I Never Sang for My Father (1970)
If you want to sing out, sing out.
Tom (Melvyn Douglas) was a remarkable man. We know because the movie keeps telling us. If it didn’t, we’d just think he was a jackass.
I Never Sang for My Father is littered with flat, unreasonable, and unsympathetic characters stuck together in a family. Tom feels that his children have never appreciated him and has banished his daughter Alice (Estelle Parsons) for marrying a Jew. Tom’s dutiful son Gene (Gene Hackman) feels smothered by his father and wants to escape to a new life in California. Gene sums up his relationship with his father thusly: “I hate him. I hate hating him.”
Maybe Tom never realizes it, but he’s failed his children just as his own drunken, absent father failed him. And, just as Tom left his father to die alone in a hospital, Gene leaves Tom to do the same. A dispiriting, ugly conclusion.
Rating: 3/10, my childhood was too good to enjoy this movie.
Cast and Crew
This is one of those capital-A Acting films and it was blustery scenery-chewer Melvyn Douglas who came out of it with a Best Actor Oscar nomination. We’ve seen Douglas once in this column as the upstanding father in Hud who eviscerates Hud for his lack of decency. Douglas’ character in I Never Sang for My Father also upbraids his crappy children, but since he’s just as crappy as they are, it all feels pretty hollow. Also, it seems the screenwriters forgot to put a movie—you know, that thing with plot—around all the familial squabbles. Oops.
Douglas’ biggest starring role came as a young man in Ninotchka (1939), a comedy about a Bolshevik who comes to Paris and falls in love with a member of the bourgeoisie. It absolutely rules, mostly because Douglas and Greta Garbo1 are both impossibly charming.2
Here’s a fun story that Melvyn Douglas only sorta features in: Douglas was married to actress Helen Gahagan.3 After her acting career, Gahagan Douglas entered politics and was eventually elected to Congress. In 1950, she won the Democratic Senate primary and squared off against Richard Nixon in the general election. That was the end of the road for Gahagan Douglas: Tricky Dick aggressively painted her as a Communist “fellow traveler” and ended her career in politics. Nixon, meanwhile…well, you know. Anyway, after Watergate, apparently there were signs put up in California that read, “DON’T BLAME ME, I VOTED FOR GAHAGAN DOUGLAS.”4
Quick Hits:
Gene Hackman scored a nomination for Best Supporting Actor. It was his second nom—he was also up for BSA for Bonnie and Clyde. We’ll discuss him in more detail when he gets his Best Actor trophy for a 1971 film.
I Never Sang for My Father teamed Gene Hackman up with Estelle Parsons again; they previously played a couple in Bonnie and Clyde. In that one, Parsons’ character spent the whole film screeching, yet somehow she’s only a touch better here.
Playwright Robert Anderson wrote the source material and the screenplay. He’s more known for “Tea and Sympathy,” a play-turned-film with Deborah Kerr and John Kerr (no relation). Two of his other notable screenplays were The Sand Pebbles and KW/OU favorite The Nun’s Story (1959).
The Trivia
Hey, remember last week when it seemed like we were gonna talk about World War II but then we talked about fun stuff like modern pentathlon and horseys instead? Well, now it’s time for vegetables. In this film, Tom brags that his son “saw the flag go up at Iwo,” so today we’re discussing the American involvement in the Pacific theater of WWII.
We’ll start with December 7, 1941, with the climax of From Here to Eternity: the bombing of Pearl Harbor, a naval base on Oahu in Hawaii.5 What’s less discussed is the numerous other attacks the Japanese launched on the U.S. that day (or, because of the International Date Line, on December 8th): attacks on the territories of Guam, the Philippines6, and Wake Island.7 At Wake Island, U.S. Marines and civilians held out for weeks against Japanese assaults, and though they were eventually overrun, their stand earned them the name “Alamo of the Pacific.”8
So what was the plan for the U.S.? The strategy was twofold: Admiral Chester Nimitz would go island-hopping in the Central Pacific, winning islands that would allow him to get closer to Japan. General Douglas MacArthur, who had promised to return to the Philippines, would get there by advancing from Australia through New Guinea.
Early 1942 saw the Doolittle air raid, a morale-raising attack on Tokyo led by Jimmy Doolittle, but don’t be fooled—the U.S. was still on the back foot. Only through battles fought later in the year would the U.S. blunt the Japanese advance and turn the tide of the war. The Japanese wanted to strengthen their position by taking Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea but were stopped at the Battle of the Coral Sea (fought May 4–8, 1942, part of the bottom prong).9 This is remembered as the first aircraft carrier battle. A bigger win for the U.S. was at the Battle of Midway (fought June 4–7, 1942, part of that top prong). The U.S. had the upper hand due to codebreaking and scored a war-altering victory over Admiral Yamamoto: we sunk four Japanese aircraft carriers and destroyed hundreds of planes, stopping their advance cold (though the U.S. lost the carrier Yorktown).10
The beginning of the offensive was the Guadalcanal Campaign, August 1942 to February 1943 (bottom prong). Guadalcanal itself is the largest island in the Solomon Islands; Honiara, capital of the Solomons, is on it. Admiral William “Bull” Halsey is the guy to know here, but you should also know that all five Sullivan brothers died during the Battle of Guadalcanal (a tragedy that helped inspire the Sole Survivor Policy). The Thin Red Line (1998), a film based on a James Jones book11, dramatized the battle.
Howzabout a couple of quickies?
Battle of Attu (fought May 11–30, 1943). Taking place in the Aleutian Islands in Alaska, this was the only land battle fought in North America.
Battle of Tarawa (fought November 20–23, 1943, top prong). Part of the campaign to take the Gilbert Islands (now Kiribati, of which Tarawa is the capital).12
The Marianas Campaign (June to November 1944, top prong). The U.S. captured Saipan and retook Guam (which had been lost to Japan after Pearl Harbor).
Let’s hit another battle you’re responsible for knowing: the Battle of Leyte Gulf (October 23–26 1944, bottom prong), again led by Admiral Halsey. This one’s well-known because it has a superlative: it was the largest naval battle in history. It was also the first battle with large-scale kamikaze attacks. A U.S. victory set up the invasion of Manila.
Then came the battle that Gene was in and the whole reason we’re doing this Trivia section. That’d be the Battle of Iwo Jima13, fought in February and March of 1945 (top prong). This was one of the bloodiest battles in the Pacific theater; Chester Nimitz later said that “for those who fought on Iwo Jima, uncommon valor was a common virtue.” The sacrifices and valor underscored the glory of the six servicemen who raised the flag on Iwo Jima’s high point, Mount Suribachi (you’ve probably seen the Pulitzer-prize winning photo by Joe Rosenthal of it). One of the flag-raisers to know is Ira Hayes, a Marine, Pima Indian and subject of a Johnny Cash song.14
The final land battle of WWII was fought on Okinawa, an island in the Ryukyu Islands15, in June 1945 (top prong). The U.S. suffered their greatest losses during the war there. Those heavy losses, perhaps suggesting what was to be expected from an invasion of Japan, influenced the eventual use of the nuclear bomb. A film set during this battle is Hacksaw Ridge (2016), where Andrew Garfield played Desmond Doss, a conscientious objector and Medal of Honor winner.
Odds and Ends
This film began life as a play starring Alan Webb, Lillian Gish and Hal Holbrook…the father orders his martinis “6 to 1”; that indicates the ratio of gin to vermouth (so 6:1 is pretty dry)…director Gilbert Cates is actress Phoebe Cates’ uncle…Tom mentions Gentleman Jim Corbett, who we’ve discussed here…as a symbol of condescension, the father tries to order the son Dubonnet, a sweet fortified wine…Gene’s in the Rotary Club—hey, we’ve talked about fraternal organizations before!
I Never Sang for My Father starts and ends with this quote: “Death ends a life, but it does not end a relationship, which struggles on in the survivor’s mind toward some final resolution, some clear meaning, which it perhaps never finds.” I’m so glad that doesn’t mean anything to me.
Since Garbo typically did drama, this lighter fare was given the tagline “Garbo laughs!” The tagline riffed on the one from Anna Christie (1930), which was Garbo’s first sound film and had the tagline “Garbo talks!”
Though he was the lead in Ninotchka, Douglas was mostly a second banana during his career. Some examples: Best Picture nominee Captains Courageous (1937, Spencer Tracy was the lead), The Sea of Grass (1947, Tracy again), Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (1948, Cary Grant), and The Americanization of Emily (1964, James Garner).
Helen Gahagan’s most notable film role was as the title “She” in She (1935), a film based on an H. Rider Haggard novel. That “She” is actually “She Who Must Be Obeyed,” the immortal ruler of the hidden civilization of Kor.
As far as I can tell, Watergate was the birth of the “Don’t blame me, I voted for X” meme, though it was more common to fill in that blank with George McGovern’s name. Also, we’ve got Glenda Jackson coming up in a 1971 film, so stay tuned for more actresses-turned-politicians.
In our post on From Here to Eternity, we discussed American intervention in China during the 1920s, proving that we’ve been avoiding discussing WWII for a long time.
Why did the U.S. have the Philippines? Because of the Spanish American War. After acquiring the Philippines, we fought the longest war in our history against them/us (though we’ve now fought longer wars). If you want to know more about the history of U.S. imperialism, I can recommend Daniel Immerwahr’s “How to Hide an Empire.”
The Japanese also attacked British and Dutch territories, including Malaya, Singapore, Hong Kong, Burma, and the Dutch East Indies.
We’re about to describe the island-hopping campaign of the war, but we’re not gonna mention Wake Island again. That’s because we didn’t go get it back—the Japanese held it until the end of the war. On the island, the Japanese did both regular war crimes and bird war crimes, driving the Wake Island rail to extinction.
I was in Papua New Guinea earlier this year and my guides always thought I’d want to hear about the various battles the Allies fought there during WWII. They were wrong: I didn’t. Also, those battles were primarily fought by British and Australian troops so, uh, we’re just gonna totally ignore them today.
Note that Midway is named for its location: it’s halfway between North America and Asia. There are actually two islands there. Also, there are a bunch of movies about Midway, including Midway (1976), Midway (2019), and John Ford’s documentary The Battle of Midway (1942).
James Jones also wrote the novel “From Here to Eternity.” The Thin Red Line was a “twin film” with Saving Private Ryan (also 1998), and I gotta say, I’m so glad we have a term for “two movies that come out the same year with the same topic.”
After capturing the Gilberts, the U.S. turned to the nearby Marshall Islands, launching attacks on Majuro, Kwajalein, and Eniwetok. These victories paved the way for the Marianas Campaign.
Iwo Jima is one of three Japanese “volcano islands”; its name means “sulfur island.”
The John Wayne film Sands of Iwo Jima (1949) had Ira Hayes in a cameo. Two other films about Iwo Jima were the Clint Eastwood films Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima (both 2006), which showed the battle from both the U.S. and Japanese sides.
This is an island chain that stretches between the Japanese island of Kyushu all the way to Taiwan. Okinawa is the largest of them.