Film review

Gilbert Cates (1970)

A black and white photograph appears on the screen in the prologue to I Never Sang for My Father.   The photograph shows two men, one elderly and the other middle-aged, side by side.  You get a clear sense from this snapshot that there are tensions between the pair; that the older man (Melvyn Douglas) is a strong, determined personality and the younger man (Gene Hackman) is less certain, more vacillating.  A melancholy voiceover announces that:

‘Death ends a life. But it does not end a relationship, which struggles on in the survivor’s mind, toward some resolution, which it may never find.’

You already know what the film is called.  Once you’ve seen this opening, you feel pretty sure you know what’s coming.  And you’re right.  As the picture ends, the black-and-white photo is back and you feel you could have done without the ninety minutes between its two appearances.

Robert Anderson’s screenplay is adapted from his own stage play, which ran on Broadway in 1968.  The play’s cast numbers eleven and there are hardly more people in Gilbert Cates’s film, even though the outdoor sequences are meant to be in New York.  Streets and a train station are deserted.  There are only a few folk hanging around in the airport where, at the start of the film, Gene Garrison (Hackman) collects his parents, Tom (Douglas) and wheelchair-bound Margaret (Dorothy Stickney), on their return home from a winter in Florida.   The piece reveals its theatrical origins in more expected ways too – for example, the arrival and departure of Gene’s sister, Alice (Estelle Parsons), whom Tom disowned when she married a Jew.  Alice comes back for Margaret’s funeral; has a set-to with her father; tells Gene, of whom she’s fond but by whom she’s exasperated, some home truths; and, playwright’s mission accomplished, goes on her way.

Pauline Kael, who usually loathed and derided this kind of unhappy family story, was relatively very kind to the film.  She was right that Robert Anderson has the integrity not to resolve the father and son relationship in a crude, melodramatic way but, since Anderson and Gilbert Cates supply instead a series of scenes which, for all the skill of the main actors, are conceived and play out in a pat, over-determined way, the benefits of integrity are, in this case, very small.  Although the lack of resolution is a more believable outcome than a purging and transformation of Tom and Gene’s feelings about each other, the steps towards this outcome are no less mechanical and no more convincing than a contrived optimistic ending would have been.  It may be ‘realistic’ that Gene is a weak man, who keeps wanting to get something – he’s not sure what – out of his dealings with Tom; and that there’s nothing to support Gene’s attempts to convince himself, and Alice, that their father was once an admirable man.  Such realism counts for little, though.  Tom thunders repeatedly about the poverty of his own childhood, reminding his children they have him to thank for their comfortable upbringing – but the rant feels generic and the character consequently clichéd (a pale imitation of the father in Long Day’s Journey Into Night).

The film’s title refers to a moment when, in the course of a conversation with Tom, Gene is forced to consider, after decades of resenting his father’s failure to give him praise and affection, that he may have denied Tom opportunities to do so.   (Tom compliments Gene on the fine singing voice he had as a teenager but says that, whenever he asked his son to sing, the answer was no.)  This moment of reappraisal, since it isn’t followed through, gives the impression of having been included merely for immediate, what-might-have-been impact (and to provide a distinctive title).  Familiar stage showdowns dominate I Never Sang for My Father to such an extent that they would obscure the truthful substance of the material if there were any.  But that is a big if.

Gene is a college professor and a published writer.  He’s been widowed for a year, during which he’s got to know a woman called Peggy, a successful gynaecologist in California.  Gene wants to move there to start a new life with her.  Until now, he has been a dutiful son – both parents say to him, ‘What would we do without you?’, and mean what they say.  Margaret Garrison dies and Tom virtually blames this on the shock of her finding out that Gene means to leave New York.  Gene’s restlessness is a device to catalyse the crisis in his relationship with Tom:  it’s exposed as nothing more than a device because Anderson and Cates barely suggest how things were during Gene’s first marriage.  It’s mentioned that Tom expected his son to be, as always, with his parents for Thanksgiving even when Gene’s wife Carol was dying in hospital; but for all the talk about family history and tensions, there’s no indication of whether his filial duties caused any conflict between Gene and Carol or how she got on with her in-laws.  Gene might just as well be a bachelor, who’s had few, if any, lasting relationships and is now more than ever anxious to have a fulfilling life of his own, before it’s too late.  He might also just as well be an accountant as a scholar and writer – except that the latter comes in handy as a signal of his ‘thoughtfulness’.  It’s unclear what his long-distance relationship with Peggy (Elizabeth Hubbard) consists of, especially as the only woman we see Gene in bed with isn’t her.  It’s unclear too whether this other woman (Lovelady Powell) is an academic colleague or a hooker with a helpfully psychoanalytical line in post-coital chat.

Melvyn Douglas’s force is often impressive – especially in the rare moments when Tom Garrison breaks down emotionally – but there’s limited scope for Douglas to do more than illustrate, repeatedly, that the father is an arrogant bully.  Gene Hackman performs a small miracle in keeping you interested in Gene Garrison but the actor’s essential truthfulness reinforces your frustration with the man.   Estelle Parsons livens things up a bit when Alice first appears but her character’s purpose in the story is almost entirely functional.  Although Gilbert Cates can direct scenes between pairs of actors, the film is remarkably lacking in any other sort of fluency.  For example, in the bedroom scene with the sympathetic woman, Gene’s hand moves to one of the fittings at his side of the bed.  The idea seems to be that he starts fingering this at first idly but then, as his thoughts turn back to his family life, with anxious concentration.  Cates shoots this in a way that robs the moment of development:  his camera is focused on the fitting the second Gene first touches it.

Some features of the direction are worse than unsmooth.  The music, by Al Gorgoni and Barry Mann, is turned on and off abruptly in a way that emphasises its shoddiness.  (There’s also a feeble ‘original’ song, played over shots of Gene removing dustsheets in his parents’ house – that is, as part of the movie proper, rather than as an accompaniment to opening or closing credits.  This placing of the song dates the film rather amusingly.)  A sequence in which Gene looks round residential homes, with a view to persuading his father to move into one, is startlingly tasteless.  The appearance and behaviour of the residents suggest there’s hardly any difference between twilight homes and mental institutions, and is insulting to those who spend time in either.  Gene’s tour is accompanied by horror film music.  The offensiveness of this goes way beyond the fact that Gene Hackman can express the character’s alarm at what he’s seeing without help from the soundtrack.

7 May 2015