I Never Sang for My Father

Plot

At the airport, college professor Gene Garrison meets his parents, who have returned from Florida. After driving them home, he takes them out to dinner. Back home, he spends the evening with them. The barbs of his father, Tom, run through his mind as he drives home. Gene seeks solace in the arms of Norma, a woman he's been seeing, who pines for a more serious relationship. Soon after, his mother, Margaret, suffers a heart attack and is hospitalized. Upon visiting her at the hospital, Gene finds Tom pacing in the waiting room. Tom asks Gene to go to the Rotary Club with him, though Gene was expecting not to leave his mother's side.

When Margaret dies, Gene helps his father shop for a casket. His sister, Alice, arrives without her husband and children. She explains to Gene that Tom's failing memory and health will require constant care either in a nursing home or with live-in assistance. She broaches the idea with their father, who rejects it outright. The conversation brings up old tensions about Tom's disinheritance of Alice over her taking a Jewish spouse. Alice leaves Gene to deal with their father by himself.

Gene's girlfriend Peggy arrives for a visit. She is charmed by Tom and offers to relocate to New York to live with Gene and his father. That night, Gene and Tom reminisce together over old photographs. Tom's love for his son comes shining through in their conversation and he asks about a tune that Gene used to sing for him as a boy. Gene confesses that he never sang the tune for his father, but Tom recalls otherwise. Gene tells Tom that he is thinking about moving to California to be with Peggy, where she has a successful gynecological practice. Tom becomes irate at the notion, feeling abandoned. After a bitter argument between the two men, in which Tom in rage tells Gene that he is dead to him and that he doesn't need him, slams the door shut after him. The frame freezes and in the narration, Gene comments that he did move to California and marry Peggy and there were a few visits back and forth between Gene and his family and Tom. He ends the movie by stating that Tom ended up in a hospital, unaware of his surroundings and died by himself without an "orange" referring back to how Tom's father died by himself in a hospital the day after he asked him for some fruit and he sent him oranges.

Cast

Melvyn Douglas as Tom Garrison - Father

Gene Hackman as Gene Garrison - Son

Estelle Parsons as Alice - Sister

Dorothy Stickney as Margaret Garrison - Mother

Elizabeth Hubbard as Doctor Margaret 'Peggy' Thayer

Lovelady Powell as Norma

Daniel Keyes as Dr. Mayberry

Conrad Bain as Rev. Sam Pell

Jon Richards as Marvin Scott

Nikki Counselman as Waitress

Carol Peterson as Nurse #1

Sloane Shelton as Nurse #2

James Karen as Mr. Tucker (old age home director)

Gene Williams as Dr. Jensen (state hospital director)

Production

Original play

Gilbert Cates had been one of the producers of the original stage play together with Doris Warner Vidor. Directed by Alan Schneider and starring Alan Webb, Lillian Gish and Hal Holbrook, it initially ran for 124 performances in New York in 1968 and lost most of its $195,000 investment. The story was widely considered to be quasi-autobiographical.

The play was profiled in the William Goldman book The Season: A Candid Look at Broadway.

Filming

The film was shot at several locations, including Southern California and the Great Neck-Douglaston area of New York. Applauded by critics and viewers, the film (and play)

predicted the coming of the sandwich generation, in this case, grown children and other family members helping their elderly parents who are up in age.

Critical reception

Roger Ebert summarized the film in his review: "These bare bones of plot hardly give any hint of the power of this film. I've suggested something of what it's about, but almost nothing about the way the writing, the direction, and the performances come together to create one of the most unforgettably human films I can remember."

Vincent Canby, in his review for The New York Times, was far less complimentary, writing "(The film) does the human spirit a disservice in the way it pleads for sympathy for people who are small and flat, like comic strip characters, without sweetness, without imagination, without any suspected reserves of emotion. Indeed, it almost becomes ridiculous when you realize that it is without any honest problem, either psychological or economic." Murf. of Variety called it " dull, distended, and lacking clear point of view"; however, he called the performances of the lead actors "superb".