Most people know a Dad Movie when they see one: A certain brand of unfussy, sometimes well-crafted, sometimes just passable entertainment that actual dads and dads-in-spirit – basically, anyone who can embrace the pleasures of slightly normie-coded thrillers, crime pictures, historical epics, and occasionally actual family dramas – can enjoy on a quiet Sunday afternoon, even if they’ve seen the movie in question once or twice or ten times already (preferably including some stumbled-upon cable rewatches). These movies are most readily identified with stars like Kevin Costner or Russell Crowe, but while Dad Movies may have been discussed more frequently in the 21st century, they’ve existed in some form or another almost as long as the movies themselves. In an effort to expand this canon and offer some potential Father’s Day streaming recommendations, we’ve selected a Dad Movie across a full century’s worth of cinema, including some obvious and not-so-obvious choices. And of course, you don’t have to be a dad or even a dude to enjoy any of these movies. If you walk in while someone else is watching them, and sort of stand off to the side in the middle of the room and wind up watching 30 or 40 minutes of it, you’re the target audience.
Dad Movies, as most people know, are not exclusively or even frequently movies that are actually about fatherhood. But they do tend to have father figures – mentors, male role models, and so forth – incorporated into the story. Angels with Dirty Faces is a crime drama that does this particularly well, as a hood named Rocky (James Cagney) bonds with a group of boys at the behest of his childhood pal, now a priest (Pat O’Brien) – despite Rocky’s refusal to go completely straight. He’s mostly concerned with strong-arming an old “business” partner (Humphrey Bogart) into paying him some stashed money, but there’s a clear contrast between Rocky’s potential to guide young scrappers while setting himself off on a more self-destructive path. Cagney, Bogart, mouthy kids, crime, and basketball; this might be the most dad-coded movie of the whole 1930s. If the title sounds familiar to younger dads, maybe it’s because it was spoofed via the fake gangster movie in Home Alone: Angels with Filthy Souls. Full disclosure: Dirty Faces might seem nearly as hard to find as the nonexistent Filthy Souls, because it’s currently not streaming anywhere… but it is available on disc, and, you didn’t hear it from us, but sometimes movies that aren’t readily streamable are easy to find on the Internet Archive.
Perhaps the most purely successful adaptation of any Ernest Hemingway work, this Robert Siodmak-directed noir brings Hemingway’s short story of the same name to the screen, then expands beyond the events on the page with a flashback-heavy narrative following an insurance investigation of a slain boxer. The scrambled chronology and troubled boxer feel like an influence on Pulp Fiction, but whether the dad in question is a Tarantino acolyte or not, this is a tough, exciting yarn with great work from Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner.
Director Howard Hawks had an affinity for showing men (and women) in working camaraderie, so no decade-spanning list of Dad Movies would be complete without one of his. It turns the siege story of a sheriff (John Wayne) who must hold off a land baron’s flunkies in order to keep the baron’s murderous son imprisoned until a U.S. Marshal arrives into a hangout western. It’s both a favorite of Quentin Tarantino’s and the inspiration for the John Carpenter film Assault on Precinct 13, only with more singing interludes. If part of the Dad Movie essence involves killing a lazy afternoon, this 140-minute western, which in both style and theme serves as a rejoinder to the taut McCarthyism allegory High Noon. There are plenty of valid points to debate over which picture is better; Rio Bravo, with its sprawl, comic relief, hangout vibes, and John Wayne factor, seems like inarguably more of a Dad Movie.
Director John Sturges made a number of other classics of this era, like The Magnificent Seven, or, for the more thoughtful dads, Bad Day at Black Rock, while for some, the go-to Dad Movie of the 1960s is probably The Dirty Dozen, a different 150-minute World War II ensemble thriller, from director Robert Aldrich. But there’s something particularly defiant and inspiring about the spirit of soldiers plotting an escape from a German POW camp that puts this Sturges-directed sorta-true story over the top, sort of like Steve McQueen zooming over a bunch of buses on a motorcycle (which is noticeably not part of The Dirty Dozen, and a key feature of a movie where a Dad should be able to go “hey, check this out,” possibly as many as 10 minutes before it actually happens).
Dirty Harry might be the obvious choice here, but let’s give dads a little credit and allow that maybe they could prefer a violent cop movie that’s a little more ambiguous about whether the cop in question is actually a hero. Gene Hackman’s “Popeye” Doyle is a racist, furious man, pursuing a drug bust with single-minded mania. It’s thrilling, the way it fuels one of cinema’s all-time greatest car-chase scenes, and frightening if you stop to think about the potential collateral damage Doyle is capable of inflicting. Because he’s played by Hackman, he’s both charismatic and believably scary; the thrills are there, and vicarious, but Hackman and director William Friedkin give them a discomfiting edge. It’s an up-to-the-minute thriller that kinda-sorta became a form of historical (but maybe not that historical) fiction as the decades passed.
Kevin Costner is a major figure in Dad Cinema – which, as we know, does not necessarily mean playing famous dad roles so much as parts that dads like to see themselves in. It’s telling, I think, that Costner’s famous role in Field of Dreams as a farmer who receives a mystical message to build a baseball diamond is more son than father. His Ray has kids in the movie, but the emotional lynchpin is the ghostly ballplayers and, eventually, Ray’s own departed, baseball-loving dad, who populate Ray’s ballfield. In between Costner’s more athletic turns in Bull Durham and For Love of the Game, he tests his acting chops even further by playing a regular guy who likes baseball but doesn’t necessarily aspire to conquer the game, even for so much as the crack of a homerun or a perfect pitch. Costner has often been compared to classic movie stars like Gary Cooper, and this is probably the closest he’s come to that kind of quiet perfection. (For a bonus sports picture depicting a complicated father-son relationship with a little less sentimentality, check out Spike Lee’sHe Got Game.)
Was anything in the late ’90s more enjoyable than catching any given part of The Fugitive on cable? (Well, maybe not if you came in at the slightly deflating final 15 minutes and realized you missed all the good stuff.) A dad-flipping-channels classic chase movie, it has just enough pop-culture bona fides (Harrison Ford starring in an adaptation of a classic TV series), conspiracy plotting, crusty comic relief (courtesy of Oscar winner Tommy Lee Jones), and pulse-pounding tension to give a whole movie’s worth of satisfaction even if experienced in eight-minute chunks with frequent commercial breaks. What makes it particular Dad perfection, I think, is the degree of methodical process Ford’s Richard Kimball goes through in matters small (eluding the cops when he returns to Chicago) and larger (proving his innocence in the murder of his wife). There’s a practical to it that feels so much less farfetched than any number of its fellow ’90s movie-star vehicles.
The historical epic is a go-to Dad Movie subgenre, but these lavish productions can become tedious pageantry so quickly and easily. Master and Commander takes place in the early 19th century – when oceans, as the famous intro card says, are battlefields! – and mounts some of the most impressive ship-to-ship battles ever seen on screen, led by Russell Crowe deep into his prestige-movie-star era. This feels like it should be watched from a real good armchair.
Photo: 20th Century Fox Licensing/Merchandising / Everett Collection
James Mangold may be the most Dad-coded director currently working; his films include a Bob Dylan biopic, a Johnny Cash biopic, one of the only good non-Rocky Stallone movies, and a Russell Crowe/Christian Bale western. He even made a superhero movie about being a regretful but badass old guy. His crowning achievement in this field – not his best movie, but his Dadliest – may be Ford v Ferrari, a racing-car saga that’s barely even about car racing, but designing and building the damn cars. It’s also a confident delight, with two perfectly pitched movie-star performances and a dash of history.
The obvious 2020s pick would be Top Gun: Maverick. But does anyone need to be told to watch Top Gun: Maverick three years after it set box office records? On the other hand, another slightly melancholic legacy-style sequel featuring a familiar, beloved hero in middle age only did typical Bond business when it was finally released in 2021. But No Time to Die is a perfect Dad Movie for anyone looking for slightly more emotional engagement than a typical Bond installment, while maintaining the country-hopping production value we all expect from this series. You get newfangled in-continuity Sad Bond who’s in love with Léa Seydoux (and is a secret dad himself!), old-fashioned charming Bond flirting with Ana de Aramas in Cuba, and cool stuff with motorcycles and cars.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn podcasting at www.sportsalcohol.com. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others.
