I'm sure there are plenty of good 70's-style dads out there who are keeping the faith here in the 00's, but man oh man, I hardly ever see them. When I do, most of them are cool, upscale African American dads, the types who wear immaculate dreads and walk like lions. Those are rare, though. Mostly it's a lot of Greg Kinnear-style namby pambying, and it's gotta stop.
We need to look to the 70's dads to see what they did that dads today no longer do; what secret ingredient has been lost and needs to be reclaimed?
Now to qualify for the honor of "great dad of the 1970s" you don't need to actually be a dad, like, say, Bill Bixby in "The Courtship of Eddie's Father." But you need to rule somewhere, something, a band or a sports team or a motorcycle gang, or your ward of psychos or war vets. Or you need to embody the spirit of the lion. Here's the first:
WALTER MATTHAU in BAD NEWS BEARS (1976)
Tobacco and cheap beer constantly in hand, Matthau is the sad sack loser from the minor leagues now reduced to coaching the worst of the worst, little league juvenile delinquents and the otherwise uncoordinated. If you were bad at sports as I was, this was your revenge movie. I hated baseball--being always picked last-- but I loved the movie, I remember seeing it down at the theater in Plymouth Meeting Mall and walking out exhilarated. Matthau cursed, smoked, guzzled cheap cans of beer, passed out in the dug out and--when the chips were down--cheated by bringing in ringer Jackie Earle Haley and an estranged tomboy daughter (Tatum O'Neal).
And then, when the team was about to win the final victory, Matthau suddenly has an alcoholic moment of clarity: looking at his benchwarmers picking their noses as the game goes on, he decides to send 'em in. It's a beautiful moment and in classic 1970's style it doesn't come heralded by trumpets and hugs and close-ups of moist eyes. It just happens. And in the end, it's the attitude that counts, not the sickening corporate notion of "family." Bottom line: The Bad News Bears and Matthau just don't know how to win, they only know how to lose with style. They'd rather have their shaggy aggression and angst then go be some golden poster boy chumps with corporate sponsorship and parental pressures.
As kids we came out of the theater with a song in our hearts and the immortal last words of the Bears still ringing in our heads (so we could play it back to our gathered schoolyard friends): "You can take that trophy and shove it up your ass!" The generations to come would not have this sort of linguistic freedom, their father figures would be soft and cuddly or be nothing more than "old teenagers" ala Adam Sandler and Will Ferell. But we, damn it, we had Matthau in BEARS... a total fuck up, but goddamn it, as Dietrich said in TOUCH OF EVIL, "some kind of a man."
For other seventies dads of note:
Kim Morgan writes on Paul Newman in SLAPSHOT - here.
And I praise Burt Reynolds in BOOGIE NIGHTS over on Bright Lights After Dark, here.
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