Take Two translates the day’s headlines for Southern California, making sense of the news and cultural events that affect our lives. Produced by Southern California Public Radio and broadcast from October 2012 – June 2021. Hosted by A Martinez.
With Father’s Day coming up this weekend, we thought we’d discuss fathers throughout cinema history with writer and film buff Mark Jordan Legan.
Legan talked about the traditional roles of fathers in the early days of the silver screen. Usually the father figure was stoic; a rock solid man of a man.
But then there came a time when the women’s movement changed many people’s outlooks on the role of the Mom and the Dad. And after ERA, the movies also showed this shift – either through tearjerkers – like the Oscar-winning "Kramer vs. Kramer" starring Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep:
But then there was also a comedic take on the stay-at-home dad. In the John Hughes penned "Mr. Mom," Michael Keaton loses his job and his wife Terri Garr re-enters the work force while Keaton stays home with the kids.
Around this period the movies really started serving up the stock character of dumb ol’ dad – especially Chevy Chase as Clark Griswold in the Vacation movies, but one film that Legan feels really got the father role right was Ron Howard’s "Parenthood." It starred Steve Martin and Jason Robards.