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Two days ago the Northwest Chicago Film Society screened Baby the Rain Must Fall (1965) at the Gene Siskel Film Center. It was a characteristic choice for the repertory programming organization in that the film provides a window into an overlooked chapter of American movie history—in this case, the career of director Robert Mulligan. Like such other NCFS favorites as Mitchell Leisen, John Cromwell, and André de Toth, Mulligan was a prolific, respected filmmaker in his lifetime but an overlooked one today. (To Kill a Mockingbird remains well-known, but not because Mulligan directed it.) And like those other directors, Mulligan’s filmography doesn’t contain the familiar bells and whistles that readily attract auteurist reevaluations. Yes, Dave Kehr noted in his Reader capsules the consistency of Mulligan’s subjective camerawork and his predilection for “delicate psyche[s] under stress,” but these qualities don’t jump out at casual viewers. Mulligan’s direction, for better and for worse, was often at the service of his screenplays and performers. This is especially true of Baby the Rain Must Fall, in which Mulligan generally defers to Horton Foote’s dialogue and Lee Remick’s Method performance to convey the movie’s themes.

Mulligan, in his respect for writers, can’t transform this material the way a more aggressive director like Elia Kazan might have. Yet he frequently achieves an understated visual beauty that I failed to properly acknowledge in my capsule review. The ranch house where McQueen and Remick try to live, surrounded by an empty field and with no neighbors in sight, conveys the characters’ isolation more succinctly than much of the dialogue does. And he evokes a real claustrophobic dread in the large house where McQueen’s domineering foster mother lives. (In another instance of Mulligan taking directorial cues from his writers, he shot much of Baby the Rain Must Fall in Foote’s hometown of Wharton, Texas.) These locations leave as strong an impression as the courthouse of To Kill a Mockingbird.

  • Steve McQueen and Lee Remick in Baby the Rain Must Fall