Life with Father I watched "I Never Sang for my Father" for the first time today and it surprized me that I hadn't seen it before. This is an excellent movie that deals with a real issue in many families. The issue is adult father/son relationships and how individuals involved handle their changing roles. The roles don't need to transpose themselves although this sometimes happens as parents reach advanced age. What ideally needs to happen is that love and respect would mature along with father and son. In this way authority would evolve into encouragement and instructions evolve into advice while obedience evolves into support and responsibility becomes second nature. This is NOT the relationship we find in "I Never Sang for my Father". The father (Melvin Douglas) is a domineering man whose life is focussed around himself. An important aspect of the movie is understanding the father's relationship with his own father (or lack thereof). The son (Gene Hackman) knows their relationship has always been one-sided but is willing to try to do the right thing.
The movie is a powerful drama that examines their relationship. Something cannot be broken if it was never whole and that seems to be the biggest stumbling block. The two outstanding preformances are supplemented by the roles of the mother/wife and sister/daughter. This is not a happy movie but it is an essential movie written, apparently, by a man who understood what he was writing about.
Why is this great movie not out on DVD?!!! I saw this movie in the Mercury theater in Middleburg Heights, Ohio in 1970 when it was first released. It was the first movie I ever saw that featured Gene Hackman, and I was just blown away. His performance as a somewhat estranged son to Melvyn Douglas's character was riveting. Melvyn Douglas, in an equally powerful performance, played a recently widowed man who is forced to cope with his two grown children, played by Hackman and Estelle Parsons. To make a long story short, it is a story of two men, father and son, who never connected, of parental expectations not fulfilled and a relationship, finally, iretrievably broken. It will, literally, bring you to tears.
See it for the performances I had to give it four stars because in truth INSFMF is somewhat haphazardly directed, but the acting is out of this world. Melvin Douglas is watchable in just about anything, but he really gives one astounding performance here, as do the rest of the cast.
The film rather unflinchingly looks at a strained father & son relationship brought to a head by the mother's death and fathers advancing senility. I think the script does a good job of showing how both parents and children are profoundly flawed in their understanding of each other, and provides no easy answers as to what "the right thing to do" is when human frailty requires tough choices.
A total masterpirce What a masterpiece and view into the lives of a father and son and their ambivalent and painful relationship. Anyone watching this film will recognize these characters as being so much like relatives, friends or acquaintances. You find yourself applauding "Gene's" sister "Alice" when she opens up to her brother and gives him the advice he so needs but doesn't want to heed because of his deep desire to have a close relationship with his maddening and impossible father. This is a film that you'd love to have others watch so you can have a deep discussion about the problems of having a rigid, elderly father who can't accept the fact that his child is an adult with the right to live his own life rather than having to stifle all his own life desires to please a selfish and manipulative parent. It's so well worth watching, pondering, and discussing.
Excellent drama Anyone who grew up in a difficult family, who is still dealing with those issues as an adult, and who is now confronted with the past as they deal with the present reality of aging parents should see this film. Stumbled upon it the other night on AMC.
There is *nothing* dated about the relationships and struggles portrayed. (I speak from experience.) The human element is right on target. The scenes when Hackman shops for a nursing home were particularly powerful, horror music appropriate. Been there recently, and things haven't changed much in 30 years...
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