The New Pictures

Death of a Salesman (Stanley Kramer; Columbia) treats the text of Arthur Miller's 1949 Broadway hit with the respect due a play that won both the Pulitzer Prize and the Drama Critics' Circle Award. The unflinching tragedy of Willy Loman, whose phony dream of success leads him straight to failure, is a bravely uncommon movie to come out of Hollywood, where dreams are the stuff that success is made on. Unhappily, it is also a disappointing picture.

The 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 eye of the camera, the ranting salesman (Fredric March) seems so appallingly extreme a mental case that it becomes hard to believe that his wife, sons or neighbors would not rush him to an asylum. The madman in Loman, as he is played in this film, is constantly overshadowing the man himself.

The play told much of its story in 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 trees on a Brooklyn street.

At other times, the movie blunts poignant climaxes and fritters away mood. Thanks mostly to Playwright Miller, some of the play's power still courses through Death of a Salesman. From the Broadway cast, the film offers good performances by Mildred Dunnock as Willy's wife, Cameron Mitchell as his philandering son, Howard Smith as his envied neighbor. Kevin McCarthy, who played on the London stage the son who sees through Willy, does well in the same part.

One of the film's worst drawbacks: Fredric March in the key role. Trying to convey Willy's shambling desperation, March never shakes off the appearance of an actor calculatedly playing a part; sometimes, in slurred speech and maudlin gestures, his calculation is so wide of the mark that fie seems to be trying to play a drunk.

My Favorite Spy (Paramount) casts Bob Hope as both a cowardly burlesque comedian and a debonair international spy.^ U.S. security agents persuade the comic to impersonate the spy, pack him off to a Tangier that is teeming with sinister villains (Francis L. Sullivan & Co.) and baited with a beautiful but treacherous lady spy (Hedy Lamarr).

The plot was old when Hope was merely hopeful; he has used most of the situations himself many times before, and even the title owes a debt to one of his earlier films, 1942's My Favorite Blonde. But for all these heavy mortgages, Hope and his five writers pay a good rate of comic interest: rapid-fire gags, uproarious burleyque bits such as those that enrich Broadway's current Top Banana, and an oldfashioned, helter-skelter movie chase in which Hedy drives a fire truck through old Tangier with Hope perilously clinging to its raised ladder.

Elopement (20th Century-Fox) is a bogus little comedy about a young couple (Anne Francis and William Lundigan) who run off to get married and are pursued by two sets of indignant parents determined to stop them. Once thrown together, the girl's uppity parents and the boy's homespun folks take to each other so enthusiastically that they turn to playing Cupid when the youngsters bicker and part short of the altar.

Cast as the girl's haughty father, who turns incongruously into a sentimental old dear, Clifton (Belvedere) Webb takes another sizable stride in his descent from actor to movie type. Elopement contains one passably good visual gag: a modern reclining chair that slowly tips its occupant upside down. But the film is so hard up for comic ideas that it has to use the same gag twice.

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