(Anthem Art and Culture), by Gary Morris (Editor), Bert Cardullo (Introduction), Jonathan Rosenbaum (Foreword). London and New York: Anthem Press, 2009.
— David Hudson, IFC.com
Death of a Salesman turns on Biff’s discovery that Dad has been cheating on Mom. This is the great, hidden secret that destroyed the trust between Willy and Biff. If only Willy hadn’t cheated! If only Biff hadn’t come unexpectedly! If only Willy had gotten the broad out of the room in time!
The 1966 CBS version stars Lee J. Cobb as Willy, Mildred Dunnock as Linda, George Segal as Biff, James Farentino as Happy, and a pre-Bonnie and Clyde Gene Wilder as Bernard. Cobb and Dunnock also played the lead roles on Broadway during the play’s first run. The CBS production is simply a photographed version of a stage play, and it seems a little creaky at first, but that’s probably more the fault of Miller’s script than the set or the actors. Once the action gets underway, we’re hooked, and hooked good.
1. The 1948 film version of All My Sons, starring Edward G. Robinson and Burt Lancaster, is available on video, along with a 1986 TV version starring James Whitmore. All My Sons is a terrible play, but it’s perversely fascinating to watch Miller use his extensive knowledge of Shakespeare, Ibsen, and the ancient Greeks to create an utterly meretricious drama.
2. The jury is still out on whether the standard Jewish childhood from Hell is worse than the standard Irish-American childhood from Hell and the standard repressed American Protestant childhood from Hell, and will probably remain so.
3. Eugene O’Neill’s masterpiece, A Long Day’s Journey into Night, offers a strikingly similar foursome, based explicitly on O’Neill’s own family. O’Neill wrote the play well before Miller wrote Death of a Salesman, but did not allow it to be produced until after his death in 1953.
4. Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, and A View from the Bridge all turn on adultery.
5. I saw this film on black-and-white TV forty years ago and still remember being amazed by the passion emerging from the 19-inch screen.
6. Hoffman has a terrific time playing Willy, but physically he seems all wrong for the role. How could Ratso Rizzo father two Adonises?
7. Yes, this is only my opinion. Miller is taken very seriously in Europe and in some parts of the U.S., and a fair number of his plays are available on video. Miller discusses his own career extensively in Timebends.
8. In 1956, after he had written The Crucible and after he had married Marilyn Monroe, Miller was hauled up before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. The McCarthy era was effectively over and the committee was desperate for publicity. Miller refused to answer questions and drew a two-week suspended sentence.
9. The Jewish writers who more or less took over American literature after World War II had a very assimilationist, Anglophilic style. In Death of a Salesman, we’re expected to admire Bernard because he plays tennis and has a friend with a private court.
10. The Crucible is available on video in two versions. The first is Les Sorcières de Salem (1957), released on video in the U.S. as The Crucible, translated by Jean-Paul Sartre and starring Yves Montand and Simone Signoret. Les Sorcières de Salem is a fascinating film that deserves to be seen. Sartre turns The Crucible into a terrific assault on 17th-century religious hysteria in America (Voltaire would have loved it). Unfortunately, it has nothing to do with 20th-century political hysteria in America. Thirty years later, Miller got the chance to write his own screenplay for the 1996 version, directed by Nicholas Hytner and starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Paul Schofield. Even with Wynona Ryder as bad girl Abigail Williams, the film is a crashing bore.
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