Fathers and Sons
By HENRY P. RALEIGH
June, 2003
All you fathers out there who are concerned, and you certainly should be, about your relationship to your son — assuming you have one, of course — should take a look at the way Hollywood has changed our traditional roles. Oh, I know there's a book in your local library by some Russian writer or another entitled Fathers and Sons but that has nothing to do with it. There are a few around I imagine who can remember the Andy Hardy films of the late 1930's and 40's and probably thought they would grow up, bear a fine son and turn into a Judge Hardy — dignified, wise and understanding of the silly and harmless follies of youth. Lewis Stone played all the Judge Hardy's and although at the time he seemed to me somewhat old to be the father of a teenager, I discovered after the birth of my fifth child, a son, I most likely appeared somewhat old too — I felt like it anyhow — and so what the hell. Fay Holden was an Every Mom and the model for all the sit-com mothers of the 50's, Mickey Rooney as Andy the quintessential American teen but with a lot more talent than most. Those were the days, fathers, when sons listened to you respectfully, obeyed your sage advice without argument, didn't sneeringly point out your ineptness with a computer. And they went out on innocent dates not with some tattooed, purple-haired thirteen-year-old floozy, but with sweet, upstanding girls like Ann Rutherford. How could these people be anything but good and endearing and chocked full of moral rectitude coming from a town like Carvel? Carvel is your dream town; nothing happens there until the teens get together to stage a musical and dance to beat the band. OK, they still do that, but it's not the same as it was, I can tell you, and you don't want to be around when they do.
But take a look at a couple of recent films centered on the relationship of father and son and you'll quickly notice just how turned around things have become. In "City by the Sea" we are flinchingly introduced to a son who is into things Mickey Rooney never heard of and a father who has had nothing to do with him since he was eight and who can blame him? Robert De Niro is no Judge Hardy, not by a long shot, and you certainly can't believe his son, played by James Franco, would bother organizing his friends to put on something like "Babes on Broadway." Why his friends are just as bad — one called Spyder (they can't spell either) wears a sawed-off shotgun as part of his motorcycle design ensemble. No one ever needed a shotgun in Carvel, and no one owned a motorcycle. And is this film view of Long Beach any place for a young boy to grow up in? I've heard the citizens of Long Beach were pretty peeved that this beachfront devastation was the only side of the town we ever see. Being a Long Islander myself, I really can't picture how prime beachfront property could have been left in such ruins. "City by the Sea" must break the hearts of real estate developers.
Father De Niro and son Franco do get together in the end for a little bonding of sorts during a shoot-out and in the touching finale, father waves goodbye once more as son is lugged off to jail for murder and heaven knows what.
"Road to Perdition," set in Prohibition days, gives us a nice enough son, but a father who is a killer. Curious to find out what his father does for a living, the son is soon privileged to see his dad at work slaughtering his colleagues and learning how to duck. Father and son do get along well’ I guess any son whose father packs a good deal of armaments and is so handy with it is bound to be careful about talking back. I will say that Chicago of the 30's is a notch above Long Beach; still it does seem to rain without let up and everything is brown — yellowish brown during the day, dark brown at night. Maybe it's all that rain.
It's really hard to take Tom Hanks as a murdering father and right there you can see the insidious way in which Hollywood has completely turned away from the Judge Hardy version of fatherhood. Tom used to be a swell fellow and then Hollywood stuck an oversized fedora on his head, an overcoat that hung down to his ankles, gave him a tiny mustache and, just like that, willy-nilly, he's machine-gunning away like there's no tomorrow.
So to sum it up, fathers: become a professional assassin if you want your son to admire and respect you or go off by yourself until your son matures into an entirely dissolute youth who can be seen now and then on visiting days.
