March 19, 2012

28 Death of a Salesman (1951)

***½
Country: US
Director: Laszlo Bededek


The first we see of Willy Loman (Fredric March) in the 1951 film version of Death of a Salesman is a close-up of him behind the wheel of his car at night as the credits roll. After he pulls into the rear yard of his Brooklyn house and gets out of the car, we can tell immediately from his slumped posture and unsteady gait as he walks to the back door that this is an exhausted man. By the time the picture has ended nearly two hours later, again with Willy behind the wheel of his car, this time driving away from his house for the last time, we know in detail the reasons for his exhaustion. And we know that his exhaustion is not just physical, but also mental and spiritual.

The film is based, of course, on the play by Arthur Miller, one of the great works of the American theater. Directed by Miller's close friend Elia Kazan, it opened in New York in 1949, ran for 742 performances, and collected just about every major award, including a slew of Tonys and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Like so many of the great, enduring plays, it examines in almost microscopic detail the inner workings of a family, probing under the seemingly placid and conventional surface to reveal the turbulent emotions and unacknowledged deceptions that lie beneath.

The Loman family consists of 63-year old Willy, his wife Linda, and their two grown sons, Happy and Biff. When Willy pulls into the driveway at the beginning, he is not coming back from an out-of-town selling trip, but has abruptly aborted the trip after barely leaving town and returned home because he can no longer bear the strain of his job as a commercial traveler. When he arrives, he finds that his estranged 34-year old son Biff has returned for a visit and that his other son Happy, a salesman himself, has come to spend the night to make the occasion a real family reunion. But far from uniting the family, what happens over the next twenty-four hours rips it apart.

The crucial relationship is the one between Willy and Biff (Kevin McCarthy). During the course of the film, we learn that as a teenager Biff had been a promising high school football player with offers of a sports scholarship from several universities. Willy invested all his hopes for the future in Biff, but something happened that derailed Biff's plans. Far from becoming the great success his family expected him to be, Biff is a rootless drifter who has never married and has held only a long succession of menial jobs. Biff and Willy rarely see each other and when they do, they invariably end up fighting, with Willy deriding his son's lack of ambition and wasted potential, and Biff resenting his father's disapproval and attempts to run his life.

This time their reunion is further complicated by Willy's deteriorating physical and mental condition. Willy is, in a word, cracking up. He talks loudly to himself, relives scenes from the past, and repeatedly slips into reveries in which he sees his life more and more as one of disappointment, failure, and regret. Willy's present and future have become obscured by his preoccupation with past mistakes and missed opportunities. When the big revelation of the film comes—that the reason for Biff's failure is his accidental discovery of a shameful secret Willy kept from his family, a discovery that destroyed Biff's image of his father and poisoned their relationship permanently—Willy is forced to confront his own responsibility for what he sees as his son's failure in life, and the pain and guilt of finally admitting something he has so thoroughly repressed for so long both liberates and destroys him.

As moving as Death of a Salesman is as a human and family drama, it is at the same time a powerful indictment of American values, a scathing work that strips bare the American dream that success is within the reach of everyone and exposes it as a myth. At the age of sixty-three, Willy is no longer up to the demands of being a commercial traveler working on commission, and he finds that the buyers and other salesmen with whom he has developed a rapport over the years have either died or moved on. The founder of his company who had years before promised him an office job in New York also has died. When in desperation Willy goes to see the son who now runs the business to get the promised job—his wife Linda has finally convinced him that this is the only way he can continue working—he is treated condescendingly, ignored, and finally fired after being told that he has nothing to contribute to the profitability of the company.

Willy has lived his entire life with faith in the great American belief that hard work and a positive attitude will be rewarded with success. In one humiliating encounter that belief is exposed as a fiction and collapses before his eyes. He finds himself in a business world where profits are more important than people, where productivity is more important than loyalty, where feelings and promises have no importance at all. As he nears the age of retirement, he suddenly finds that the rules of the game, rules he has observed all his life, have been arbitrarily and irrevocably changed. He has been pushed aside, too set in his ways to adapt and too far behind to catch up. This is surely a theme that evokes a powerful response even today, perhaps especially today. Was Arthur Miller prophetic, or are these things cyclical? Or is this sensation of being out of sync with the times universal, something everyone is destined to experience with age?

Willy Loman is a middle-class American Everyman so disoriented by circumstances he can't comprehend, much less control, that he has been driven to the verge of madness. He's one of the great tragic figures of drama, maybe the closest any American playwright has come to creating a character with the scope and resonance of a Hamlet or Lear. It takes an exceptionally skilled actor like Fredric March to capture all the nuances of Willy Loman and elicit the feelings of pity and fear that are the essence of tragedy. In less capable hands Willy could come off as pathetic or even demented, something March avoids in his expertly calibrated performance. There is a fine line between pity and sentimentality and between being haunted by past errors and being mad. March treads that line without misstep, showing us how Willy has fallen because of a convergence of internal and external forces—his own moral shortcomings and his mistaken trust in a system that was bound to fail him.

Throughout his long career, Fredric March divided his time between movies and theater. He was offered the part of Willy Loman in the original stage production of Death of a Salesman but turned it down. So it shouldn't be surprising that he grasps the part of Willy in the movie version with such intensity. It's one of the finest performances of his movie career and got him an Oscar nomination, a Golden Globe, and the best actor award at the Venice Film Festival. The film version of Death of a Salesman has much to recommend it—imaginative transitions between the present and the past and between external reality and inner reality, creative use of light and shadow by cinematographer Frank (Franz) Planer, uniformly excellent supporting performances, especially by Mildred Dunnock as Linda. But at the center of any version of Death of a Salesman is Willy Loman; from him everything else flows. It is appropriate then that Fredric March's unforgettable portrayal of Willy is the engine that drives this film.

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This post, while not officially part of the March-in-March event at Sittin' on a Backyard Fence honoring Fredric March, was inspired by that event. Visit Sittin' on a Backyard Fence to read more about Fredric March and his work.

28 comments:

  1. Thank you for this in-depth review of a movie I don't see much lately, which is a shame. Fredric March is so watchable no matter what he does, and he is amazing here.

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    1. Filmboy, March is an actor I've only really become aware of in the last couple of years, but he has become one of my favorites of the studio era. For me his peak decade for movies was the 30s. He gave many superb performances in that decade, including my very favorite of his, Norman Maine in the 1937 version of "A Star Is Born." I remembered his Willy Loman from seeing the film on late night TV many years ago, and his interpretation has stood up well. I prefer it to Dustin Hoffman's better known but less restrained interpretation.

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  2. I am so jealous you were able to see this. It's been on my to watch list forever but I just can't find the film. And it was the film I was most disappointed TCM did not play when they honored March at SOTM in 2010 I believe.

    Thanks to your review I want to see it even more.

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    1. Kim, I wasn't able to find this on Netflix or other DVD rental services so I bought a copy. It's distributed by an obscure outfit in Oregon and not very good quality, so you'd have to be very willing to put up with the flaws in the print to make it worth getting. On the other hand it wasn't all that expensive. I've seen it on Amazon from time to time for around $10. I'm not aware of TCM ever showing it, but you never know--they've been premiering a lot of films recently. It was a Stanley Kramer independent production distributed by Columbia, and I've read that Columbia hasn't been good about releasing their films on home video. Maybe the publicity about the new Broadway revival directed by Mike Nichols with Philip Seymour Hoffman as Willy will create some interest in getting this out on a better quality DVD or shown on TCM.

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  3. I haven't seen this March performance, but he's an actor I've always admired. I confess that I wouldn't have quite seen him in this role (Spencer Tracy or Edward G. Robinson come first to my mind), but your excellent post makes me want to watch March in this film. Thanks.

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    1. GOM, March is very, very good in this, perhaps the last really good movie role he got. After this he became more of a character actor as he got older. Maybe you've seen the 1948 movie of Miller's "All My Sons." It has a lot of similarities to "Salesman," in some ways a trial run of themes he would develop in the later play--the strong father-son relationship compromised by the son's discovery of his father's flaws. Robinson played the father in that film (Burt Lancaster was the son), so it's interesting you should mention him in relation to Willy. His character in the 1949 film "House of Strangers" also has some similarities to Willy Loman.

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  4. This is one of March's finest performances. His Willy is so spot-on to the character that Miller created. For some reason, this rarely gets aired on TV, which is a shame

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    1. Kim, this was the first Fredric March performance and the first version of "Salesman" I ever saw many years ago on TV. The film was my not only my introduction to March, but also made the character of Willy Loman forever identified in my mind with Fredric March's interpretation. It's interesting to me that the two biggest American plays of the 1940s were this and "A Streetcar Named Desire" and that both were made into movies in 1951. Everyone remembers the movie of "Streetcar" but "Salesman" seems to have been forgotten. It's true that "Streetcar" is the better movie, but "Salesman" is still a very good one. It might have been even better if Elia Kazan had been able to direct it. In his autobiography Kazan writes about working with March on a later film (apparently they got along very well even though March was quite a bit older and from a more traditional school of acting). He writes quite a lot about his Broadway production of "Salesman" but doesn't mention the movie version. He was a well-established, Oscar-winning director by this time, so I find it curious that he wasn't considered to direct the film.

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  5. I have always loved this play and have found its tragic implications deeply human. I first read the play way back in high school, and saw the Lee J. Cobb TV version, with a young George Segal back in the 1960's (I recently purchased the DVD) and later Dustin Hoffman's version. Unfortunately, I have never seen this film version though it has been on my wish list for ages. As I read your article, I was struck by the fact that Willy Loman and I are now the same age! (LOL) Fortunately, I am not struck by Willy's ailments, mentally and physically.
    Willy's faith in the American dream hits a brick wall, as your write...

    " He finds himself in a business world where profits are more important than people, where productivity is more important than loyalty, where feelings and promises have no importance at all."

    This today is more relevant than ever before. How many times have we heard the words, "it's just business, nothing personal," Corporations only exist to make a buck, most recently even the "everyday peoples" great love, Oprah has fired staff at her OWN cable station which has been going down the TV tubes. Willy learns some hard lessons. One has to measure one's own success and not be judged by what society says or thinks.

    March was only 54 at the time his made this film. A few years later he portrayed another "older" man in a relationship with a young 24 year old woman in Paddy Chayefsky's "Middle of the Night." His character was suppose to be 56 years old but he looked closer to late 60's to 70.

    Thanks for highlighting this film!


    John

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    1. John, I can see why you'd write that "Salesman" is "more relevant than ever before." I hadn't seen the movie in so long that this didn't occur to me before watching it again. But as I did watch it in preparation for writing the post, this became more and more obvious to me, and I was amazed at how timely this 65-year old work seemed. Willy might be one of those middle-aged men you see interviewed on TV news shows who find themselves in circumstances similar to his. Many great American plays deal with family relationships and problems, but I think Miller's exploration of the dark side of the American Dream in "Salesman" gives the play an extra dimension. Of course, it needs the human element too or it would be just a didactic issues play. But its combination of emotional power and intellectual power makes it truly special.

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  6. I have my own stories to tell about my high school drama club experience with this play, one I have been fortunate enough to see in four different productions over the years in Manhattan. I also had to secure a copy of the film through a bootleg source, and I continue to lament the lack of a proper release. It's the best film version of this iconic work, and Frederic March gives a performance to rank with his DR. JEKYLL & MR. HYDE, INHERIT THE WIND and LES MISERABLES. He was also quite good in A STAR IS BORN, NOTHING SACRED, THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES and SEVEN DAYS IN MAY, but I am hardly saying anything revelatory here. As Willy Loman he is absolutely electrifying, and you are right to note that he's the engine that drives this film. You do a stupendous job in delineating the nuances of this astonishing performance, one that that brought Miller's most famous character to complete fruition. Mildred Dunnock is another performer I have fond memories of. The former schoolteacher played little old lady Miriam Olcott in the superlative "The Cheaters," one of the best episodes of 'Boris Karloff's Thriller,' an incomparable Gothic horror series of the early 60's. Word is that she was not the first choice of either Arthur Miller or Elia Kazan to play Loman's long-suffering wife, but she eventually signed on after completely over 700 performances in the stage version opposite Lee J. Cobb. Her sad, all-knowing eyes give her performances an astonishing degree of depth.

    It is true waht you say too about this being one of the two most celebrated American plays (though Miller would be third as dramatist behind Williams and Eugene O'Neil overall) and that it's inexplicable that this film never received the critical praise or audience adulation as the Kazan STREETCAR, but as you astutely note Kazan didn't follow-up his stage directing with this film, sad to say.

    One day this film will receive the definitive praise it deserves, but the most aggressive cineastes can find it and cherish it. You have done this full justice with another exceptional essay, R.D.

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    1. Sam, I certainly agree about Tennessee Williams and Eugene O'Neill being the two greatest American playwrights, simply on the basis of the number of great works they wrote. (I'm especially fond of "Long Day's Journey Into Night," in which Fredric March played the lead on Broadway in the 50s and, I believe, won a Tony. It deals with the intricacies of family relationships in even greater detail than "Salesman.") Behind them I would place Arthur Miller and Edward Albee, who each wrote one timeless masterpiece. The plays of those others tend to be ensemble pieces, whereas "Salesman" is Willy's show all the way.

      If the film of "Salesman" has a flaw, it's that the transitions between present and past, while imaginative, tend to be rather stagy. I can't help wondering if Kazan could have worked out a way of adapting them to the greater realism and intimacy of cinema. His movie of "Streetcar," while setbound, never seemed to me overly stagy. I've read that Miller was displeased with the film version of "Salesman" because he thought it made Willy seem too crazy. I think what he objected to must have been not March's performance but the way those transitions were handled, which if taken too literally tend to make him look as though he's hallucinating more than preoccupied and brooding, which I think is what Miller intended.

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  7. I'd like to add that the reason why we have never been graced with a vintage print of the film, is because Miller himself was unsatisfied with it. Time has proven Miller wrong just as time is already proving Stephen King wrong with Kubrick's THE SHINING. Miller is gone, but his estate seems to remain adament, sadly.

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  8. I avoid "Death of a Salesman" because it always makes me cry. But it would be worth watching with Fredric March.

    You've written an excellent review.

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    1. R.A., it IS a very moving work, sad but in an emotionally rewarding way. It's definitely a shock to witness a man's life collapsing because he finally grasps that his beliefs and values have been based on illusion.

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  9. Like John, I've seen the Lee J. Cobb and Dustin Hoffman versions of Miller's great play, but not the film with Fredric March. I was interested in seeing it before reading your piece, but am intent on finding it now.

    Jill at Sittin' on a Backyard Fence has put together a great tribute to Fredric March in hosting the "March-in-March" blogathon - he was such a very fine actor, with a long and storied career, but is relatively overlooked and forgotten today.

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    1. Eve, if you like March--and I agree with you about what a fine actor he was--you must try to see this film, if for nothing else his interpretation of one of the great characters of American drama. Jill picked an original but worthy subject for her blogathon, a great actor whose career offers a lot of material to work with and who is most deserving of rediscovery.

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  10. R.D.,

    Thank you so much for this insightful review of a forgotten gem. March's version is rarely shown, and it's quite unfortunate. It is one of the greatest performances of a glorious career.

    I appreciate your contribution and willingness to participate in this tribute.Thank you so much.

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    1. Jill, it was a pleasure to see this again after many years and from a more experienced perspective than the first time around, which only made me appreciate it all the more. It's a shame this film isn't available in a quality DVD version, as it's one of the great American plays as well as having one of the best performances of an important American film actor.

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    2. I hope this film gets a proper DVD release soon. More people need to see it!

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  11. In college, I took an acting class and one of the scenes we performed was from 'Salesman' (I played Biff). Because I've studied this play so closely, it has come to mean a great deal to me, and though I've only seen the Dustin Hoffman version, one day I'm gonna watch this version too. My father liked this movie a lot.

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    1. Rich, thanks for your comment. You might have trouble finding the Fredric March version of "Salesman," but I do hope you can. Willy Loman is such an important character in American theater. I think that for those who've seen this version, March's performance is one against which others will be measured.

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  12. Thanks for this great review. I've always wanted to see this version. No disrespect to Dustin Hoffman,whom I do love as an actor, but his Willy Loman left very little impression on me. But it's also hard for me to imagine Fredric March in the part, since for me personally, his more tortured roles (Norman Maine, Dr. Jekyll, Al Stephenson) always have a kind of thwarted greatness to them. Like this is an intelligent man that really could do brilliant things but for whatever reason, he won't get there. I'm curious to see whether he brings that to Loman. Anyway, this was an excellent post and I hope to see this film soon.

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    1. Rachel,thanks. I found Dustin Hoffman's version of Willy Loman to be lacking also. He seemed to be trying so hard--too hard--without locating the center of the character. I recall seeing him in a "making of" extra to the TV production asking for take after take (and clearly driving his costars to distraction), as if trying harder would give him some insight into the character he didn't already have. March, on the other hand, seemed to have a clear idea of the requirements of the character and to know exactly the impression he wanted to make.

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  13. R.D., after being intrigued by your fine review, I've just watched this film at Youtube, where someone has posted it in 12 sections - the picture quality there is pretty good although it is clearly a print which needs restoration and at times the sound is a little jumpy. I studied the play at high school (it was on the syllabus in the UK when I was a teenager in the 1970s, not sure if that is still the case now), but I must say I think it has far more resonance for me as I revisit it in middle age. I don't think I've ever seen it on stage, but I would love to do so.

    I do agree that the play is very relevant to the world we live in nowadays, where so many people are losing their jobs and often their sense of self-worth too. But I also think you are right to ask: "Or is this sensation of being out of sync with the times universal, something everyone is destined to experience with age?"

    Fredric March is excellent in the role, as you discuss here, and I also think Kevin McCarthy (I was surprised to learn he was Mary McCarthy's brother) and Cameron Mitchell are very good as Biff and Happy, coming across almost as two sides of their father's personality, the vulnerable side and the smiling (happy) salesman. But I am not so sure about Mildred Dunnock - though maybe what I'm objecting to is really some aspects of the character of Linda, who seems somewhat underwritten compared to the men, rather than the actress. And I do agree with you that the transitions to the flashbacks are rather stagy and even clumsy at times - for instance, the scene where Willy is writhing around on the washroom floor at the restaurant. I'm very glad to have seen the film, anyway, and will hope to see the Dustin Hoffman version some time to compare.

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    1. Judy, you raise some intriguing points. I like your idea about the two sons reflecting two sides of Willy's personality. Willy puts all his hopes in Biff because this is the way he would like to see himself, with talent leading to success and security and being "well-liked" for it. In a way, it's inevitable that anyone so idealized is bound to disappoint. It's funny then that Happy the smooth-talking salesman, who seems to have been rather neglected by Willy in favor of Biff, is the one whose personality and life more resemble Willy's and who is more tolerant of Willy's shortcomings. This is something that occurred to me, but I couldn't find a way to introduce it without developing the idea in more detail.

      I also agree that the part of Linda is, as you put it, underwritten. I'm not sure if Miller was less comfortable with female characters than with male characters, or maybe this idea of women being relegated to wifely support of their husbands and families and little else was simply a reflection of the attitudes of the times. So in this sense Linda as a character lacks the depth of Willy and the sons. But I do think that given the limitations of the character, Dunnock is very good at making the most of what she's given to work with. I got the same impression from Kate Reid in the Dustin Hoffman version and actually liked her performance the best of any in that version.

      It sounds as if the YouTube version might be the same as the print used in the DVD. (I'm wondering if it has somehow slipped into the public domain. If so, nobody creatively connected with it would benefit, which would be a serious disincentive to a proper restoration.) The first reel or so showed clear evidence of having broken and been mended, which led to parts of the dialogue getting lost, a shame but not a huge obstacle to understanding what's happening.

      As for the lack of reference to the war, I'd never thought of this. All the visual cues seem to indicate that the movie is set in its present, c. 1951. Miller had written one play that was all about the activities of the characters in WW II, "All My Sons." Maybe he felt that this subject wasn't pertinent to what he was getting at in "Salesman."

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    2. Thanks very much for the detailed response, R.D. - I like your thought about Happy's personality and life, and his shortcomings, actually resembling Willy's more in some ways. On Linda, I do agree with you that the idea of her being "relegated to wifely support" may be partly a reflection of the times. I kept wanting to know more about what she felt about Biff and Happy herself, as their mother, apart from their relationship with her husband.

      It would be a shame if the print is in the public domain - as you say, this is a strong disincentive against proper restoration, although a few public domain films have recently been issued in restored copies, so maybe there could still be hope for it even if that is the case.

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  14. PS, I meant to say I'm slightly puzzled that, although Miller's play is from the late 1940s, there's no mention of the war and neither Biff nor Happy seems to have been a soldier - I wondered if it was supposed to be set pre-war, but as they have the car and refrigerator, etc, maybe not.

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