All My Sons
How far is someone willing to go to get out of trouble? Of course, any child will probably lie to a teacher if they know it will stop a call home. There’s a certain amount of integrity someone has to develop in order to make the crucial decision between self preservation and doing what is right. For Joe Keller, this is particularly intense, because he makes the decision more than once. Not only does he have to decide whether to send off his defective machinery to save his family, his money, and himself (an instinct the Great Depression instilled in him) or to put a halt to the entire thing, which would ensure failure by the means of the business but could have, perhaps saved lives... Keller has to make the decision on whether he wants to continue to live in his fragile web of lives to his family, himself, and the community, or if he wants to do what is right and accept the consequences.
I don’t see Keller as an evil character - it is actually particularly difficult for me to even consider him a villain. Sure, people died based on a selfish decision he made. Yes, the men were trusting that their own side would at the very least send them efficient weapons and armor to at least let them stand a chance on the battlefield, but it’s important to know that Joe never had malice in his heart. His own son was in the military - of course, everyone that was lost was his son, when it came down to it - and there’s of course no way that he would want someone to die. He was of course aware that sending those plane parts to the cause could result in death and he did selfishly choose his own life over the lives of the men fighting (only to take his own life, so look how far that got him). But this was a man trying to protect his family and to cement their future in a manner that he wasn’t able to have.
Now, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, but it serves as an important factor to bare in mind that Keller lacks a lot of the malice to serve as a true villain. An antagonist, yes, I can agree with that, but I feel a villain is a bit more... doing evil for the enjoyment of it whereas our villain in All My Sons seemed to be doing evil for the sake of survival. More to come.