The Devil and Daniel Webster
Sloppy, enjoyable version of the old story, with a fun Walter Huston as "Mr. Scratch."
The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941). Grade: B-
I love deal-with-the-devil stories, but there’s an obvious plot logic flaw to most of them. It’s Pascal’s wager, flipped around. I’m an agnostic who respects honest, kind-hearted religious belief; I do not spend a lot of time wondering if there’s a Heaven or a Hell.
What if, however, tomorrow… what if I met the actual Devil, who promised me anything I could possibly dream of having, but I’d pay for it by going to Hell forever? Man, I would become the world’s most devout believer so fast, you wouldn’t… believe it. (Then you run into the problem of WHICH church to join, of course…)
Imagine this, though: what if, tomorrow, I got approached by some stranger, who offered me $100 on the spot if I signed a contract? A contract that said I’d go to Hell? And the stranger doesn’t claim to be the actual Devil. They say they’re rich, and this is a weird game they enjoy playing, to see how people react. Or they say they’re conducting a university research project to see how people react.
Would I sign the paper then? I might. I’d be a little worried, even so… because we know the Devil is the father of lies, of course he might say he isn’t the Devil!
So the best versions of this (very, very old) story are the ones which tweak the formula. There’s apparently an Icelandic one (per Wiki) where a monk makes “a pact with the devil that the devil should bring him home to Iceland from Europe on the back of a seal. [The monk] escaped a diabolical end when, on arrival, he hit the seal on the head with the Bible, killing it, and stepping safely ashore.” (Poor seal.)
In other variations, the Devil might give you the letter of what you wanted but in a different way than you wanted (like the Midas touch, or a tricky djinn, or Coyote, etc.) Or gives you exactly what you wanted… and it turns out to be shallow, and makes you unhappy. Or makes you such a rotten person that you’d deserve to go to Hell, contract or not. The Picture of Dorian Gray is kinda like that — so’s my all-time favorite in the genre, The Phantom of the Paradise.
This kinda sorta happens in The Devil and Daniel Webster — a somewhat-nice farmer (James Craig) starts off by using his newfound wealth to help all his neighbors. Then eventually uses it to exploit all his neighbors. (Just as the region’s nasty landlord was doing to Craig, when the story began.) At first, Craig enjoys buying his devoted wife a new bonnet; later, he spends all his money on his evil mistress. (It’s never said that she’s his mistress, because of the Hays Code; it’s very heavily implied.)
Unfortunately, James Craig is in almost every scene, and he’s… not a blast to watch. He’s not a bad actor, he’s just not very interesting. You largely don’t care what’s going to happen to him. (You care more about what would happen to the wife if Craig dies; she’s played by Anne Shirley, who has a warm presence in a largely one-note role.)1 Fortunately, Walter Huston is in a lot of scenes too, and he’s absolutely a delight.
Huston was born in 1883; his first stage role was in 1902, and his first film role in 1929. He was a very well-respected actor who did mostly serious, stern dramatic parts. Huston gets to ham it up here, and looks like he’s having a hoot doing so. Huston thought he overacted a bit, according to Seongyong Cho on RogerEbert.com; maybe so, yet the overacting’s part of the fun.
This Devil, or, as he calls himself, “Mr. Scratch,” gets a jolly old kick out of being evil. (So does Ray Walston in Damn Yankees, singing “Those Were the Good Old Days.”) Heck, he seems to enjoy everything. He likes laughing at the despair of others; he likes having a rum at the tavern with happy people; he likes seeing a pretty sunset. Today, he’d be one of the most popular online “influencers”; if all the top influencers aren’t, in fact, working for Mr. Scratch as it is.
Director William Dieterle was certainly experienced in working with hammy actors. His The Hunchback of Notre Dame had Lon Chaney, Jr. in it; his The Story of Louis Pasteur and The Life of Emile Zola had Paul Muni in them; his A Midsummer Night’s Dream had both James Cagney AND Mickey Rooney. (I was never a big fan of that play, but Mickey Rooney, ugh…)
Incidentally, this has an opening logo (separate from the standard RKO logo) announcing it as “A William Dieterle Production”; Notre Dame and Pasteur and Zola had been big enough hits that Dieterle wanted to try running his own production company. It didn’t last long; this movie didn’t turn a profit.
You can kinda understand why. To avoid confusion with The Devil and Miss Jones (a comedy released earlier that year), RKO changed the title to All That Money Can Buy, which sounds like a sexy comedy title from the pre-Code 1930’s. And the movie’s plot/dialogue centers heavily on New England, specifically New Hampshire, praising it as full of a noble character above all other regions. Which would be annoying to all other regions, and New Hampshire isn’t the most populous place in the country. Also, maybe people just didn’t want to see stern Walter Huston playing a grinning Devil.
Also also, Daniel Webster was a curious choice for the Devil’s foil. Webster was a famed orator in a period where people who could speak well (and speak loudly, it was before microphones) became popular attractions. He was regarded as a brilliant lawyer, served in Congress in the House and Senate, and was Secretary of State under two administrations. Did people in 1941 remember a guy who died in 1852?
The film’s Devil at one point taunts Webster by saying “you’ll never be President; I’ll make sure of that!” Who would possibly have known that Webster ran for the Whig nomination in 1848 and 1852 (and didn’t do great either time)? I know people in the 1940s knew more US history than most Americans do now, but remembering Webster’s presidential runs would be like remembering Al Smith today.
As Criterion essayist Tom Piazza points out, Webster’s a strange choice for another reason — the Fugitive Slave Act. Webster played a big role in its passage and later enforcement. It was deeply hated by many in the North and helped kill support for the Whigs.
(Here’s a fun find. Nothing to do with the movie. In 1854 an escaped slave was arrested and tried in Pennsylvania under the Fugitive Slave Act; he won his case and was released, and promptly moved to the Canada side of Niagara Falls, where he and his family had a nice life as farmers. The former slave’s name was Daniel Dangerfield… but the name he was living under in Pennsylvania was Daniel Webster. That's dangerous satire of the highest kind; salute to you, Mr. Dangerfield!)
Piazza writes: “‘It is odd to hear Daniel Webster arguing at the film’s end that a man is not a piece of property (to be claimed by the devil), while his historical alter ego ended his argument with slavery by actively upholding and enforcing the “property” rights of slave owners.’” While the Devil has the best line in the whole movie, claiming to be as American as apple pie: “When the first wrong was done to the first Indian, I was there. When the first slaver put out for the Congo, I stood on the deck.”
In short, the politics of this story are… convoluted.
The movie has some good things besides Huston in it. Dieterle was never a visual whiz, yet has a few cool images here; some of the tricks with fire that Huston uses are neat, and there’s a late look at faces outside a window that actually spooked me pretty good. There’s a reveal featuring coins which shows that Mr. Scratch has been in town before. Simone Simon (how French a name is that?) is an agreeably dippy insta-mistress who we first see… tending a fireplace.
(I realize I've been using that punctuation… a bit much.)
Edward Arnold, an enormously prolific character actor, plays Webster, and gives off the polished cheerfulness that’s common in successful politicians (or, it was). He’s fun when he’s never able to refuse a good rum, even when it’s tricky Mr. Snatch doing the pouring. The original actor for the part, Thomas Mitchell, fractured his skull while filming a carriage scene! (He did completely recover.) It helps the movie, since Mitchell would best be known later as the annoyingly pathetic Uncle Billy in It’s a Wonderful Life. No fun roly-poly rum-filled orator he.
Arnold’s Webster represents poor doomed Craig in a ghostly trial at the end. The judge and court clerk look very appropriately creepy, I liked ‘em. The logic Webster uses is not very convincing. I think he’d have actually lost by a quick unanimous show of hands. Cho’s essay pointed out that The Simpsons had a better trial loophole in their “Treehouse of Horror” episode parodying this story! (Which I remember, and which was 1993, so, gulp.) But goodness wins, or at least a kind of annoying twerp doesn’t have to go to Hell. (Not yet, at any rate.)
Come for the supernatural story; stay for the Walter Huston; and don’t think too hard about the shot where he kicks away some barn hay to reveal a giant pile of gold, proving he IS the Devil and CAN make you rich. Where, if you saw that, you’d have run screaming into the house and grabbed whatever crucifix you had handy, or improvised a quick one with pencils. It’s best never to take these stories TOO seriously.
P.S.: that ghostly trial at the end has 12 famous scoundrels from the bowels of Hell as the jury. It’s three pirates who sailed in what would be American waters (Blackbeard, Stede Bonnet, Captain Kidd), failed sea captain “Floyd” Ireson, highwaymen/serial killers the Harpe brothers, Revolutionary War “traitor” Benedict Arnold, British Loyalists Walter Butler and Simon Girty, Puritan-hater Thomas Morton, “Governor Dale” (I think this is Thomas Dale, who ruled the Jamestown colony with an iron fist), and “Asa, The Black Monk.” (No idea who that is.)
Does it help you to know that? No. Did you want to know that? No. Did I want to know it? Kinda. Did someone at IMDb type up the list? Yes. And does Wikipedia still exist? For now. So I did that. You can thank me when we meet in the afterlife, depending on what contracts I’ve signed before then.
Shirley was born Anne Paris; she adopted the stage name Anne Shirley after appearing in a very successful movie version of Anne of Green Gables, where her character was named Anne Shirley.