The death of a salesman

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Movie
German title The death of a salesman
Original title Death of a Salesman
Country of production United States
original language English
Publishing year 1951
length 108 minutes
Age rating FSK 16
Rod
Director László Benedek
script Stanley Roberts
production Stanley Kramer
music Alex North
camera Franz Planner
cut Harry W. Gerstad
William A. Lyon
occupation

The Death of a Salesman is an American drama from 1951 . It is a literary adaptation of the play of the same name by Arthur Miller .

action

After a long and hard work trip, Willy Loman comes home at night. He is received by his loving wife Linda. Exhausted, he says that he has to leave in four hours. As a 60-year-old man, you should certainly not take on such enormous travel stresses. After sacrificing decades of his life for the company, he finally wants to work in New York City . Just the time that could be saved by the shortened trip. It is just inconvenient for him, however, that his two useless sons come back home after a lively evening. While he was working hard, his oldest, Biff Loman, should finally get his life back under control and reach his full potential. However, he does not want to conform to the ideals of his father and prefer to live off his hands, perhaps on a farm. Rather, Biff and his younger brother Happy are concerned about their father's sanity. He's constantly screaming in self-talk, while always scolding Biff.

Willy is just reveling in his memories a little too vividly, when times were simple and hopes for the future were great. Although he worked ten to twelve hours a day back then and the money was spent faster than it was earned, he had always placed great value on bringing up his sons, who should be better off than him. They should one day share the happiness of his brother Ben. When he was 17 years old, he went into the jungle and came back as a rich man at the age of 21. Willy emulated him all his life. He always wanted to impress him with his sons, especially Biff. And he asks him for advice on how he can raise his sons better so that they can lead a life as successful as he can.

He experiences all these hallucinations , memories and hopes so vividly that his family always gets to know. Biff and Happy think he's insane and characterless, but Linda doesn't want to hear about it. Her husband had failed in his life due to his own demands and only experienced rejection. It takes a lot of character to constantly ask his neighbor Charley for money so that he can still fool his family into earning enough money to support them. He had experienced so many humiliations that he even wanted to take his own life. In order to prevent a second attempt, Biff agrees to meet his father's demands. He promises to meet up with his old childhood friend, Bill Oliver, to borrow money for a business idea. Willy is immediately enthusiastic. He advises him how to behave and that he should not ask for less than 15,000.

If his son has the courage to start a fresh start, Willy could too. So the next morning he meets with Howard Wagner, his boss, to finally get a better job, after all, he has sacrificed decades of his life for the company. Back then, he had turned down an offer from his brother Ben to become a successful businessman in Alaska, only to work for Howard's father. But Howard is not interested and refuses because of Willy's poor sales figures. When Willy gets angry, Howard dismisses him on the grounds that he couldn't represent his company like that. Willy is dejected and takes refuge in his memories again. All his hopes now rest on Biff, who was once such a good football player and studied at the University of Virginia . During his subsequent visit to Charley, where Willy receives his weekly 50 US dollars and again proudly refuses an offer from Charley to work for him, Willy asks why his son is so incredibly successful. After all, Bernhard soon defends his first case before the Supreme Court as a lawyer . But Charley only has one answer. He never asked or pushed his son to do so, but always trusted that he would make the right decision. But Willy feels attacked and yells at him that his son will soon be successful. Just today he had a financing meeting for a business idea and he will meet with him shortly.

Meanwhile, Biff is already meeting with Happy in a café. Biff explains to his brother that he won't get the money. Oliver couldn't even remember him. Worse still, he was just discovering that his whole life was a sequence of failure and failure. But he won't live another lie and will finally confront his father with the truth. But when his father arrives and finds out, he again takes refuge in a memory and no longer listens and leaves again. Gripped by the fear that Willy wants to kill himself, Biff follows him. Happy, on the other hand, cares little about his father's fate. He prefers to flirt with the beautiful Miss Forsythe. When he comes home that evening, he has to put up with his mother's reproaches for not worrying whether his father lives or dies.

Biff finally and finally wants to leave his family. It was once the experience that his father had an affair with another woman, so he didn't go to summer school, didn't go to college , and then switched from one casual job to another, always with his father's words in mind that he was a man who lead the other. But it was his father's upbringing that resulted in him spending three months in prison and never being happy, driven by false ambitions. He's not throwing his life away now. He just wants to be happy and be able to live free from it. Biff says this with such emotional and tear-shaking anger that Willy realizes that Biff loved him all along. That really surprised him. He no longer hears when Linda asks him to come to bed, but instead drives with his hallucinations and his car into the city and into death. Nobody comes to the funeral afterwards. Linda is very sad, after all, the last installment of the house has finally been paid off. Except for her, no one lives there anymore.

criticism

Bosley Crowther of the New York Times said it was a “darkly depressing film” that “should be celebrated for whipping you into the whirlpool of life.” He praised the drama and especially the faithfulness to the original of the film, which would have "an advantage" over the play in that it could capture the pain even better. In addition to the performance of the actors, he found words of praise for the producers and the decision to film as faithfully as possible.

The lexicon of international films said: "In addition to the excellent acting, the film illustrates, through image reflection and montage, the psychological mood swings between wishful thinking and reality."

The evangelical film observer drew the following conclusion: “The story of a traveling salesman who escapes from the sobriety of his life into an illusion and has to perish because of it, is an exemplary statement about the situation of modern man. People aged 17 and over prepare to think about it. "

Awards (selection)

Academy Awards 1952
Golden Globe Awards 1952
British Academy Film Award 1953

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Bosley Crowther: 'Death of a Salesman,' With Fredric March and Mildred Dunnock, at Victoria on nytimes.com, December 21, 1951, accessed January 15, 2013
  2. ↑ The Death of a Salesman. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used 
  3. ↑ Evangelical Press Association Munich, Review No. 429/1952