son

Fathers in film come in all shapes and sizes; tough, funny, sad, angry, you name it. Let’s face it, Don Corleone was a dad and so is Homer Simpson. There’s a lot of latitude in the job description.

Sometimes they’re cardboard stereotypes only there to give their kids someone to fight with and other times they show us moral courage and patriarchal strength.

Jimmy Stewart was the quintessential breadwinner and family man George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life. John Wayne acted as a surrogate father to a collection of schoolboys in The Cowboys. Gregory Peck played the remarkable Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. And in recent years, audiences have chuckled at the antics of Steve Martin as Gil Buckman in Parenthood, and Eugene Levy as Jim’s Dad in the American Pie films. Most often, these modern dads don’t know best at all. […]