Simply Perfect

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

A film with more than the usual spoiler issues. Talking about it in any detail feels akin to handing you a gift-wrapped present and saying, "I hope you like it -- It's a thriller about a diabolical secret experiment."

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

Edward G. Robinson on the top of his career and Burt Lancaster in the beginning of his as his son must turn into something absolutely special, and it does, with a vengeance. To this comes the very ingenious composition of the play. It's impossible to guess anything of what is going on in the beginning, as all you get glimpses of to begin with is some relationship problems. Gradually the war gets involved, and then the trauma starts building up.Larry has not returned from ther war, and his mother is still expecting him every day. His girlfriend Ann is coming for a visit, and Larry's brother Burt Lancaster wants to marry her, certain that Larry never will come back. Both his parents advise against it, but she is willing, and Burt is difficult to turn off. Other relatives turn up, especially young families, and then there is some problem about Ann's brother and their father, who is in jail. Gradually it dawns on the audience that Burt's father got him there and that there still is some unfinished business around somewhere.This is just some contours of the very complicated mess of family intrigue, which constantly turns more complex and difficult to cope with, as also the other father in prison finally gets an important part in the play.This could be the greatest of American family dramas. Arthur Miller would never succeed in writing anything like it, and his following plays are shadows of it. The actors are all at their best and make the drama truly a Greek tragedy widely transcending anything Eugene O'Neill has written. Tennessee Williams would find a more stable standard though than Miller in keeping up a high level of drama in many plays.

The story is wonderful. It is clean of the usual flurry of characters going in and out of the screen. There is much dialog and less time wasted on introspection and private thoughts you have no idea if they are meant to be heard by the audience of by somebody else. The actor play is quite good and the characters are drawn well with a sure hand, mostly to the credit of the play author.On the technical side I loved how the screen was also clear of most useless objects. For example the opening scene that follows into the garage. You see there are not one but two cars. The cars are big. They seem new because they are clean. And the garage is large enough for the two characters to move around with the two cars parked inside. So they are well to do. Also, later on, you realize there are two cars because only *men* drive cars. That is made clear by the remarks young women receive. So this is quite a patriarchal environment. I get to see nothing else in the garage. Not the mess of a storage shed. No other accessories.What breaks the well executed film is the end which might as well be shot afterward without director or script just to give the story an optimist look.Contact me with Questions, Comments or Suggestions ryitfork @ bitmail.ch

A standard 1940's group of ensemble players, coupled with strength of an Arthur Miller project. All of the cast principles and minor players as well were at the top of their forms when they stood before the cameras. None were noted as powerful stage actors in their own right. Yet when they appeared in this film, they succeeded in doing what I think a film of a major stage work should do. Carry the viewer into the stage (not film) theater, and give him/her the unique experience of a Broadway or Off-Broadway theater seat.The production style and direction, (for reasons of cost and utility) let the words of Miller's play take center stage. The Art and Set direction, in beautiful black-and-white, are spare, firm, and commanding. They command our attention. Miller is big on attention to the issues his characters are grappling with and their impact on the great issues of our (and all) time.As Miller repeats in Death of a Salesman, there are layers upon layers of meaning and understanding between his characters and the issues they confront both internally and externally. The two business partners have had a long, intimate, family relationship (like Cain and Able). So close a relationship, that his son could have married his partner's daughter. And she of course, is the only one who has always known (from that son) the truth about the death of the son. And the truth(s) about the father.Miller shows us that the father's Horatio Alger lies are so much at the foundation of who we are individually and collectively as Americans; the they can almost completely wash out what individuals and a community should think about its leading citizens. It is an interesting plot twist that as Miller's script points out, it is the low class birth and poverty of the father embeds him into the fabric of the community.That the film faithfully carried Miller's message of contempt and loathing not only for the worship of that false god(capitalism), but also for the whole Horatio Alger hero myth (that both American liberals and conservatives embrace) is quite daring. Even for a film world that had not yet descended into the long night of the "Black-List".

"All My Sons" is one of those disappointing films that goes far enough in a certain direction to become somewhat interesting but doesn't really follow these ideas to any kind of meaningful or even dramatically satisfying conclusion. To how much of an extent that was the fault of the original work by Miller and how much was due to the changes by the screenwriters it's impossible for me personally to judge because I'm not familiar with the material. But regardless of the reason, in my opinion it doesn't add up to a particularly good film.Chris Keller (Burt Lancaster) is the somewhat disillusioned son of an industrialist, Joe Keller (Edward G. Robinson) who happens to be in love with the daughter of his father's former business partner (Howard Duff), Ann Deever (Louisa Horton). What could have been a rosy small town setup however has been sent off the tracks by a criminal investigation into the war-time practices of the company, which was accused of passing off defective parts which ended up killing American pilots – Ann's father has been sent to prison for a crime that it becomes increasingly obvious was probably just as much Edward G's character's fault.The great weakness of this film is that it's completely obvious that his character is the guilty one. Otherwise there would be no story at all. And a moral dilemma should really have more weight than this one. Should Keller have rejected the defective parts, even if it meant shutting down his plant? Obviously he should have rejected them, so there's really no dilemma. The film tries to convince us that his plant would have been forced out of business if he had rejected them, and yet at the same time shows us that his business was booming during the war. This makes the economic element of the dilemma unconvincing. And even if we did believe that he had to choose between rejecting the parts and closing his plant, his speech about how hard he's struggled to create this legacy for his children hardly inspires me to empathy with his "plight".As if to quash any last possibility of compelling drama, the film's eventual conclusion focuses on a letter from Chris' brother, who died in the war. His letter, which the film implies should be like an earthquake of drama shaking this family, is instead predictable and its tragic consequences are also predictable.