This wartime movie about the struggle of a family in a still economically depressed New York environment, tries hard to entertain with its Neil Simonesque dialogue. Then comes the bombshell. When father Halevy (Claude Rains), a failure by anyone's, including his own, standards, realizes that his adored daughter Bobby (Anne Shirley) is headed for an unrealized life of failure not unlike his own for want of a mere one thousand dollars, he decides to give her this money the only way he still can, by staging a potentially suicidal elevator crash. The scene of Halevy's leaving home before going through with this scheme is very close to Willy Loman's corresponding scene in "Death of a Salesman." According to the credits, "Saturday's Children" is based on a Pulitzer Prize winning play by Maxwell Anderson, which a young Arthur Miller surely must have seen. If it suggested the end of his major masterpiece "Death of a Salesman" to Miller, that alone would redeem this otherwise schmaltzy play/movie.
Review of Saturday's Children
