Saturday Night Cinema: Death of a Salesman (1950)

Tonight’s Saturday Night Cinema classic is Arthur Miller’s shattering drama, Death of a Salesman, produced by Stanley Kramer.

The vise-like grip with which Death of a Salesman held Broadway theatregoers for almost two years continues undiminished in Stanley Kramer’s production of the film version. Arthur Miller’s Pulitzer Prize-winner has been closely followed in the screen adaptation.

The film received many honors, including four Golden Globe Awards, the Volpi Cup and five Academy Award nominations. Alex North, who wrote the music for the Broadway production, was one of the five Academy Award nominees for the film’s musical score.

Though the movie received excellent reviews and garnered nominations and awards, it was a box office failure. The subject matter, the failure of the American dream, was a bomb with the era’s moviegoers. America was a proud and happy country. This was 1950, well before the left seized control of the culture and mainstreamed their unhappiness, envy and hatred.

Excerpt from Bosley Crowther, NY Times review December 21, 1950:

Now that Arthur Miller’s death of a salesman has been brought by Stanley Kramer to the screen and Frederick March has been given the opportunity to play it’s difficult leading role, a great many more million people, not only in this country but in the world, we’ll have a chance to see this shattering drama what is probably its artistic best.

Tells a grim reflected story of the terrible self delusions of a man and the tragic upset that his faking works on his wife and sons. With the earlier performance of the drama on the stage used the syntax of the screen, with time and location shifting often with the wandering of the man’s mind, such a movement and flow I thoroughly natural and consistent in the cinematic form. Past and present our run together with perfect smoothness and striking clarity in film.

Furthermore, Mr. Cramer’s production is so faithfully transcribed and well-designed that it stands as a night exact translation of Mr. Miller’s play, both in its psychological candor and its exhibit of a bleak bourgeois milieu.

Mr. March’s performance does a lot to illuminate this broader implication of the drama, for fills out considerably the lack of humanity in the main character that Mr. Miller somehow overlooked and thus makes a character more symbolic of the frustrated “little man.” The weakness of Mr. Miller’s “salesman”, in this corner’s opinion, is a petty and selfish disposition, unredeemed by any outgoing love. Mr. March by his personable nature, gives occasional fleeting glints of tenderness. Otherwise, he is the shabby, cheap, dishonest, insufferable big talker of the play.

As the long-suffering wife of this faker, Mildred Dunnock is simply superb, as she was on the stage. Her portrayal of a woman who bad the agony I’ve seeing her sons and husband turn out failures supports the one pretension of this drama to genuine tragedy. Cameron Mitchell and Kevin McCarthy are disturbingly shifty as the suns and Howard Smith and Don Keefer do finally by the roles of close relatives that they played on the stage. Laslo Benedek’s adapteion direction is commendable all the way.

Variety, December 31, 1950 11:00PM PT:

The vise-like grip with which Death of a Salesman held Broadway theatregoers for almost two years continues undiminished in Stanley Kramer’s production of the film version. Arthur Miller’s Pulitzer Prize-winner has been closely followed in the screen adaptation.

Salesman starkly reveals how Willy Loman’s disillusionments catch up with him, his sons, his wife Linda; of how, after 34 years selling for the same house, he is finally fired, thus bringing about his complete mental collapse. During the period when his mental processes are breaking down, the film images Willy’s memories of the past 20 years in illustrating how his desire for importance somehow became enmeshed in his confused dreams.

Fredric March, in the part created on the New York stage by Lee Cobb, gives perhaps the greatest performance of his career. Mildred Dunnock, in her original Broadway part, is superb as Willy’s wife Linda. Kevin McCarthy, as Biff, is a film newcomer who entrenches himself strongly in the role performed on Broadway by Arthur Kennedy, Cameron Mitchell is an engaging ‘Happy’ Loman, the other brother, which he played on Broadway.

1951: Nominations: Best Actor (Fredric March), Supp. Actor (Kevin McCarthy), Supp. Actress (Mildred Dunnock), B&W Cinematography, Scoring of a Dramatic Picture

Death of a Salesman

Production: Kramer/ Columbia. Director Laslo Benedek; Producer Stanley Kramer; Screenplay Stanley Roberts; Camera Franz P. Planer; Editor William Lyon; Music Alex North; Art Director Rudolph Sternad, Cary Odell

Crew: (B&W) Available on VHS. Extract of a review from 1951. Running time: 115 MIN.

With: Fredric March Mildred Dunnock Kevin McCarthy Cameron Mitchell Howard Smith Royal Beal