University of Virginia Library

CINEMA

Anderson's 'Father' An Emotional Wringer

By Steve Wells
Cavalier Daily Staff Writer

So begins Robert Anderson's
"intensely personal" story of a man
who wants only to be able to love
his father as he should and thereby
rid his conscience of the guilt which
his paternal hatred has produced. "I
Never Sang For My Father" was
originally written as a film script,
which the author scrapped and
re-wrote as a Broadway play. It has
now comfortably made the
transition back to the screen, and
whatever reservations I had about
the stage version can, at most, only
serve as parenthetical comments in
an evaluation of the beautiful,
emotion-charged film treatment.

Means More

Most every major American
dramatist has one such "intensely
personal" work which means more
than all the others. It is the work,
usually autobiographical or
semi-autobiographical, which he
writes in his head a thousand times
before he puts anything on paper.
It is the work which he is often
afraid to write for a number of
reasons: fear of its not being as
perfect as he wants it to be, fear of
the actual pain of writing it. It is a
work ripped out of his memory and
written more by his heart than his
mind. For O'Neill, it was "Long
Day's Journey Into Night." For
Miller, it was "After the Fall." For
Williams, "The Glass Menagerie."
This is Robert Anderson's.

And Mr. Anderson, in writing
his screenplay, has proven that he is
a good enough writer not to fall,
into the trap many authors of
"intensely personal" works do:
becoming so emotionally involved
that all objectivity is lost. Mr.
Anderson recognized the
weaknesses of his play and has
skillfully avoided most of them in
his film adaptation.

For instance, he begins to build
up the conflict between the father
and son earlier in the film, whereas
in the play this didn't come into
full perspective until the second
act. He has added two significant
characters, the son's mistress and
fianc?e, who serve primarily as
"sounding boards" for the son,
through whose eyes we view the
story. We need to know the basis
for the son's hatred and see his
frustration, and on stage his direct
addresses to the audience were not
enough.

Emotional Intensity

Primarily, though, the film's
success is due to the intensity with
which the characters' emotions and
attitudes are conveyed, and here
Mr. Anderson must share
recognition with his director,
Gilbert Cates, and his stars, Melvyn
Douglas and Gene Hackman.

Mr. Cates effectively employs
close-ups and quick cuts to help the
action reach its desired peaks.
There are several moving moments
in the film — the son's abrupt
announcement of his mother's
death, his confession to his sister
(whom his father banished for
marrying a Jew) that he has always
needed and wanted to love his "old
man," and, of course, the final
confrontation scene in which we
sadly realize that the gap between
father and son can never be
bridged.

Nursing Home

But, above all, there is the scene
where the son visits a nursing home
in which he is considering placing
his father. Mr. Cates shows him
walking down corridors, seeing
helpless old folks waiting to die —
an array of grotesques which would
make Nathaniel West foam at the
mouth. The tinkling music becomes
strangely distorted, a look of
shocked repulsion appears on the
son's face, quick cuts of his father
are interspersed, and, Christ, the
reality of the situation, the
universality of it, the horror of it, is

all there, and the impact is
shattering.

Mr. Hackman plays the son, the
role which Hal Holbrook created on
the stage, and he proves
conclusively that he is one of the
most talented and underrated
actors in films today. His emotional
range is extraordinary as he covers
the spectrum — love, hate, anger,
tolerance, guilt, compassion,
understanding, grief, confusion — in
a way Mr. Holbrook never could
(this is not to demean Holbrook,
just to say he isn't a particularly
"warm" or "emotional" actor).

Mr. Douglas is his equal in every
respect, playing the senile old man
to perfection. He portrays his
character as both a well-liked
codger and a self-centered bastard,
shifting between the two with
amazing skill and case.

Core Of Film

The women's parts are all played
rather innocuously by Dorothy
Stickney, Estelle Parsons, Elizabeth
Hubbard, and Lovelady Powell, but
then they aren't that important, for
when the trappings are stripped
away, it is the performances of
Mssrs. Hackman and Douglas which
are at the core of the film and
which, perhaps more than anything
else, are responsible for putting you
through an emotional wringer.

There are those, to be sure, who
will dismiss "I Never Sang For My
Father" as pure schmaltz. But I
suspect those who do will be people
who lack the maturity and the
sensitivity to appreciate the role of
love in human existence, the need
for its presence and the lonely pain
of its absence.

(Now at the University)