Pros: Faust Legend, Walter Huston's as the Devil, Simone Simon, Bernard Herrmann's Oscar Winning Score.
Cons: Restoration from both 16mm and 35mm elements is skillful, but some flaws are evident.
The Bottom Line: The best American film based on the Faust Legend contains an ambiguous but powerful moral, and Walter Huston's performance as the Devil is close to his best.
macresarf1's Full Review: Devil and Daniel Webster
THE DEVIL AND DANIEL WEBSTER (Dieterle, 1941) is the finest telling of the Faust Legend in American Movies. Such entries as ANGEL ON MY SHOULDER (Mayo, 1946), MEPHISTO WALTZ (Wendkos, 1971), or even the new re-make of BEDAZZLED may come close, but they fail to equal our sense of America at a crossroad that this first film has.
THE DEVIL AND DANIEL WEBSTER is based on a patriotic 1937 short story of the same title by Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943). Forgotten now, Benet was once in all the literature books and highly regarded. When bankrupt RKO was revitalized by Studio Head George Schaefer, and with the coming of Orson Welles to the lot, Benet was persuaded to write the screenplay with Dan Totheroh. His story is a retelling of "The Devil and Tom Walker" by Washington Irving (1783-1859), itself derived from Goethe's version of the 16th Century Germanic legend. The Faust legend dogs Western Capitalism like a blood hound on the trail of gore and offal.
The film is set in the New England of the 1840's. America will soon embark on The Mexican War, which Walt Whitman suggested was an historical downturn from which the Nation never recovered. It is also the moment when America has begun to struggle with its great national shame: The Institution of Slavery. Daniel Webster, of Benet's title, is a great orator and Congressman, a champion of the Abolitionist Cause.
The film's hero, Jabez Stone (James Craig), is a small farmer from Cross Corners, New Hampshire, in the then mostly rural America, an entrepreneur of his time (some would say, sucker). The renewed turmoil after the Era of Good Feeling has affected the return Jabez can earn on his crops. Bad luck, bad weather and the loan sharks have added to his financial troubles. He lives a Christian life with his faithful wife Mary (Anne Shirley, STELLA DALLAS, Vidor, 1937) and his mother (Jane Darwell, Ma Joad in THE GRAPES OF WRATH, Ford, 1939), but Miser Stevens (John Qualen) is about to foreclose on their farm.
Not only that but Jabez and Mary are going to have a child, adding to his panic. He is stealing the butter and egg money in a desperate effort to keep their home. When he is found out and utters the oath, "Consarnit," his devoutly religious mother calls him on it, and he ashamedly retires to the barn, muttering, "For two cents, I'd sell my soul to the Devil.
The Devil needs little encouragement, and he's there for the sale in a flash. The Devil (our great Walter Huston), or Mr. Scratch, as he is known in the film, offers Jabez seven years of prosperity and power for a little more than two cents. On April 7, 1841, the date burned by Scratch into a great tree, Jabez, symbolizing America about to become an Empire, accepts the bargain and immediately, his luck turns; he accrues money, property, and "all that money can buy" (which is one of the film's alternate titles).
When Mary has her little boy, he is given the first name of his Godfather, the most noble, contentious lawyer/politician in New England, Senator Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, but the child is soon taken away from his Mother by a mysterious nurse, Belle (French-born Simone Simon), who appears in a cloud of smoke "from over the mountain." As his seven years pass, when everyone else is at church, Jabez lives it up with the seductive Belle, luring the town high rollers to card games on the Sabbath. He lets out contracts ruthlessly, builds a large mansion, and prospers materially, as did the United States in those seven years.
Meanwhile, Mary feels increasingly isolated. Jabez ignores her, Belle mocks her, and Ma Stone criticizes her. In anguish, she crosses the Stateline into Massachusetts and makes an appeal to Daniel Webster, her hero, played by the FDR-like Edward Arnold. He is sympathetic and says he will try to help her get Jabez back on a moral high road.
Jabez, however, regards Congressman Webster's intervention as an opportunity to expand his fortune and influence. He and Belle plan a Ball in the new mansion, and he has Squire Slossum, the richest man in town, Squire Slossum, by now a card playing buddy and in debt to him, invite the creme de la creme of Cross Corners. He secretly bets Slossum $5,000 that Webster will be the guest of honor.
There follows a surreal scene at the Ball in which the Devil begins to collect souls. The last soul will be that of Jabez, of course, who throws himself upon the mercy of Daniel Webster. Dan'l defends him at an equally surreal court trial, before the infamous Judge Hawthorne (H. B. Warner), and a jury made up of Revolutionary War and Colonial Period scum from our young Nation: among them, Walter Butler, the Loyalist terrorist of the Mohawk Valley; Simon Girty the Renegade; Edward Teach, aka Blackbeard the Pirate; and worst of all the traitor, General Bendict Arnold.
Unlike Washington Irving's story, which depicted the Devil as a black man who carried Tom Walker away on a horse, Benet's story has Webster convince his jury of the damned that, because they were once young and innocent, when the Nation was young and idealistic, they should let Jabez keep his soul. The film has a rather ambiguous and amusing happy ending, which I will not spoil, as some like to say here at Epinions.
THE DEVIL AND DANIEL WEBSTER, begun on the RKO lot on April 7, 1941, a month after the completion of CITIZEN KANE, has Orson Welles' fingerprints all over it. John Housman, Welles' partner in The Mercury Theater, had produced in New York a 1939 opera based on the story. Welles at one point had considered playing both Jabez and Webster. He had essayed Webster in "Black Daniel," a radio version of a similar tale, two years earlier.
Robert Wise, Welles' editor, did the honors for this film. Welles' great contribution to the ranks of movie composers, Bernard Herrmann, was given his first Oscar not for CITIZEN KANE but for THE DEVIL AND DANIEL WEBSTER (a superb Copeland-Ivesian folk suite based on "The Devil's Dream," "Spring Mountain," and "Miss Mcleod's Reel").
Why there's William Alland, the faceless reporter of CITIZEN KANE, playing a guide, and guess what? Sunny Bupp, Charles Foster Kane's young son, is little Martin Van Buren Aldrich, who alerts Cross Corners to the arrival of Senator Daniel Webster.
Director William Dieterle, who certainly needed no obvious help from Orson Welles, had occupied an important part in F. W. Murnau's great 1926 FAUST. After coming to America, he established himself as a director with a series of important films at Warner Brothers (A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM, 1935; THE STORY OF LOUIS PASTEUR, 1935; THE LIFE OF EMIL ZOLA, 1937; and JUAREZ (1939). He moved to RKO for THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME (1939), and on the strength of its great success, he was allowed by George Schaefer to form a short-lived production unit, similar to Welles' Mercury Theater Unit. While always an interesting director, none of his other films show the swiftness and innovation that THE DEVIL AND DANIEL WEBSTER does.
From the beginning, there also seems to have been a Wellsian kind of trouble with the production. The script was questioned. A good deal of criticism of our past is included in its dialogue. There is the attack on the profit motive and money lenders, combined with praise for the solidity of the Nation at the expense of individual states and what we might call today Libertarianism. The sultry Belle, obviously living openly in adultery with Tom, was violating the Hollywood Production Code of 1941.
Then, to mention The Devil in a title might cause the film to be banned from marquees in Southern States. Thus, several times prior to its release, the film's title was changed as CITIZEN KANE'S had been, before settling back on its original title: THE DEVIL AND DANIEL WEBSTER. The film was still released as ALL THAT MONEY CAN BUY in the South, and some of the immediate cuts were caused by objections there to the film's content.
And then there was the accident. Initially, Thomas Mitchell (STAGECOACH, Ford, 1939) played Daniel Webster. Early in the picture, you will see Webster stop his buggy to pick up Danny Stone (Lindy Stone). In the original scene, the horse bolted, and in shielding the little boy, Mitchell was thrown out. He fractured his skull, broke his leg, and was nearly killed. Because the film was following the rare, creative practice of shooting in sequence, most of Mitchell's scenes were complete. The cost of reshooting the Daniel Webster part with Edward Arnold almost shut down the production.
It may also be important that Joe August, cinematographer for Welles' idol John Ford, provided chiaroscuro photography in the movie, which makes portions of it look indeed like a combination Welles-Ford film. In fact, Critic Bruce Eder, in an essay, remarked that although August's approach was unlike Gregg Toland's on CITIZEN KANE, ". . . yet, many parts of THE DEVIL AND DANIEL WEBSTER play like FAUST MEETS THE MERCURY THEATER."
[There are several amusing sidelights: Gene Lockhart, who plays the greedy, pompous, lecherous Squire Slossum had ridiculed Orson Welles publicly on behalf of the Hollywood elite, of whom he considered himself a leader. One can almost see Welles' influence, which was considerable in that moment, placing Lockhart in such a meaty but demeaning part. Also Jeff Corey, whose labor and left wing activities would get him black listed before he re-emerged as Hollywood's leading coach of actors, makes his debut in THE DEVIL AND DANIEL WEBSTER as a young farmer trying to organize a Grange (which in the 1930's would have been regarded as a farmers union). Finally, Simone Simon, looked down upon then in Hollywood as the mistress of the late George Gershwin, made a comeback here as The Devil's helper.]
Unfortunately, regardless of the awards and praise heaped upon it, THE DEVIL AND DANIEL WEBSTER was treated like a Welles' movie by the new owners at RKO, in that it was immediately cut from 109 minutes to 106 minutes, went through several title changes (such as DANIEL AND THE DEVIL or HERE IS A MAN), all of which worked against the film's success. Then, it was withdrawn for ten years and reissued for Television distribution, in 1952, at 84 minutes. The original version was lost, and for the next 40 years, the only cut available started nearly 10 minutes into the action of the film. In 199l, The Voyager Company procured the only known second cut of the film, a 16 mm print, and worked to produce the nearly complete 106 minute film now again available. The result is not perfect, but it is a great film again.
It is interesting to speculate which three minutes of the 109 minute July 16, 1941 production has been lost, presumably forever. Looking at the film, my guess is that most of the excision comes in the trial scene, which from a verbal duel with Mr Scratch over the testimony, cuts precipitously to Daniel Webster's summation. Most of Benet's short story is taken up with this trial, and, as always, "the Devil has the best lines." The heart of the film makes the important point, that we shall always have to fight to overcome the corruption which always threatens to compromise the ideals of our young land.
In the short story, Mr Scratch, committed more than anything to preventing Daniel Webster from one day becoming President, says, "When the first wrong was done to the first Indian, I was there. When the first slaver put out from the Congo, I stood on her deck. Am I not in your books and stories and beliefs? Am I not spoken of, still, in every church in New England? 'Tis true the North claims me for a Southerner and the South for a Northerner, but I am neither. I am merely an honest American like yourself -- and of the best descent -- for, to tell the truth, Mr Webster, though I don't like to boast of it, my name is older in this country than yours."
That line is not really challenged by Webster in the film we have, though it is dramatically necessary to the trial scene in which it occurs. My guess is that, for whatever reason, a minute or two of Webster's rebuttal have been excised. However, Webster's summation, as given by Edward Arnold, remains one of the finest patriotic speeches in American Motion Pictures.
Daniel Webster, of course, as Mr Scratch predicts, never did become President. He went back on his ideals. He supported in an equally brilliant speech the Compromise of 1850, which allowed the extension of slavery into the territories acquired by our actions during and after the Mexican War. (Those years, 1841-1848, are the time span of THE DEVIL AND DANIEL WEBSTER. Slavery, our expansion into the Southwest, and the Gold Rush were the events our Great National Democratic Poet Walt Whitman wrote, in Democratic Vistas, which irrevocably corrupted the United States.) Webster, morally bankrupt, was finished as a politician by this speech and his vote in support of that Compromise. He never again regained the influence he had in the 1840's, and he ended his life working for "the money interests."
The Devil had had his due.
But Benet seemed to be saying in his story, and in this film, produced in 1941, on the Eve of World War II, that a Nation like America can lose its soul in many ways and many times, but there is always a chance to regain it.
It is a good message for today.
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Update (August 19, 2003): Good news! Thanks to "sergio" at the wonderful and recommended www.wellesnet.com site, I have learned that Criterion will bring out a DVD edition of THE DEVIL AND DANIEL WEBSTER. Unlike their Laserdisc version, which depends heavily on a 16mm print, the DVD comes from a recently discovered 35mm edition, which promises much improved visuals. Three minutes from the original are still missing, but there are many new extras, including a video comparison of this edition with Dieterle's cut, entitled HERE IS A MAN, which presumably has at least stills of the missing footage.
A New Englander sells his soul to a Mr. Scratch and needs Daniel Webster on his side in hell's court. Directed by William Dieterle.More at HotMovieSale.com
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