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The Devil and Tom Walker is a folk tale about a greedy man who meets the devil in a swamp in the outskirts of Boston, Massachusetts. Tom Walker and his wife are very greedy and are always trying to outdo each other. When Tom meets the devil for the very first time, the devil tells him of the great sums of money that was buried by Kidd, the pirate under the oak tree in the swamp. The devil makes the money available to Tom, but Tom does not comply just to spite his wife. The wife then decides to meet with the devil to try and work out a deal with him; however, as fate puts it, she loses and is never heard from again. When Tom does not hear from her, he grows anxious and soon sets out to the swamp to find her.
He soon meets with her fate and finds her heart and liver tied up in her apron upon a tree. Tom then meets with the devil and agrees to become a user where he charges high interest rates on the loans the poor people make. After a while, Tom becomes anxious and tries to find a way to get out of the deal with the devil. He carries a small Bible in his coat pocket and keeps one on his desk, in hopes that he will be safe from the devil.
One day Tom is caught without his Bibles, and the devil takes him away. His house and his belongings burn, and there is nothing left behind. Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movies plot 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 the sense of America at a crossroad that the first film has. THE DEVIL AND DANIEL WEBSTER is based on a patriotic 1937 short story 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 agreed 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 16 th Century Germanic legend. The Faust legend dogs Western Capitalism like a blood hound on the trail of blood 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 the 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 films hero, Jabez Stone (James Craig), is a small farmer of 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 get on his crops. Bad luck, bad weather and the loan sharks have added to his financial troubles. He lives with his faithful wife Mary (Anne Shirley, STELLA DALLAS, Vidor, 1937) and his mother (Jane Darrell, Ma John in THE GRAPES OF WRATH, Ford, 1939), but Miser Stevens (John Queen) is about to foreclose on the 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 religious mother calls him on it, and he retires to the barn, muttering, For two cents, Id sell my soul to the Devil. The Devil needs little encouragement, and hes there for the sale in a flash. The Devil (the 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 and immediately, his luck turns; he accrues money, property, and all that money can buy (which is one of the films 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, Jabez lives it up with the seductive Belle, luring the town high rollers to card games on the Sabbath, when everyone else is at church. 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 road. Jabez, however, sees it as an opportunity to expand his fortune and influence. He and Belle plan a Ball in the new mansion, and he has the richest man in town, Squire Slossum (Gene Lockhart), 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 will be that of Jabez, who throws himself upon the mercy of Daniel Webster. Daniel defends him at an equally surreal court, before the infamous Judge Hawthorne (H. B. Warner), and a jury made up of the Revolutionary War and Colonial scum of our young Nation: among them, Walter Butler, the Loyalist terrorist of the Mohawk Valley; Simon Girls the Renegade; Edward Teach, aka Blackbeard the Pirate; and worst of all the traitor, General Benedict Arnold.
Unlike Washington Irving's story, which had the Devil a black man who carried Tom Walker away on a horse, Benet's story has Webster convince this 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 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. Welles at one point had considered playing both Jabez and Webster. He had played Webster in Black Daniel, a radio version of 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... KANE but for THE DEVIL AND DANIEL WEBSTER (a superb Copeland- Ivesian folk suite based on The Devils Dream, Spring Mountain, and Miss Mcleod's Reel). John Housman Welles partner in The Mercury Theater, had produced the 1939 opera based on the story in New York. Why theres William Allan, the faceless reporter of CITIZEN KANE, playing a guide, and guess what? Sunny But, 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 played an important part in F.
W. Murnaus great 1926 FAUST. After coming to America, he established himself as a director with a series of important films at Warner Brothers (A MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 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 Unit.
While always an interesting director, none of his other films show the swiftness and innovation that THE DEVIL AND DANIEL WALKER 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 profit and money lenders, combined with praise for the solidity of the Nation at the expense of individual states and what we might call Libertarianism today. The sultry Belle, obviously living openly in adultery with Tom, was a violation of The Production Code.
Then, to mention The Devil in a title might cause the film to be banned from marquees in Southern States. Thus, the films title was changed as CITIZEN KANES was several times, prior to release, before settling back on the original title. The film was still released as ALL THAT MONEY CAN BUY in the South, and some of the immediate cuts were caused by objections to the films content. And then there was the accident. Initially, Thomas Mitchell (STAGECOACH, Ford, 1939) played Daniel Webster. You will see a scene where Webster stops his buggy to pick up little Danny Stone (Lindy Stone).
The horse bolted, and in shielding the little boy, Mitchell was thrown out 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 Daniel Websters scenes were complete. The cost of resorting Mitchells scenes with Edward Arnold almost shut down the production. It may also be important that Joe August, cinematographer for Welles idol John Ford, provided the chiaroscuro photography for 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 Augusts approach was unlike Gregg Tolands on CITIZEN KANE, ... yet, many parts of THE DEVIL AND DANIEL WEBSTER play like FAUST MEETS THE MERCURY THEATER. [An amusing sidelight is that 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). ] 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 films 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 film. In 199 l, 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 moves precipitously from the duel with Mr Scratch over testimony to Websters summation.
Most of Benet's short story is taken up with the trial, and, as always, the Devil has the best lines. The heart of the story makes the important point, that we shall always have to fight to over come the corruption that compromise of ideals brought to 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 dont 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.
However, Websters summation, as given by Edward Arnold, is one of the finest patriotic speeches in American Film. Daniel Webster, of course, as Mr Scratch predicts, never became President. He went back on his ideals. He supported 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, expansion into the Southwest, the Gold Rush, were the events our Great National Democratic Poet Walt Whitman wrote, in Democratic Vistas, irrevocably corrupted the United States. ) Webster, morally bankrupt, was finished as a politician by his speech and 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. 33 c
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