Death of a Salesman (1951)

Stanley Kramer Productions/ Columbia Pictures
Director: László Benedek
Starring: Fredric March, Mildred Dunnock, Kevin McCarthy

Arthur Miller’s Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winning play gets the Hollywood treatment in Columbia’s 1951 feature Death of a Salesman. A brooding drama, about one man’s negative impression of modern capitalist society was a critical success on stage that met plights when offered the prospect to be adapted to the screen. A then conservative Hollywood saw opportunity to profit from the known commodity, but soon took issue with its subject matter, the result was a motion picture that displeased its original author, was a box office failure, and clashed with audiences of the period, yet landed abundant critical praise.

 

Death of a Salesman is a drama about an aging middle-class man’s who looks back on his life of failures.  Willy Loman (Fredric March) is a 60 year-old traveling salesman who struggles to pay the bills, feuds with his grown sons, and fails to understand how his life was filled with disappointments. As a self-proclaimed devoted husband, father, and employee Willy fails to see the shortcoming in his own life which is unveiled through a series of flashbacks, delusions, and interactions between family and friends. We witness as Willy allows his pride to limit himself from improving his personal and professional standing, allowing for personal stagnation as the world moves beyond him. This same pride spirals him into a life of depression and secret suicidal thoughts and he fails to open up to others. His self-destruction not only effect himself as his marital infidelity is uncovered by his once promising son, Biff (Kevin McCarthy), disillusioning him into him into his own disparaging ways. All these self-destructive tendencies of Willy Loman result in his death and a scantly attended funeral where not even his wife Linda (Mildred Dunnock) can weep from her departed husband.

 

A dark and brooding drama that takes a grim look at a man who allows society to pass him by and feeling deserted is a trying subject to watch in the era it was released. In the post-war period when pride in the American dream was riding at an all-time high this Arthur Miller story about a man experiencing negative effects of a capitalistic society must have been difficult to stomach. Frederic March delivers a sympathetic leading performance as a man that spirals down into depression and self-destruction, capturing a very different look at an American man. Benefiting from the black and white film stock, the drama is an emotional piece which moves between flashbacks, hallucinations, and the current story rather smoothly under the watchful eye of director László Benedek who transfer the play to the screen. It is a tragic story with plenty to say captured in little corner of middle America that can speak beyond its boundaries.

 

Not long after “Death of a Salesman” opened on Broadway rumors swirled of Hollywood brass clamoring to acquire the rights for the screen adaptation for what would eventually win the Tony Award for best play. Playwright, Arthur Miller, was eager to see his work delivered to the motion picture medium, hoping to pen the screenplay himself in the venture. However, when producer Stanley Kramer acquired the film rights Miller would play no further role in the production as it was adapted as Miller would eventually come to rue witnessing how others came to alter his original creation.

 

Much of the cast consisted of actors from the original stage productions reprising their roles for Columbia. Featured are Mildred Dunnock the loving, yet worried wife Linda, Cameron Mitchell as younger adult son Happy, and Howard Smith and Willy Loman’s revered, deceased brother Charley. Kevin McCarthy joined the screen cast respiring the role of troubled son Biff from the London production of the play. Concerns over Lee J. Cobb, the original Broadway star, and his attachment to leftist politics opened the door for veteran Academy Award winner Fredric March to star as the disturbed Willy Loman. The neighbor to and person fried of Arthur Miller, March had turned down the opportunity of originally portraying Willy Loman on Broadway, but here was given a second chance to play the part, a performance that earned him the fifth and final Oscar nomination of his career.

 

In adapting the story to for the screen the script and director László Benedek leaded more heavily the dreary and bleak middle class setting the story takes place in. Benedek utilized small rooms, often painted in greys to capture the drabness on the black and white celluloid, creating a bleak place in which Willy Loman ponders his life. Despite Benedek’s attempts to stay as close the play, using as much of the original dialogue as possible, many times verbatim, some aspects of the story were trimmed off or altered. This trimmings and changes made Arthur Miller furious, believing a altered the intent of the character and story, noting how he believed the movie made Willy was made to look more like lunatic rather than a victim as he intended.

 

As the film crept toward premiering, producers at Columbia became concerned how the left leaning story was going to upset a portion of the movie audience, especially with how it made the vocation of salesmen appear as a low-level vocation. With hope to alleviate possibly besmirching the “good name” and salesman, Columbia commissioned a short film to proceed the feature entitled “Career of a Salesman” to justify the great calling a salesman is in American society. This further angered Arthur Miller, believing the short nullified the entire point of his story, leaving him questioning why the producers wanted to make a film they did not want or believe in. Columbia distancing themselves from presenting a story about an American failure only proved to push Arthur Miller to distance himself from the film that he inspired, openly protesting against this version of Death of a Salesman.

 

Premiering in late December 1951 before wide release in early the next year, Death of a Salesman was met with rather positive critical reviews, including five Academy Award nominations, most notably for the performances of March, McCarthy, and Dunnock. However, the film was a financial flop, a dreary movie that ran against the positivity of American dreams during a prosperous time for the nation. Miller would continue to admonish the picture, believing it chopped off the very climax of the story. This would do little to lower the standing of the original story as the tale would experience numerous film and television adaptions in the future while the play has remained popular over the years.

 

Time would not be unkind to Death of a Salesman and many continue to admire the picture all these years later, despite Miller’s objections. The feature remains one of the more well-known adaptions of the story. Fredric March and cast deliver strong performances that added to the legacies of all players involved, but in the end the film itself can be take-it-or-leave-it. It is a solid picture, despite delivering at time the feeling of being a rather high end made for television movie aspect to it. It is very watchable and picture of its day, although its backstory appears to be more interesting than the actual movie at times.