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.
© James Travers 2015
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.
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...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.