OVP: I Never Sang for My Father (1970)

Film: I Never Sang for My Father (1970)
Stars: Melvyn Douglas, Gene Hackman, Dorothy Stickney, Estelle Parsons
Director: Gilbert Cates
Oscar History: 3 nominations (Best Actor-Melvyn Douglas, Best Supporting Actor-Gene Hackman, Best Adapted Screenplay)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Maybe it's the furniture.  There's something so distinctive about adult dramas of the 1970's-the mood is covered in grey, as if the screen has become exhausted from decades of technicolor, and is wallowing in self-pity.  It's something I've never truly loved, which is odd because there's few periods of film history that resonate more with me-perhaps it's because my favorite films of the era seem to breakout of this color scheme-Chinatown, The Godfather, Jaws-but it's always a tad bit jarring, as if you're visiting your great aunt's house and wondering why she simply won't redecorate.

(Spoilers throughout) This jarring juxtaposition, though, highlights what you have in common with the players onscreen, and there's a lot to see in yourself while watching I Never Sang for My Father, a film about when you realize that the balance of power within your relationship with your parents has started to lean toward your end, rather than visa versa, and what you lose in the process.  Gene Hackman stars as a dutiful son to a caring mother (Stickney) and a domineering and reductive father (Douglas), a once great man who has been compressed to anecdotes and rambling tales of his once great life.  When Stickney's character dies, you see that she's been the balancing act between the two, and Hackman must contend with the fact that he has little in common with his father, and that neither of them know that they love each other, or even if they do.

This is one of the great lost arts of the films of the 1970's that simply doesn't exist today.  There is an ending to the film (eventually Douglas and Hackman come to blows about their unrealistic expectations of each other, and go their separate ways, with Douglas dying offscreen), but there's no resolution.  Hackman or Douglas do not find absolution in airing their feelings toward another in a shouting match, but find more loss, more questions of why their lives didn't work out the way that they planned.  Only Alice (Estelle Parsons in a gut-punch of a performance), broken from years of exile from the family, has found closure in the family's many fractured relationships, by learning to hate her father and by proxy, hate the world.

Hackman and Douglas are both incredibly strong here, though I have to deduct a few points from Hackman for being ridiculously put in the Supporting Actor category when he's in every scene of the film.  Douglas, an actor that I adored in Hud, comes as close to taking out George C. Scott in the Best Actor race as one could without toppling him.  Both are men that know that their times have past-that they are relics that must make way for the new world, and for men who are more sensitive and whose ways they of which they neither understand nor approve.  Douglas's pleadings to his son to stay, to come and visit and go with him to the rotary club and not move to California, are less about seeing his son and more about seeing himself as a younger man, a man who was important and not fading into the background while the youth take control.  Everything revolves around his own youth, and his stories are not meant to bore or to entertain, but simply to remind both he and the listener that he was once a young man himself.  Douglas is just a force in the movie, and towers every scene as a man always in control.  His son, Hackman, allows him to tower again, not because he enjoys it, but in a vain hope to capture a childhood love that he knows he's supposed to have, but realizes in the dynamic title scene that will never come.  Robert Anderson's screenplay allows this uncomfortable bending, twisting their relationship until it snaps.  Their relationship will never be black and white like both hope, but like the movie, it is instead a collage of grey that neither can make clear.  It's in this grey that both actors excel best, and it is this grey that makes the film's tone so rich.  Or perhaps, it's just the furniture.