Robert Mulligan
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Mud (2013)
Directed by Jeff Nichols
influenced by To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), Baby the Rain Must Fall (1965)
Themes Plot Characters
It's a child-on-the-way-to-becoming-an-adult story that recalls such classics as "To Kill a Mockingbird" and "Shane" (including a nod to the boy's cries of "Sha-a-a-ne"), and I do not throw around those titles loosely.
Echoing The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , but also evoking the predatory menace of The Night of the Hunter and other books and films ( To Kill a Mockingbird comes to mind) where children become immersed in an adult and dangerous world, Mud finds Matthew McConaughey at the top of his game.
Originality is pretty much a no-show, as I kept clicking off movies in my head like “Shane,” “Stand by Me,” “Sling Blade,” “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “The Beasts of the Southern Wild,” “A Perfect World” … Even the outstanding work by Matthew McConaughey, playing a scraggly good ol’ boy with love on his mind and the law on his tail, seemed much too familiar.
"Mud" runs deep with undercurrents from American movies and literature: " Tom Sawyer ," "Huckleberry Finn," " The Night of the Hunter ," " To Kill a Mockingbird ," "Moby Dick," " Cool Hand Luke ," the films of Nichols' fellow Austin-resident Terrence Malick (" Badlands ," " Days of Heaven ," " The Tree of Life ").
Families can talk about the similarities between Mud and other stories about kids who befriend enigmatic older characters, like Huckleberry Finn or To Kill a Mockingbird .
Two generations ago, McConaughey's role might've been taken by Paul Newman or the Steve McQueen of "Baby the Rain Must Fall."
(Long before the current crisis in public education, films like “Up the Down Staircase” and “Conrack” were more about brave attempts than about inspiring successes.)
With echoes of earlier teacher-in-crisis-mode dramas, especially Robert Mulligan’s 1967 classic Up the Down Staircase, the overwhelmed staff at this urban high school are in hunker-down mode, waiting for the storm to pass.
The Help (2011)
Directed by Tate Taylor
influenced by To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)
Characters Themes
She makes you imagine that this might be how Scout from Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird might have turned out had she become a journalist: Too inquisitive, sensitive and empathetic not to brush aside the common wisdom of the day to see eternal truths about human beings.
Skeeter's book, when it arrives, is credited to "Anonymous," which makes it a group effort as well as a Skeeter ego-boost, and emphasizes the notion that Skeeter is a collaborator and partner rather than a superior (such as Sandra Bullock in "The Blind Side" or even taciturn Gregory Peck in "To Kill a Mockingbird").
This is the kind of heartfelt liberal picture that Robert Mulligan (“To Kill a Mockingbird”) or Martin Ritt (“Sounder”) would have made forty or fifty years ago, but with a different subject—what black women working for wealthy white families in Mississippi in the early nineteen-sixties (and, by extension, at any time and place) felt about their lives and about their female employers.
This flawed adaptation of Kathryn Stockett’s best-selling novel about black maids and their white employers in early-1960s Jackson, Miss., aims for “To Kill a Mockingbird” significance, but lands in “Steel Magnolias” territory.
Skeeter’s exposé is meant to empower both the subjects and the author, but “The Help’’ joins everything from “To Kill a Mockingbird’’ to “The Blind Side’’ as another Hollywood movie that sees racial progress as the province of white do-gooderism.
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002)
Directed by Peter Jackson
influenced by The Other (1972)
But who will spot the references to Robert Mulligan’s The Other and Henry Hathaway’s How the West Was Won?
Unfortunately, instead of hearing the theme from Summer of '42 , we then flash back to 1958, when the teenage Michael (played by the gawky, endearing David Kross) had a furtive love affair with the much older Hanna Schmitz (Winslet), a ticket-taker on the Berlin trolley.
A flawed mix of a kind of German "Summer of '42" with a theatrically bound courtroom drama and aftermath, "The Reader's" lopsided before-and-after structure defeats part of its dramatic impact.
All of this is cloaked in a "Summer of '42" coming-of-age story about a boy's first love and an older woman's last brush with tenderness.
There is a bittersweet element to this, but "Summer of '42" it ain't.
Bridge of Spies (2015)
Directed by Steven Spielberg
influenced by To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)
Themes
Like many Spielberg movies this harkens to earlier movies, quietly liberal classics like "Judgement at Nuremberg" and "To Kill a Mockingbird" – the idea that everyone deserves justice.
“Bridge of Spies” is rather like a version of “To Kill a Mockingbird” set against the backdrop of McCarthyism, Sputnik and the Bay of Pigs rather than southern racism.
With his mandatory father-son weightlifting sessions and refusal to brook the slightest rebellion, Ronald is a sports-dad nightmare up there with Karl Malden in “Fear Strikes Out,” but part of the tragedy is that we understand him.
Although you might figure out the big final twist in “Goodnight Mommy” early on—which isn’t all that difficult to do, even if you haven’t seen Robert Mulligan’s 1972 adaptation of Thomas Tryon’s “The Other” to serve as a prompt—it will probably still fascinate you, as well as creep you out.
Evil Dead: El Despertar ( Evil Dead Rise , 2023), nuevo capítulo de la retahíla del espanto que se propone independiente pero retoma a nivel conceptual lo hecho por Álvarez en Posesión Infernal , es el segundo largometraje del cineasta irlandés Lee Cronin, aquel de la interesante y remotamente similar El Bosque Maldito ( The Hole in the Ground , 2019), esa cruza entre La Invasión de los Usurpadores de Cuerpos ( Invasion of the Body Snatchers , 1956), de Don Siegel, La Mala Semilla ( The Bad Seed , 1956), de Mervyn LeRoy, El Otro ( The Other , 1972), de Robert Mulligan, El Resplandor ( The Shining , 1980), de Stanley Kubrick, y The Babadook (2014), gran obra de Jennifer Kent acerca de la histeria familiar.
Catch Me If You Can (2002)
Directed by Steven Spielberg
influenced by The Great Impostor (1960)
Plot
Try Tony Curtis in The Great Impostor (1961), also based on a true story about a conniver named after his father.
The story is very close to the 1961 Robert Mulligan movie "The Great Impostor," which starred Tony Curtis as Ferdinand Waldo Demara, a real-life chameleon-crook who successfully posed as -- among many other things -- a surgeon, a naval officer, a Trappist monk and even a prison warden.
I haven’t read One Day the book, so I didn’t know not to expect a Same Time, Next Year sort of gimmick.
Even the story's conceit is shoddy: Unlike its precursor (1978's Same Time, Next Year), this couple doesn't necessarily need an annual face-to-face encounter.
On the other hand... Reel Thoughts: A Blue Valentine (That People Will Actually Want to Watch): From Same Time, Next Year to (500) Days of Summer to last year’s brutal Blue Valentine, films that unfold on timelines are fascinating, because you get to see the characters change, sometimes radically, from date to date.
Nicholls' charming novel had a Same Time, Next Year?style premise, checking in on Dex and Em every single July 15 for 20 years, wherever they might be on that day; in adapting his book for the screen, Nicholls skips some years and does some compression of events.
From Same Time, Next Year to (500) Days of Summer to last year’s brutal Blue Valentine, films that unfold on timelines are fascinating, because you get to see the characters change, sometimes radically, from date to date.
We have a suspicion writer Lowry was just cashing in on a familiar theme and that maybe the school curriculum should go back to “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
Freedom Writers (2007)
Directed by Richard LaGravenese
influenced by Up the Down Staircase (1967)
Plot
…musical remake), UP THE DOWN STAIRCASE…
If you've seen "Blackboard Jungle," "Up the Down Staircase," "To Sir, With Love," "Dangerous Minds" or "Stand and Deliver," you'll be way ahead of the story.
Malena may first strike viewers as an Italian variation of Summer of '42, a coming-of-age story of a boy who becomes infatuated with an older, unreachable town beauty.
I'm sorry, but even though filmmaker Giuseppe ("Cinema Paradiso") Tornatore's name is on "Malena," a wannabe sensitive coming-of-age tale set in World War II-era Sicily, it still feels more like "Porky's" with marinara sauce than "Summer of '42."
The film may look like a relative to the Freddie Prinze Jr. vehicle She's All That (1999), but it's more like a cousin to Robert Mulligan's The Man in the Moon (1991).
The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1992)
Directed by Curtis Hanson
influenced by To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)
Characters
The movie borrows from "To Kill a Mockingbird," casting Ernie Hudson (the forgotten Ghostbuster) as a mentally retarded handyman who is not permitted to touch the children.
The American Film Institute ranked Schindler’s List the third most inspiring picture ever, behind only It’s a Wonderful Life and To Kill a Mockingbird .
Benjamin Wallfisch contributes a score that’s nicely varied—an idyllic sequence at a quarry lake recalls Elmer Bernstein’s wondrous “To Kill a Mockingbird”—though the choice of period songs at a few points is questionable.
The plot could be called a gay Summer of '42 in its wistful pairing of a twentysomething and a teenager, but director Luca Guadagnino and screenwriter James Ivory apply a soulful sophistication to the complexities of first love, even more troubling as "the love that dare not speak its name."
I mean, it’s not “Summer of ’42” or “The Reader,” but we’re no longer venerating this “lover of experience” initiation ritual, or are we?
It's a sequence that has drawn comparisons to the grotesque photography of Joel-Peter Whitkin and the experimental self-aware filmmaking of Stan Brakhage, and its format has been likened to Stephen Frankfurt's title design for Robert Mulligan's 1963 adaptation of the courtroom thriller To Kill a Mockingbird , which also features close-up photography of personal items to describe the psyche of one of the film's key players.