:
Gwiazdy Musza Plonac
(codirected with Witold Lesiewicz) (d). 1955:
Niedzielny Poranek/One Sunday Morning
(d);
Blekitny Krzyz/Men of the Blue Cross
(d). 1956:
Czalowiek na Torze/Man on the Track
. 1957:
Eroica
. 1958:
Spacerek Staromtejski/A Walk in the Old City of Warsaw
(d). 1959:
Zezowate Szczescie/Bad Luck; Polska Kronika Filmowa, no. 52
(d). 1961:
Pasazerka/Passenger
(completed by Lesiewicz after Munk’s death).

Until the more dramatically absurd death of Zbigniew Cybulski in a railway accident, the loss of Munk in a car crash was the tragedy of sixties Polish cinema. No doubt that he had an ironic, antiheroic view that was unusual in Poland, and no question of the feeling and care in his work. Even so, the argument remains that the best Poles are the ones who left—Polanski and Skolimowski—and that Munk never fully shed the mantle of tasteful social consciousness that is in all but the best Polish cinema. Just as Wajda’s
A Generation
seems like a marvelous student film, so the lessons of Lodz hang over Polish cinema—the sense of working according to doctrine. Even early Polanski looks like argued-out storyboards duly put on film. And in the famous Munk shot—of a deserting soldier drinking and the bottle mimicked by a tank’s gun looming over a ridge behind him—there is something of a seminar’s self-congratulatory rightness.

After studying at Lodz, Munk worked for six years in documentary;
Man on the Track
was his first feature;
Eroica
the clearest expression of his skeptical approach to Polish heroics.
Passenger
is by far his most interesting work, pregnant with the fact of Munk’s death and the stills that were used to complete it, not to mention its concentration-camp setting.

Walter Murch
, b. New York, 1943
In 1968–69, Francis Ford Coppola had taken to the road to make
The Rain People
. It was a unit on which many people were barely out of the two film schools in Los Angeles: Francis had been at UCLA, and George Lucas and Walter Murch had been to USC. As the shooting concluded, out of love with Hollywood and Los Angeles, Coppola, Lucas, and Murch elected to move their families up to northern California and the Bay Area, there to make a new version of American cinema. Lucas is now one of the richest men in the country, with his facilities in Marin; Coppola has been one of the most celebrated directors in the world—rich, poor, and rich again, living in his house and winery in Rutherford. And in a smaller house than his comrades, Walter Murch still lives in Bolinas, California, not rich, except in the range of his interests and the record of his achievements. Walter Murch is the scholar, gentleman, and superb craftsman of modern film. And like any master of sound, he is a quiet man.

He was the son of a good painter, Walter Murch, who had his family roots in the west country of England. As a boy, Walter fell in love with the tape recorder and the games it could play. He was also enormously affected by a father who painted at night because he had to keep a paying job in the day. Walter went to Johns Hopkins, where he started on oceanography and geology and let the tide of interest carry him over to Romance languages and art history. He then studied in Paris and Perugia before driving across the United States on a Matchless motorcycle with his new wife, Aggie, to study film at USC.

In time, his skills at filmmaking would extend to sound and editing, and in both areas he is now without a peer. But film is not his whole world: he has a lifelong hobby pursuing the proof of the Titius-Bode theory (on the spatial intervals between planets) and he translates Italian poetry. He has also directed one film—
Return to Oz
(85). It was not a success, yet I don’t think he has given up hopes of directing again. But let us look at what he has done.

He did sound on
The Rain People; Gimme Shelter
(70, David and Albert Maysles);
THX 1138
(71, Lucas)—he also collaborated on its script;
American Graffiti
(73, Lucas). He did the sound and was vital to the editing of
The Conversation
(74, Coppola), a picture that brought sound into the forefront of our consciousness. He was in charge of sound on
The Godfather Part II
(74, Coppola). He edited
Julia
(77, Fred Zinnemann). He did the sound on
Apocalypse Now
(79, Coppola), for which he won an Oscar. He edited
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
(88, Philip Kaufman);
Ghost
(90, Jerry Zucker);
The Godfather Part III
(90, Coppola);
Romeo Is Bleeding
(93, Peter Medak). He edited
House of Cards
(93, Michael Lessac) and
First Knight
(95, Zucker).