Word: loman
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...these effects, which belong to the theatre, in a motion picture. It was his job to substitute something in their place, and he didn't. The story of a salesman who grasped a false set of values still penetrates into the moral decadence of a certain American group. Willy Loman's betrayal by his own personal gods and his complete deterioration are unchanged. They are shown objectively without sentiment, but they seem to be encased in an ugly, ill-fitted coat of words. Small characters are no longer standing before us on a stage; they are breathing down our necks...
...only does Frederic March, who plays Willy Loman, talk too much, he talks too loudly. Instead of a disillusioned, broken man, Willy Loman sometimes seems merely a drunk one. Mildred Dunnock, as Willy's wife, is much better. She is able to push through the wordy speeches to show a tired, loving woman who is never really intelligent, but always loyal to her husband...
...screening it as pure realism, he loses Willy Loman, the symbol of a salesman, and leaves only Willy Loman, a certain salesman who got a tough break out of life. And Kramer's production, although it is too fuzzy and heavy to be a great movie, is still worth seeing. The movie Willy Loman is merely incomplete--the other Willy Loman was better...
...adaptation might have been better if Producer Stanley (Champion, The Men) Kramer had taken a few enterprising liberties with Miller's original. On the stage, broken-down Salesman Loman was mentally awry; he talked to himself out loud, and his words led into dramatized fragments of his past and figments of his mind. In the stylized technique of the play, it seemed acceptable that none of the other characters ever did anything about his mental condition. On the screen, he is still speaking his disordered thoughts at the top of his lungs. But to the literal...
...flashbacks, which is one of the tricks the movies do superbly. But Director Laslo Benedek models his flashbacks on the way they were done on the stage, e.g.: part of the set opens or lights up to represent the past, and without a change of costume or makeup, Willy Loman walks out of the present and enacts a scene reliving a memory. This technique, striking in itself, clashes oddly with the everyday realism of the movie's settings. Director Benedek does not improve matters by tricking up the sets with such expressionistic embellishments as diamonds twinkling symbolically from silhouetted...