Everybody Wins

By Arthur Miller

In his first original screenplay since The Misfits (1961), Arthur Miller has spun a taut, sophisticated drama of seduction and corruption in a small Connecticut city long past its industrial prime. Tom O'Toole (Nick Nolte), a crusading private detective, is summoned to town by the enigmatic Angela Crispini (Debra Winger), a woman of less that spotless reputation. Angela begs Tom to investigate the case of Felix Daniels, a local boy convicted of brutally murdering his uncle. She insists that Felix is innocent, and despite his reservations Tom is relentlessly drawn in, as much by the rising sexual tension between them as by the tantalizing hints she keeps dropping about the case.

As Tom pursues various leads, he finds that the whole town knows Felix is innocent, and that the identity of the murderer - the leader of a bizarre local cult - is no big secret either. The mystery, then, is why everyone seems perfectly happy to let Felix rot in jail, and why Angela, who holds the key, won't tell Tom the whole truth.

Everybody Wins, with a provocative preface on the role of language in screenwriting, is a richly atmospheric, masterfully plotted suspense story, but of course, in the hands of Arthur Miller, it is much more. As always in the work of this great American playwright, it is a complex exploration of morality, public and private, where the real mystery lies in the elusive core of the human personality.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0802132006
• ISBN13: 9780802132000
• Release Date: January 1994
• Publisher: Grove Press
• Length: 109 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.3" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Everybody Wins ... and Loses

Reading a screenplay is somewhat different from a play. Readers must keep this in mind as they read this Arthur Miller work. The structure of the screenplay slows the pace of the story to some degree, which is one of the main reason that I could not give "Everybody Wins" five stars. It just seemed to move too slow. A man is framed for murder but has a female acquaintance named Angela Crispini that mysteriously wants to prove his innocence. Why is she so convinced that he is innocent? When a famous private investigator named Tom O'Toole takes an interest in the the mysterious Angela, he sees layers of her story revealed only to have Angela reveal the biggest surprise to Tom's acquaintance Judge Murdoch. In the end, everybody wins in the form of a small victory. The small victory is that the innocent Felix Daniels is set free from prison. The biggest criminals are never brought to justice. I really do not have a desire to see the movie version of this story because I fear the portrayal of the characters would soil my enjoyment of the story. Even if this story lacks a certain amount of Miller's charm, it is still quality work in written form.