Crazier than a June bug on a polecat

A ghost story as transparent as the specter of its title, The Other gave me the willies when it first came out in 1972. I was an easily amused fourteen-year-old, too distracted to notice plot holes larger than Kansas. Nearly thirty-five years has removed any real or imagined sheen from Robert Mulligan’s film of Tom Tryon’s one-time bestseller, but it’s as fun and satisfying as greasy take-out on a Friday night. Just keep the antacid handy.

Tom Tryon began as an actor but never elevated beyond the role of the poor man’s John Gavin: handsome, stalwart furniture. He inched toward stardom in Preminger’s The Cardinal (1963), but ended up with marginal cult celebrity for playing the possessed husband in I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958). The Other was the first in what would become a lucrative second career as a novelist. One of Tryon’s short story collections, Crowned Heads, used creative license on a hodgepodge of true Hollywood stories — among them “Fedora,” wherein a producer attempts coaxing a reclusive star out of retirement. Billy Wilder made it into a movie in 1978, and more than a few people noticed the similarity to Sunset Boulevard (1950).

I’ve never read The Other, but judging by what’s on the screen it surely must have appealed to Mulligan, whose penchant for the paint-by-numbers aesthetic of Norman Rockwell Americana — the sunny jerkwater idyll where happy-go-lucky rubes dig shoofly pie and brush off adversity with a hearty ‘pshaw’ — has permeated his work for years. After a stint in television during the early 1950s, Mulligan formed a partnership with Alan J. Pakula as his producer to do a string of low-key dramas: Fear Strikes Out (Anthony Perkins preparing for Norman Bates; 1957), To Kill a Mockingbird (widely, and not unjustly, regarded as the director’s best picture; 1962), Love With the Proper Stranger (1963), Baby, the Rain Must Fall (1965), Inside Daisy Clover (showcasing a ripe Natalie Wood; 1965), Up the Down Staircase (1967), and The Stalking Moon (1969). Pakula, of course, graduated to direct a handful of pictures and had a knack for paranoia: Klute (1971), The Parallax View (1974) and All the President’s Men (1976). (Pakula died in a car accident at the age of 70 in 1998.)

Opening with the prerequisite spooky song signaling our detour away from normalcy, The Other turns its soft-focus eye on vexed twin brothers (Chris and Martin Udvarnoky in their simultaneous screen debut and swan song), a deer-in-the-headlights mom (refined beauty Diana Muldaur, who made her mark as Dennis Weaver’s main squeeze on TV’s McCloud), and a grandmother from the old country who spouts supernatural red herrings (Uta Hagen doing Maria Ouspenskaya; they initially offered it to Ingrid Bergman, but Ingrid’s no dummy). Plus there’s the obligatory Tobacco Road clan (including a young John Ritter), an illiterate farm hand (Victor French sporting an uncanny resemblance to Giancarlo Giannini in bib overalls), and a dotty spinster you know is going to get snuffed before the third act. As dumb as a box of rocks, they’re blind to the warning signs popping up all around — unexplained deaths, freak accidents, an old lady swooning into a trance, and a traumatized kid having long conversations with a wall.

At the time, Mulligan was riding high on the box office take of Summer of ‘42 (1971): produced for $1 million, it grossed over $25 million in the United States alone. While that’s no indication of any picture’s quality, it’s certainly a bargaining chip in the board room. (Admittedly no classic, Summer of ‘42 survives as a guilty pleasure among middle-aged guys fixed on tawdry adolescent dreams and the Ivory Girl loveliness of Jennifer O'Neill.) That film had clarity and purpose, whereas The Other is scattered, a frivolous mix of genres, patented Jerry Goldsmith musical clichés, and actors in search of motivation. Past the references to pickled infants and Bruno Hauptmann, we’re expected to raise the bar on our suspension of disbelief and allow for a great deal of shenanigans. Fortunately, it’s far less painful than it sounds.

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