“Coming from Bronx Irish is hardly Southern. But there was that sense of the Irish storytellers, the fairy tales.”—Robert Mulligan (1925-2008), director of To Kill a Mockingbird and The Man in the Moon, explaining the shared passion of Southerners and Irish-Americans for telling tales, quoted in Margalit Fox, “Robert Mulligan, Director, Is Dead at 83,” The New York Times, Dec. 23, 2008
(I had never even thought of it, but as I researched the background of Mulligan, I realized that I had an affinity, too: with his Bronx Irish-Catholic background. Though my family moved to the suburbs when I was only a year old, I think the connection has lingered through my DNA and the tales that my mother and her siblings related to us of growing up there.
Mulligan came from their generation, attending St. Anne’s Academy in the borough, but his vistas widened after he went to Fordham University. He graduated from there with a bachelor of arts degree, with a concentration in radio, in 1948, one year after the school had started broadcasting from WFUV-FM, which is now my favorite radio station.
Like many young people starting out in those days, Mulligan transitioned out of radio into TV, where he learned the ropes of directing. Once he moved over to the big screen, he seldom if ever impressed the critics with flashy camera angles. No, he displayed the instinct that any good tale-teller has: get out of the way of your story.
Mulligan had the distinction of directing Gregory Peck in perhaps his iconic screen role and Reese Witherspoon in her formative one. Both To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) and The Man in the Moon (1991) are coming-of-age movies set in small Southern towns. Under Mulligan’s sure hand, Peck won his only Academy Award as the upright attorney Atticus Finch in the former movie, while future Oscar winner Witherspoon had her first major on-screen role in the latter.
The collaboration with Witherspoon proved to be Mulligan’s last. May flights of angels sing him to his rest.)
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