Now best known for To Kill a Mockingbird, the celebrated seven-film partnership between director Robert Mulligan and producer Alan J Pakula ended in 1969. Pakula embarked on directing a series of conspiracy thrillers (most famously All the President’s Men) that reflected the following decade of defeat in Vietnam, the Watergate scandal and national self-doubt. Mulligan started the 1970s with the big, nostalgic box-office hit Summer of ‘42, followed by the less popular The Other, a movie that continued his interest in everyday Americana seen from an adolescent point of view and in a period setting. But The Other also initiated another cycle of pictures reflecting the anxious decade, a succession of psychological horror movies about possessed and demented children, among them The Exorcist, The Omen, Halloween and The Shining.
A very minor success in its time, now a much respected cult movie, The Other is set in the deceptively idyllic late summer of 1935 on a Connecticut farm. Troublingly present in the background are the Depression and the sensational ongoing story of the kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby. In the foreground a succession of grisly accidents have cast a pall over the Perry family and their neighbours. The lively 10-year-old identical twins Niles and Holland (the impressive only film appearance of real-life twins Chris and Martin Udvarnoky) are staying with their Russian grandmother Ada (the first and only significant movie performance by Uta Hagen, the great American classical actress, creator of the role of Martha in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?). The boys’ mother is still grieving for the recent accidental death of their father, and the sensitive young Niles is encouraged by the seemingly psychic grandma to believe he has special empathetic powers derived from his eastern European heritage.
The film is adapted from his debut novel by Thomas Tryon, a minor Hollywood star successfully recreating himself as a popular writer, and Mulligan handles the twists, shocks and revelations with a subtlety that creates depth and ambiguity. This richly atmospheric film was shot by veteran cinematographer Robert Surtees between two more celebrated period assignments, The Last Picture Show and The Sting. The editing, pacing and design all contribute to the overall impact, as does the acting, most remarkably that of the twins. Mulligan knows how to lead us up and down the garden paths of his bucolic world, and as with Psycho you need a second viewing to appreciate the various skills that have gone into this movie.
