"I Never Sang for My Father" (1970)

“Death ends a life; but it does not end a relationship…”  from the opening and closing narration

“I Never Sang for My Father” is about the complex bond between sons and their fathers (who were also sons too, at one time).  The movie dramatizes in precise, painful detail the troubled relationship between a recently widowed middle-aged man (Gene Hackman) and his proud, aging, difficult father (Melvyn Douglas).  

The film is like a Rorschach test of our own individual experience of being a son (or a daughter).  For some viewers, there’s an additional layer, about the dread of aging and decline, about how we emotionally cling to our roles as parent and child, even when those roles are no longer healthy or reasonable.

In a brief (92-minute) running time, “I Never Sang for My Father” touches an array of ideas and feelings that most of us grapple with our entire lives.

Watching it feels like my personal psychodrama.  The situations are different but the feelings are real.  The film perfectly captures the underlying tension, rage, sorrow and regret, that I remembered in struggles with my own father, and sent me into a state of deep catharsis.

“I Never Sang for My Father” is an excellent example of what the best movies have always been able to do. They entertain us with complicated, believable characters, and by identifying with them, we are able to work out our emotional issues. In contemporary cinema, this is becoming a lost art and a forgotten function.

Gene Hackman gives one of his career-best performances as the restless yet guilt-ridden son.  Hackman’s character (also named Gene) comes back to his childhood home to visit his aging parents, who have returned to New York state after their winter in Florida. Gene is a teacher, whose wife has recently died of an undisclosed illness. 

On a recent trip to California, he has met Peggy, a doctor with children of her own. He wishes to marry Peggy and settle down in California. The trouble is, his father will do everything he can to keep Gene nearby.

Hackman received his second, well-deserved Oscar nomination for this film, three years after “Bonnie and Clyde".  (He would go on to win the Best Actor award the following year for “The French Connection”.)

Veteran actor Melvyn Douglas, in the pivotal role as Tom, Gene's father, gives one of cinema's greatest performances.  Douglas, who received his first Oscar in 1963 as Paul Newman’s disillusioned, scrupled old Father in “Hud”, doesn’t act the part so much as he lives inside Tom.  Every expression of bewilderment, anger and pride, every  spoken nuance and outburst come from deep within Douglas’ knowledge of this character.  He embodies every manipulative, controlling parent desperately trying to hide his vulnerability.

It is a sadly neglected performance that demands to be seen and appreciated today. Douglas also received an Oscar nomination for this role.

Tom is a former marine, a highly respected member of his community, a “remarkable man”, as Gene’s mother says repeatedly.  He’s a dignified codger stuck in his ways, a charmer to others who alienates those closest to him, especially his children. He does not abide differences of opinion.  

His rigidity crosses over to bigotry; he disowned his daughter (Gene’s sister Alice) for marrying a Jew.   And still he tries to control everyone around him.  “You can’t change him---there’s no use trying” Gene’s mother reminds Gene, to alleviate Gene’s frustrations with Tom’s old oppressive behavior. 

Estelle Parsons, who co-starred with Hackman in her Oscar-winning role in “Bonnie and Clyde”, re-teams with Hackman as Alice. She has some of the more difficult speeches in the film, and carries them off calmly and intensely, without hysteria.  Alice, who has adapted to life's disappointments, is a foil for Gene’s sentimental guilt and yearning for parental approval. Once again, Parsons and Hackman share a beautiful chemistry.

Tom is in physical and mental decline; he is forgetful, has trouble hearing, and is prone to coughing fits. He is stubborn; opinionated; denies his poor health; flies into rages when help is offered; and uses passive aggression and guilt-trips to manipulate his son, who still needs his validation, and even his love.  (We may all see bits of our own fathers in Tom; just as we might see parts of ourselves in Gene’s conflicted feelings and insecurity.)

When Gene hints that he wants to remarry and move away, Tom, who always assumed that Gene would remain nearby to look in on them, tells him flatly that his moving away “will kill your mother; you are her whole life.”  He is too proud to say how he himself would feel.

But Tom is not just an irascible father.  He was also a son, to a father with whom he had a stormy relationship, and with whom he is still coming to terms after seventy years.  We are conflicted about this father-figure, feeling both anger and sympathy for him.  On the other hand, we feel for Gene, and his search for happiness after his own personal tragedy.  The dilemma between them  is complicated. There will be no easy resolution.

Gene “hates” his father; but he feels compassion for him and “hates hating him.” When a family crisis brings Alice home, and the family doctor suggests that Tom can no longer be left to live alone, hard decisions must be made.  

Will Tom give up a new life to fulfill an obligation, and try to reconcile with his father’s impossible expectations to earn some shred of respect?  Will Alice talk him out of this sacrifice?  Will Gene have the courage to stand up to his predictably furious father when he suggests hiring a full-time live-in housekeeper; or worse, residence in a nursing home?

The film’s screenplay by Robert Anderson is a straightforward adaptation of his play.  Director Gilbert Cates (who produced 17 Academy Awards telecasts before his death in 2011) wisely keeps us close to the characters and their conflicts most of the time.  Occasionally, he applies some directorial flair to enhance the mood of a sequence.  

The most interesting is the depiction of Gene’s visits to hospitals and retirement homes for his father.  The sinister music and sound effects, coupled with Gene’s guilt and aversion to how the people exist there, and his shock at the idea of leaving his father there, have the amped-up melodrama of a horror film.

At other times, the film strays off the mark.  The score is a little overbearing in the early scenes.  A musical interlude, by Roy Clark, serves little purpose.  A subplot involving Gene and his affair with an old mistress  does little more than provide background, but it distracts from the central relationships, and might have been better left out.

But when the film concentrates on its central theme, and involves us in the impossible emotional landscape of its characters which most of us have been a part of, it hits us powerfully.  The final explosive exchange between Gene and Tom, and its aftermath, has rarely been matched in human honesty on screen.  It is a masterpiece of writing and acting.

Aside from watching it on Father’s Day, which gave the film an extra poignancy, “I Never Sang for My Father” has special significance today, reminding us of the continuing predicament of growing old in our culture, the feelings of being forgotten, abandoned, and irrelevant.  Most important, it recalls the tragedy of the elderly dying of Covid-19 in disproportionately large numbers in nursing homes around the country.

My parents both passed away several years ago; both spent their final moments in nursing homes.  I am glad they never lived to experience this pandemic, or to have been exposed to it or become ill from it.  I can think of nothing harder than the knowledge of them suffering and dying from this serious illness, and having no way to be there with them or even tell them why I couldn’t be there.  As much as we might have fought or disagreed; no matter how unreasonable I thought they were, my compassion and my guilt would have been too much to bear.

I appreciate “I Never Sang for My Father” for allowing me to ruminate on these things while being absorbed by the drama of a parent-child relationship that was fundamentally not much different than my own.  I applaud the movie's simple power to help me deal with those emotions, and in a small way come to terms just a little bit more with the relationship I had with my parents, a relationship that, it’s true, did not end with their death.