POWERFUL PROBE OF PROFITEER
Powerful Probe of Profiteer Joseph T. Shipley ON THE STAGE ALL OUR GUILT "ALL MY SOS'S." By Arthur Miller. Staged by Klin Kazan. Designed and lighted by Mordeeai Gortlick. Presented by Harold...
...otherwise, he does an excellent piece of work...
...AH the action takes place in the Keller backyard...
...This excessive spleen is natural to the situation...
...In the genial opening minjtes...
...Perhaps the author has been warned not to let the action lag...
...The bitter railings of Chris spread his father's guilt upon the whole country, as if it eases his sense of family guilt to assume that all the nation is tainted with the same callous greed and fear as his father's...
...It is far from a perfect one...
...Presented by Harold Clurman, FAia Kazan, and Walter Fried in association with Herbert H. Harri...
...And now he discovers that it is really his father, Joe Keller, that ordered those defective parts to go through...
...Joe was exonerated...
...she knows and condones her husband's guilt...
...There is also the doctor t'other side, whose problem comes out of "Arrowsmith": his wite presses him to make money...
...At the end, it falls into place with the father's guilty action...
...but still one wonders | Whether it hasn't been stressed too much...
...On the stage, Joe Keller is a pathetic figure indeed, desperately pleading that his family came first...
...but his neighbor and partner Deever has spent three and a half years in jail...
...in his final awakening, he holds us all...
...A neighbor, easting Larry's horoscope, announces that the day he was reported missing was a "favorable day," on which it's unlikely there'd have been an accident...
...Arthur Kennedy is intense and effective as Chris...
...Author, designer, lirector, players combine to make "All My Sons" a rich and rewarding experience in the theatre...
...Lois Wheeler has a more strained intensity, as the partner's daughter...
...On screen, MGM's "Till the Clouds Roll By," Technicolor filmusica] based on the life and music of Jerome Kern, will be featured...
...ahe opposes those with whom the audience sympathizes...
...Keller expects to return...
...Chris' parents don't know, because Ann had been engaged to Chris' brother Larry, Larry has been missing in action three and a half years, but his mother still expects him back...
...It probes deep into the soul of a personal problem, yet reaches out to the span of human responsibility and concern...
...It is terrible, too, to see a son called to sit in judgment on his father...
...he would rather do research...
...Beth Merrill makes quite teal the mother who, even at the cost of the happiness of the living, clings to her hope of the return of the dead...
...He has also high-lighted the more sensitive aspects of the play, and toned down its occasional moments of melodrama...
...Like the play, this is crowded a little...
...some twenty planes crashed...
...Break the news they must—but other news breaks, too...
...The .director, 'Ella Kazan, has found many little ways of adding to the naturalness of the playing...
...All My Sons" is a powerful play on a searching theme...
...the Coronet Theatre...
...Yet Beth Merrill makes this woman not only understandable, but in a measure charming...
...the scenes between father and son are powerful and poignant...
...Now Ann Deever, who had moved away, comes back to marry Chris Keller...
...They are, in truth, "all my sons" whom my actions will affect...
...The anguish of Chris Keller is hard to bear...
...There is the girl next door, who has three_ children, but still plugs in the mixer whert she wants to make toast...
...The first to probe the soul of a guilty war profiteer, this is an important play...
...But Mordeeai Gorelik has managed in the setting not only to capture the feel of a town back yard but also to suggest the mood of the play...
...Joe Keller's firm sent the Air Force defective parts...
...There is, especially, the problem of the missing son, Larry, whom Mrs...
...It is terr'ble to think of a man who will send boys to death for his own profit...
...Such clutterings fall aside In the play's climax, as the guilt of the father comes back upon him in the decisions of the sons...
...Out of them, Joe Keller le*rns that a man's responsibility reaches beyond personal needs, beyond family...
...The varied characters all seem natural, all are understandable, and effective acting strengthens the naturalness of the persons and the genuineness of their emotions and their driving motives...
...AT LOEWS STATE Jackie Gleason, rotund comedian of nightclub and "Follow the Girls" fame, Is the stsr of the stage show »t Loew's State Theatre...
...Hers is a hard role...
...And indeed there was not...
...She wants Ann still to lie waiting lor Larry...
...in his anguished need of justification...
...but she warms well to the part...
...But Larry will never come home...
...Chris, who has come back from the war soul-scarred, hopes to work, somehow, to better the world...
...As the father, Ed Bagley, seems to overstress his alarm, his fear that Chris and Ann will discover his guilt...
...Among others in the cast, all playing well, one might mention John McGovern as the doctor who unwisely married the nurse...
...His work has been too long missing from the New York stage...
...he so clutters the play with characters and with stir that for a time it is confusing...
...It leads many into extremes, but Chris' idealism makes us hope he will recover balance...
...For a time, Kate Keller's delusion about her son Larry seems almost the play's major theme...
Vol. 30 • February 1947 • No. 7
