Death of a Salesman (1951)
Directed by Laslo Benedek

Film Review

Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman is one of the most important works in American theatre.  When it was first performed in 1949 it ran for 742 performances and garnered a brace of awards, including the prestigious Pulitzer Prize.  Critics were just as fulsome in their praise of the play's first screen adaptation, directed by László Benedek and produced by Stanley Kramer, but the film struggled to find an audience and to this date it remains one of the most overlooked triumphs of 1950s American cinema.  The film's release was ill-timed, coming at the start of the consumer boom that would transform American life and American attitudes in the early 1950s.  Miller's astute critique of the American dream, with its emphasis on personal and professional failure, was not something a cinema audience of this time would have warmed to, particularly as the film goes out of its way to stress the original play's bleakness with a minimalist, expressionistic style that is frankly depressing.  Miller loathed the film, insisting that it was a betrayal of his original intent, which was to portray its central protagonist, everyman Willy Loman, as a tragic victim of capitalism rather than, as the film implies, a failed family man who brought his misfortunes on himself.

Miller's criticisms of Benedek's film certainly have some validity but, even if Loman's failure is shown to be more the result of internal rather than external factors, the film still makes for a powerful piece of drama.  Indeed, its allusions to the emptiness of the American dream are starker and more apparent than you might have expected for a mainstream piece of cinema of this time.  Fredric March (replacing Lee J. Cobb in the original Broadway production when the latter's supposed association with leftwing politics came to light) takes Miller's symbolic hero and fills him full of blood and fire, making him a terrifyingly believable individual.  March's Willy Loman is a formidable character who is not without charm and nobility, but he is also a deluded fool, a man who in the twilight of his life suddenly sees through the capitalist fantasy he has built his whole life on and realises it has all been for nothing.  He is like the frozen leopard in Hemingway's The Snows of Kilimanjaro - he has followed the wrong path up a very steep mountain and it has led him to nothing, just a lonely patch of ground on which to die.  March was awarded the Best Actor award at the Venice Film Festival for his portrayal of Loman, and whilst his performance does veer towards wide-eyed lunacy in the film's later passages, it has that rare blend of truth and greatness about it.

Mildred Dunnock had made the part of Loman's wife Linda her own in Elia Kazan's original Broadway production of the play, so it would have been indefensible to cast anyone else in the role for the film version.  With three loud and physically powerful actors hemming her in on all sides, you'd think Dunnock's slight housewife would be scarcely noticeable, but unassuming as the character is she makes her presence felt in every one of her scenes - the one pacifying influence in a scorching cauldron of over-heated sentiment.  One of the founder members of the Actors Studio, Kevin McCarthy reprised the role of Biff from the first London production of the play, and in doing so he made a stunning film debut in a career that would last more than sixty years and take in over 200 appearances on film and television.

Despite his prolific career, McCarthy seldom gave a performance as intense and gut-wrenchingly poignant as the one that appears to have been torn from his soul for Death of a Salesman.  His scenes with March have such a fierce energy and visceral brutality that at times they resemble some kind of medieval torture, each character visibly traumatised by the effort of trying (and failing) to make some kind of emotional connection with the other, amid the molten hot recriminations that are driving them apart.  In contrast to Volker Schlöndorff's 1985 television film adaptation (which is closer to what Miller intended), László Benedek's film works better as a family psycho-drama than as an all-out assault on the downside of capitalism, its main achievement being the gruesome reality with which it develops the father-son relationship and makes this the fulcrum about which Willy Loman's personal tragedy is played out.

Film Synopsis

Willy Loman is a 63-year-old travelling salesman who can no longer cope with the physical demands of his job.  As he reflects on his life in his darker moments he struggles to comprehend where it all went wrong.  His sons, Biff and Happy, have both turned out to be disappointments - they seem content to fritter away their lives when they could have been so much more.  Loman could himself have been a wealthy man if only he had made a few different choices in his life, but rather than take the opportunities offered to him he stuck to his career as a salesman and at the end of thirty years he has little to show for it.  Now, to cap it all, his boss has given him the sack, just when the final instalment on his mortgage is due.  With grim irony, Loman realises that he is worth more dead than he is alive...