All My Sons

... in that in most noirs you see the dilemma up front in its compexity and completion. And then you watch the protagonist stumble through a series of decisions in which the noose just tightens.

Here the opening scenes are middle class and almost mundane and so post war. A son (Burt Lancaster) has returned from war and is planning to marry the girl of his dead brother, killed in the war. The living son's mother can't deal with the fact that her dead son is indeed dead - he died on an aerial mission and his body was never recovered. And thus she is not very supportive of this prospective union.

But this film turns out not to be about war and remembrance and the new middle class at all. Instead it is about a deed past done, and apparently the perpetrator has gotten away with it, and only as the film wears on are all of the secrets revealed, as well as the real reason the mother cannot accept her son's death.

Edward G. Robinson is terrific as the father who is living the American dream after being set out on the sidewalks by his own family since the age of ten. Lancaster with his beaming smile and his head full of bushy hair would look at home in a collegiate letter jacket, and this is a good early showcase for his talents. Harry Morgan appears in a minor role as one of the fathers of the ongoing baby boom.

I haven't said much here about what is really the conflict in this film, because I don't want to give anything away. However, it is a great film about moral conflict versus friend and family and even patriotic obligations, and it is a shame it is so obscure.

Although Edward G. Robinson was most famous for playing gangsters, he was a very versatile actor, playing comedies, dramas, and even period pieces. He even took on the very heavy lead in the Arthur Miller play All My Sons. Upsetting, intimate, and one you'll probably watch only once, All My Sons is worth it for the acting. Eddie G is fantastic! His long-suffering wife Mady Christians (really only remembered today as Shirley Temple's aunt in Heidi) won a Rag award for her performance. Though filmed in 1948, everyone is very realistic and subtle in their deliveries. This may be a play adaptation, but it's as much of an eavesdropped slice of life as it can possibly be.

Even starting with the opening credits, it feels like you're observing a family, not watching a movie. From the dawn of Tinseltown, credits preceded the film with music (or silence) and black and white titles. All My Sons was either the first or one of the first films to show footage behind the text instead. Immediately, you're immersed. When Burt Lancaster shares scenes with his girlfriend, Louisa Horton, you hear them whispering while in dim lighting. This is an entirely different type of drama. There aren't spotlights, strategically turned heads during important lines, and shouting to the back row.

If you like upsetting dramas, this might become a favorite of yours - especially if you're an Arthur Miller fan. Director Irving Reis got the best performances from his actors and brought what could have been a melodrama into a family's living room. It's a very good film, but it might be too heavy for the average viewer.

ALL MY SONS may have been slightly diluted for the screen as compared to the stage play which implicated corruption and wartime profiteering on a higher level than just one or two business men, but it's still powerful stuff and extremely well directed by Irving Reis. Individual scenes have a strength that is impressive, largely due to the excellent central performances of BURT LANCASTER, EDWARD G. ROBINSON and MADY CHRISTIANS. Robinson, in particular, makes the most of a meaty role that has him cocky and confident one moment, then bruised and bitter the next as his past crimes catch up with him--and his conscience.

Seems that during WWII, he and his partner (FRANK CONROY) were pressured to finish making cylinder parts for airplanes on the government's tight schedule and knowingly sent defective parts which caused the death of twenty-one pilots when their planes went down. Robinson has been hiding the truth from himself and his neighbors ever since, concerned only with making a decent living for himself and his family in suburban America.

Conflicts arise when others around him begin to question his role in the crime that sent his partner to jail. The son of the jailed partner, played in rather stiff fashion by HOWARD DUFF, is unforgiving when he realizes Robinson shared the guilt with his father and yet let his father take the blame for the incident. Lancaster, too, and his girlfriend (LOUISA HORTON) who happens to be Duff's sister, also bring the conflicts into the open when they start asking for answers and probing for the truth. Horton is rather colorless in what is meant to be a sympathetic role and spent her remaining years in TV roles.

But it's EDWARD G. ROBINSON who makes the biggest impression as the father, proud of his achievements and obviously in denial until his son, Lancaster, makes him realize why his other son never returned from the war--which leads to a tragic ending.

Summing up: Somber drama never quite overcomes its stage origins but it's still powerful stuff.

Trivia note: The only implausible factor in the casting--the physical impossibility of BURT LANCASTER as Robinson's son, when he bears no physical resemblance whatsoever to Eddie--nor Mady Christians for that matter!

A standard 1940s group of ensemble players, coupled with the strength of an Arthur Miller project. All cast principles and minor players 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 significant stage work should do. Carry the viewer into the stage (not film) theater, and give them 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. In beautiful black-and-white, the Art and Set direction 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 significant issues of our (and all) time.

As Miller repeats in Death of a Salesman, there are layers of meaning and understanding between his characters and the issues they confront internally and externally. The two business partners have had a long, intimate family relationship (like Cain and Able). So close a connection 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 son's death. And the fact (s) about the father.

Miller shows us that the father's Horatio Alger lies are at the foundation of who we are individually and collectively as Americans; the lies can almost thoroughly 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, the low-class birth and poverty of the father embed 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."

I saw this movie today for the umpteenth time and it finally occurred to me... Weren't both men to blame? Wasn't Herbert Deever really just as guilty as Joe Keller? No matter who "says" they are responsible, anyone involved in knowingly shipping faulty parts that could kill people is responsible. Deever shouldn't have sent them out, no matter what he was told. Isn't that what all those Nazis claimed when asked how they could commit so many atrocities? "I was just taking orders." That doesn't wash with me or with most people. We all have a responsibility to follow our own consciences with regard to right and wrong.

They were both guilty....

It's a wonderful story and very well performed and written, but that fact remains to be discussed.