Swimming Upstream

Award-winning director of commercials and rock videos in the 1980s turned polished and proficient helmer of Hollywood genre movies. Mulcahy directed over 300 rock videos by 1983, including 15 starring Elton John and others featuring glitzy sets and costumes and fluid camerawork which highlighted Duran Duran, Billy Joel, Paul McCartney, Fleetwood Mac (“Gypsy”) and Rod Stewart (“Young Turks”). He also made many TV commercials, including advertisements for HBO, Doritos, Miller Lite beer, Ford and British Petroleum. Mulcahy made his feature debut with the British-produced “Derek and Clive Get the Horn” (1980), starring Peter Cook and Dudley Moore and followed up with “Razorback” (1984), a galvanizing cult thriller about a killer pig set in the Australian outback.

Mulcahy achieved some measure of commercial success with the Sean Connery/Christopher Lambert fantasy vehicle, “Highlander” (1986), which yielded the disappointing sequel, “Highlander II: The Quickening” (1991). He next fashioned a slick urban thriller, “Richochet” (1991) starring Denzel Washington and John Lithgow, which seemed to set a pattern for his subsequent work. Teaming for the first time with producer Martin Bregman on the made-for-cable spy drama, “Blue Ice” (1992), Mulcahy reteamed with Bregman and stayed in character with the unsuccessful “The Real McCoy” (1993), a tale of a burglar starring Kim Basinger. Mulcahy’s third teaming with Bregman, “The Shadow” (1994), was his most ambitious feature project to date. With a $45 million budget at his command, Mulcahy unleashed his video-bred stylishness on the period adventure thriller as he sought to bring the cult pulp-fiction figure Lamont Cranston to the screen. —TCM