Death of a Salesman (1951)
Willy Loman and his sons Happy and Biff are ordinary but Willy would rather die than face that fact.
In 1950, Cyrano de Bergerac, Harvey, and The Magnificent Yankee all made the jump from stage to screen. Harvey was the most successful, with the laughs translating from the playhouse to the movie theater, while The Magnificent Yankee suffered from dull camerawork and actors monologuing their way through the script. 1951’s Death of a Salesman is closer to Yankee: it feels staid and claustrophobic as a movie, with Fredric March’s Willy Loman a caricature playing to the cheap seats.
If you missed it in 10th grade English, here’s a recap: Willy Loman is an aging salesman who’s battling both a drop in sales and a slip into senility. He also can’t square the promise his sons once showed with the reality of their lives—that Biff (Kevin McCarthy) can’t hold down a job and that Happy (Cameron Mitchell) is a philandering bum. Their ordinariness reflects on his ordinariness, which is something he has always been in denial about.
Throughout the movie, there are allusions made to maintaining payments on a life insurance policy.1 The climax comes when Willy decides to kill himself so his children can get the insurance money and make something of themselves (he says that a man is “worth more dead than alive”). Considering the name of the movie, that’s not a spoiler.
The play is considered one of the best of the 20th century because of its attempt to discuss the American Dream, but this version is near-unwatchable.2 The movie achieves the bleakness it sets out to portray but does so in a blunt, uninteresting way that leaves the viewer checking his watch, waiting for the inevitable. Maybe that’s a parable for life.
Rating: 3/10, movie is worth more dead than alive.
Cast and Crew:
Fredric March was a major figure on both stage and screen in the 1930s and ‘40s. By 1951, he had already picked up four other nominations for Best Actor: 1931’s The Royal Family of Broadway, where he played a fictionalized version of John Barrymore; 1932’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, where he played both titular characters; 1937’s A Star is Born, where he played the role later occupied by James Mason / Kris Kristofferson / Bradley Cooper; and 1946’s The Best Years of Our Lives, the Best Picture winner about WWII vets that I wish I had watched instead of Bright Victory. For the latter three of those movies and this one, March plays either a drunk or a crazy person.
Mildred Dunnock, Howard Smith, and Cameron Mitchell reprised their roles as Linda, Charley, and Happy, respectively, from the stage version of Salesman. Dunnock even picked up an Oscar nod for her role, but forget those folks. Forget even that Arthur Kennedy, who we saw previously for his work in Bright Victory, originated the role of Biff Loman on Broadway. What I want to talk about is Jesse White.
We first saw Jesse White as the sanatorium orderly in Harvey, and here in Salesman he plays a bit part as a waiter. White is quite a bit more famous for a TV role, though: he played “Ol’ Lonely,” the repairman in Maytag commercials in the ‘70s and ‘80s. (He’s lonely because Maytag products never need repairs, y’see?)
That leaves Arthur Miller. I’ve played a fair amount of trivia and have gotten by yelping out either “Death of a Salesman” or “The Crucible” whenever his name comes up. Those facts, plus knowing that he was married to Marilyn Monroe for five years, have served me well. For completeness’ sake, though, let’s hit a few other highlights:
He wrote the 1947 play “All My Sons” about a businessman whose shoddy plane parts lead to the death of his son and other pilots in WWII
His 1955 “A View from the Bridge” was written to slam Elia Kazan for testifying before HUAC3
He wrote the screenplay for the 1961 film The Misfits, which was the last feature for both Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe
“After the Fall” (1964) is a reflection on his failed marriage with Marilyn Monroe
His daughter Rebecca is married to Daniel Day-Lewis
Dang, you’ve got to know a lot about Arthur Miller. For what it’s worth, he was really famous. Marrying Marilyn Monroe when she’s at the peak of her powers will do that to a man.
The Trivia
At a restaurant, Happy lies to a girl by telling her Biff is the quarterback of the New York Giants. When the movie came out, Charlie Conerly was the actual NYG QB; he had already won Rookie of the Year and had been selected to a Pro Bowl. His Giants played in the NFL championship three times during his tenure and won once. As someone who listens to more New York sports talk radio than one should4, I’ve never heard of Conerly, though I have heard of the Hall of Famer who replaced him in 1960: Y. A. Tittle.
Apparently this photo of Tittle is one of the three most iconic photos in journalism history, ranked alongside the likes of the Iwo Jima flag raising and the Hindenburg.
Before Biff’s game at Ebbets Field, Willy compares Biff to Red Grange. Red Grange, a ‘20s football legend, had two nicknames: “The Galloping Ghost,” given to him after scoring 5 TDs on his first 5 carries for the Fighting Illini, and “The Wheaton Iceman,” since he worked on an ice truck.5 Watch out, though! Knute Rockne’s Notre Dame squads had the “four horsemen” running backs when Grange was in college, though Grange was on Illinois, not ND. Also, if we’re talkin’ old-timey football blokes, you should know Slingin’ Sammy Baugh, QB of the former Washington Redskins from 1937-1952.
Ebbets Field, on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, was the home of the Dodgers from 1913 until they left for Los Angeles for the 1958 season. Don’t mix it up with the Polo Grounds, the erstwhile Upper Manhattan home to the Giants (both football and baseball).
Willy considers his youthful sons Adonises, perhaps foreshadowing that their youthful promise won’t last. In Greek mythology, Adonis was the most beautiful youth and was the lover of both Aphrodite and Persephone. Adonis was later gored by a wild boar6 and died in Aphrodite’s arms; Aphrodite wept, and as her tears mixed with Adonis’ blood, the flowers called anemones began to grow. Anemones, also called windflowers, are part of the buttercup family.
Odds and Ends
Willy mentions Waterbury, CT, as a “big clock city”; the Waterbury Clock Company was there, though in the 1940s it became insolvent and was rebranded Timex (the brand that “takes a licking and keeps on ticking”)...Willy mentions B. F. Goodrich as a late bloomer; Goodrich was the founder of a rubber-and-tire company in Akron, Ohio (though don’t mix him up with Charles Goodyear, who actually developed vulcanized rubber).
Basically Chekhov’s life insurance.
Don’t worry, Arthur Miller agreed—he himself thought March’s portrayal of Willy veered into regular old craziness instead of showing him as a victim of the capitalist system he so stridently supports.
Kazan directed On the Waterfront (1954) to defend his actions in front of HUAC (in the film, a dockworker heroically testifies against a corrupt union boss), while Miller’s response shows a longshoreman outing his coworkers purely out of greed.
The recommended daily intake of sports talk radio is zero minutes / day.
I guess “Red” is also a nickname because of his red hair, so maybe he had three nicknames.
Stories vary about which god sent the boar, but whoever did so did it to punish Aphrodite. Mission accomplished.