Father's Day Movies

For my most diligent reader: Dad. A comprehensive look at father and son movies for Father's Day. Including American films, Italian cinema, Chinese cinema and films from Argentina; classic films about fatherhood from A - Z.

Vittorio De Sica's Italian neo-realist classic "The Bicycle Thief" (aka "The Bicycle Thieves") is first on this list not just for alphabetical reasons. A poetic film of a father's admonitory, "do I as say, not as I do." A struggling man prepares his son for harsh realities with, "Your Mother and her prayers can't help us." What seems destitute is a lesson to fathers yet to realize actions speak volumes above stern lectures.

There are hard lessons of reality, but Tim Burton assures there's no harm in decorating truth in a little imagination in "Big Fish." On his death bed a father imparts a bit of optimism to his son: " -- you spend years trying to corrupt and mislead this child, fill his head with nonsense, and still it turns out perfectly fine."

At the core of John Singleton's saga of life in South Central Los Angeles, "Boyz N the Hood," is a father and son. As Furious Styles (Laurence Fishburne) tells his son Tre (Cuba Gooding Jr.), "Any fool with a $@%# can make a baby, but only a real man can raise his children."

One the greatest comparative studies of father figures is seen in Chazz Palminteri's "A Bronx Tale," directed by Robert De Niro. De Niro also stars as the dedicated working man who butts heads with Palminteri as the glorified gangster Sonny. De Niro echoes in every father's mouth when he says, "The saddest thing in life is wasted talent." This is reverberated in the Argentinean film "Family Law."

In Kevin Costner's "Field of Dreams" it's not what fathers say, as Ray's (Costner) dad shows in a scene that can choke up any father and son. On that "Field of Dreams" he builds in Iowa, father and son get one last chance at a game of catch. John and Frank Sullivan (Dennis Quaid) also get a second chance in "Frequency" when a ham radio connects a son to his father 30 years the day before his death. They create an alternate history without considering the butterfly effect, although Frank walks into the future with some advice: invest in Yahoo!

In "Hero," Bernie LaPlante (Dustin Hoffman) saves the victims of a plane crash, but his seedy past keeps him from taking the hero's limelight. He ends up a hero in the eyes of the one person that matters most - his son. Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) just didn't realize how sweet it is to have Sean Connery for a hero dad. As Professor Jones Sr. says in "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade", "Did I ever tell you to eat up? Go to bed? Wash your ears? Do your homework? No. I respected your privacy and I taught you self-reliance."

Self-reliance is important, but many lessons start with respect. The moving true story "In the Name of the Father" got father and son roles Oscar nominations. Gerry Conlon (Daniel Day-Lewis) is wrongly accused and locked up with his dad, Giuseppe (Pete Postlethwaite). Their dynamic is summed up when Giuseppe says, "I want you to have some respect," to which Gerry snaps, "Respect for who?" Giuseppe doesn't hesitate with, "Respect For Yourself."

Dustin Hoffman also won the Best Actor Oscar for a role that defined the troubled, divorced dad, who resorts to brutal honesty with his son in "Kramer vs. Kramer." At the heart of what many see as the magnum opus of divorce films, is a story about a father learning to love his son. Hoffman was brutally honest, but Guido (Roberto Benigni) in "Life is Beautiful" tells his son a beautiful lie. When Italian Jews are put in a Nazi camp during WWII, Guido taps the powers of imagination to save his son's childhood from the horrors of war.

In Wim Wenders's gorgeously shot, "Paris, Texas," is the story of a father (Harry Dean Stanton) found wandering the desert and reunited with his young son. Their journey to find his mother ends with a father faced with making the greatest sacrifice. Another father who knows sacrifice is Christopher Gardner, played by Will Smith with real life son Jaden Smith in "The Pursuit of Happyness."

One of the greatest fathers on film is Jimmy Stewart, who flexes his patriarchal muscle in "Shenandoah." Charlie Anderson (Stewart) raises 6 sons during the Civil War, ripe with lessons of humanity and love. Some of his memorable advice: "It's no easy job to take care of woman" and "when you love a woman without likin' her, the night can be long and cold, and contempt comes up with the sun." Charlie Anderson had all the answers, but Jonah Baldwin teaches his dad (Tom Hanks) a thing or two -- actually everything about love in "Sleepless in Seattle." Nora Ephron's movie is a definitive romantic comedy that shows what extent a son will go for his father.

If you dig to the other end of the world, Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou shows the extent a father will go for his son in "Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles." Tom Hartman (David Stratharin) is no slouch in the ''¹..."Dads who go the Distance' category in "The River Wild." Most of the movie we're invested in Mom's (Meryl Streep) heroics, but Dad comes through in the end.

While Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize winning novel "The Road," was written for his son, the film adaptation sums things up with "Life is Beautiful" meets "Mad Max." As depressing as this story is, it defines what a son means to a father, as The Man (Viggo Mortensen) says, "All I know is that the boy was my charge. And if he was not the word of God, then God never spoke."

Robert Duvall had a role as a destitute old man in "The Road," but won his only Oscar as a father in "Tender Mercies." Duvall's understated, yet powerful performance as washed-up country star Mac Sledge finds redemption in a surrogate son. Gregory Peck is far from being the fledgling father in the classic film adaptation of "The Yearling." As Ezra "Penny" Baxter, Peck's stern, but loving father is the pulse of life to a mother who has lost her heart. "The Yearling" was Peck's warm up to later become perhaps the most memorable father in film history; Atticus Finch in "To Kill a Mockingbird."

2 films about fathers and sons that deserve mention star Brad Pitt as son to Anthony Hopkins in "Legends of the Fall" and to Tom Skerritt in "A River Runs Through It." Both films employ fathers that are like oak trees of endearing rough exteriors who house an unbending shelter of love for their prodigal sons.