Like many people ,I had seen the Schlondorff version starring Hoffman first,and I did like it.
This one should not be overlooked though :Arthur Miller's play,with its ceaseless to and fro between present and past , imaginary world and reality was not easy to transfer to the screen,and Laslo Benedek's directing is quite estimable:the scenes in the present are dark and make the house look like a tomb (notably when Willy comes back home) whereas the past which seems so bright is filmed in plain day light (the scene when young Biff and Happy polish the car );the subway is a good place to locate the events when willy has been fired;ditto for the final scene ,with all these 'living' night lights.The one thing which is passed over in silence is the boys' attitude after the funeral:Happy is "staying right in this city and gonna beat this racket,(...) and gonna win for him" whereas Biff "knows who he is" and that he perhaps will not never be able to settle down and take orders from somebody .
The cast is sensational:Fredric March gives a tormented performance ,switching back and forth between the extremes:sometimes proud of his athlete three colleges will take,often humble and bent in the office,where his boss is more interested in his tape recorder than in his salesman's future ;Mildred Dunnock is the patient mom,who trusts her dear husband ,even when the future seems bleak and he loses his mind ;Cameron Mitchell is Happy ,his dad's optimistic side ,a lady killer who thinks everything will work out fine (too bad his part is reduced in the last scene).Kevin McCarthy (film debut) is my favorite and he thoroughly deserved his AA nomination (he lost to Karl Malden 's Mitch in " a street car named desire): I love the way he talks about Bernhard ("he is liked ,but he is not well liked" ) ;he can be hilarious -the brief moment when he apes his teacher's lisp- or deeply moving when he breaks crying in his dad's arms ("Pop! I'm dime in a dozen and so are you!")His performance is at least as mind-boggling as that of John Malkovich thirty years later.
