All My Sons
(1948)
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All My Sons tells the story of Joe Keller, a successful, middle-aged, self-made man who has done a terrible and tragic thing: during World War II, rushing to meet an order from the Army, he knowingly sold them defective airplane parts which later caused the planes to crash and killed 21 men. He framed his business partner for this crime and engineered his own exoneration; now, his son is about to marry the partner's daughter, the affair is revisited, and his lie of a life is unraveled. Joe has spent his entire life in the single-minded pursuit of wealth for the sake of his family, an American Dream gone nightmarishly awry; this is a story about responsibility: Joe and his generation must understand that the boys he killed--all the boys in the War--were his sons, too.