Soap-Opera Oedipus

By Mark Goodman

At one time or another, nearly every college sophomore has clapped his roommate on the shoulder and said: "C'mon, Oedipus, she's old enough to be your mother." Or greeted a sleepy-eyed coed at a 9 a.m. classics lecture with a cheery "Morning doesn't become you, Electra"." Jejune jests, to be sure, but they reflect post-Freudian man's easy familiarity with once intricate Sophoclean themes. If familiarity does not always breed contempt, it often produces apathy.

That is precisely the reaction provoked by / Never Sang tot My Father, Author Robert Anderson's self-indulgent adaptation of his self-indulgent Broadway play. Director Gilbert Gates moves Anderson's characters with soap-opera mawkishness through father-son conflicts that are no less tiresome for their undeniable reality. Tom Garrison (Melvyn Douglas) is a Westchester County octogenarian Babbitt who fulminates against "some damned savage who will walk off with the luggage" at Kennedy Airport and complains to a fellow Rotarian about "some bozo who has been crowding into our pew at church." As a child he worshiped his mother and despised his father; naturally his middle-aged son (Gene Hackman) feels the same way. The two clash openly--and obviously--when Gene's garden-club-variety mother dies. Sensitive son mourns while boorish father frets over casket prices and answers sympathy notes with the oft-told tale of his fiscal success in the brass business. Soon the daughter (Estelle Parsons), banished to Chicago for marrying a Jew, arrives for the funeral and winds up giving Gene a lecture on castrating fathers. After much simplistic agonizing, Gene finally delivers the ritual I-wanted-to-love-you valedictory and breaks out of the old man's brass grip.

Nothing could have saved Anderson's platitudinous script, but Douglas makes an admirable try. He manages to transform a wholly unsympathetic curmudgeon into an object of reluctant but genuine sympathy. Without his seasoned wizardry, Father would be nothing more than matinee melodrama presented by your favorite bio-nondegradable detergent.

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