All My Sons (1948)

Directed by Irving Reis

I mentioned a couple of days ago, in discussing our Word of the Week, soul, that you might give up your life for something you believe in, or for the people you love most in the world, but giving up your soul is another matter. And in our Film of the Week, All My Sons, the main character, Joe Keller (Edward G. Robinson), has made that terrible trade.

It’s one thing to be a Doctor Faustus, impatient, ambitious, impetuous, dissatisfied with his lot as a mere human being, making a deal with the Devil to be more than human. “Yet art thou still but Faustus, and a man,” says Christopher Marlowe’s hero and villain and fool, in the opening scene of his famous play. But what if you sell your soul not for greatness, but to avert something bad, like financial ruin? What if you justify it in your mind by appealing to what you want to do for the people you love, your family? That’s the case with Joe Keller. It’s wartime, and his small factory — but the biggest employer in his town — has secured a contract from the Army, for airplane parts. Joe has built up that factory from nothing but his own sweat, his relentlessness with himself, and his insistence on knowing everything that goes on in his business. “If you want to know,” the saying around the factory goes, “ask Joe.” Yet Joe has had to skin things pretty tight to keep up with the wartime demand, and suddenly he is given to know that a batch of cylinders that will be used in the Army’s planes are bad. They look all right from the outside, but a new X-ray machine has showed that the interiors are defective. Joe’s partner, Herb (Frank Conroy), is also in on the knowledge, as are several of the workers at the plant. If they fail to meet the contract, the business will collapse. All that Joe has worked for will go up in smoke. And he has a wife and two sons whom he loves dearly.

“He who would save his life must lose it,” says Jesus. Here is a case in point. You can, of course, persuade yourself that maybe, maybe, somebody else down the line will spot the problem. You can persuade yourself that maybe, maybe, the cylinders will not fail after all, or there will be no occasion for them to fail. But when the movie begins, we are given to know that they did fail, that twenty-one men lost their lives because of it, that there was a trial to determine if Joe or Herb or both were culpably negligent, and that Joe was acquitted and Herb convicted. Larry, whom we never meet in the film, is dead, or at least he never returned from a mission he flew. Mrs. Keller, “Kate” (Mady Christians), continues to believe that Larry is alive. But her other son, Dave (Burt Lancaster), will not indulge that fantasy, and he has always loved “Larry’s girl,” Ann Deever, the daughter of Joe’s partner. Now he wants to marry her. The Deevers, before the trial, used to live next door to the Kellers, and Kate was like a mother to Ann and to her brother George (Howard Duff). The families were very close, and the relationship went all the way back to when Ann and George were small children, after their mother died. But George has been talking to his father in the prison, and he is persuaded that the really guilty man is Joe. Others around town think so too, but mostly they are willing to forget the past, since there is nothing to be done about it anyway. Yet Dave has to find out the truth.

I’m no fan of Arthur Miller as a human being, but the man could write, and All My Sons is as perfect an adaptation of a play to the screen as you can get. But then, a lot of the best films in the 1950’s were like that. It was the age of the “playhouse” shows on television, with scripts of very high quality, generally ranging from pretty good to brilliant. The writers, actors, and directors understood that the drama of a human soul, hanging in the balance, or, to change the metaphor, walking a narrow path with a precipice on each side, was far more interesting than anything you could do with explosions, gunfire, noise, and spectacle. We have featured some of these films here at Word and Song: for a British entry, see The Browning Version (not the remake, but the original 1951 film with Michael Redgrave). For a romantic drama that skates on the edge of despair but does not fall, see Marty. In all three of these films, we wonder whether this human soul, with its flaws, but also with traces of grandeur, will turn toward the light.

A final word: Edward G. Robinson — “Eddie,” as Arlene Francis, who plays a small role in All My Sons, called him on an episode of What’s My Line? — is always worth watching. He’s one of three men in my top 10 of Hollywood actors who never won an Oscar, and I wonder how the heck so many people could have taken their talents for granted: Robinson, Claude Rains, and Cary Grant. (They did finally give Grant a “lifetime” honorary Oscar, when he had one foot in the grave.) On that same episode of What’s My Line?, Robinson said that he was working for a charity on behalf of the Jewish people, and it seemed clear that he was a believer. Maybe that helped to give his work a dimension you don’t find in some of the other “heavies” of the time: a sense that we must all stand before God, who will take an account of our lives; a sense that there is more at stake even in our ordinary daily actions than we can know.

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