#devil’s contract: the history of the faustian bargain

[theoptia]

Ed Simon, from Devil’s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain

Text ID: The numinous realm, the astral plane, the transcendent dimension—the sacred—is a terrifying kingdom,

[pasdetrois]

These metaphysics of magicians, And necromantic books are heavenly; Lines, circles, scenes, letters, and characters; Ay, these are those that Faustus most desires. O, what a world of profit and delight, Of power, of honour, and omnipotence, Is promis’d to the studious artizan! All things that move between the quiet poles Shall be at my command: emperors and kings Are but obeyed in their several provinces; But his dominion that exceeds in this, Stretcheth as far as doth the mind of man; A sound magician is a demigod: Here tire, my brains, to gain a deity.

The "studious artisan" who moves things at his command, who can raise the wind and rend the clouds—this is an ability of the artist able to envision alternative worlds and to create them in pure thought, who can compel men called actors to perform those words. In describing those "necromantic books," Marlowe is also simply describing literature. If magic books are composed of "Lines … scenes, letters, and characters," so are all books. Faust's paean to books seems to particularly describe dramatic works, for what is the play in which he's a character other than a work composed of poetic lines, organized into scenes, and performed by characters. If the enchantments of the wizard stretch as far as the mind of man, than the only limiting factor to his omnipotence would be the extent of his creative brilliance. God may have created man, but Marlowe reminds us that writers can also create gods. If a sound magician is a mighty god, how much more so the writer? Emperors and kings may have profane authority on earth, but he who crafted the Emperor Tamburlaine and King Edward Il reminds us through his other creation that it is writers and artists who hold sacred abilities. What the playwright admits to us in this monologue is that writers are themselves magicians, and that Faustus is Marlowe. After Faust has rejected knowledge and faith, there is but one thing left, the most transcendent and sacred of things—imagination.

Ed Simon, Devil’s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain

[likeorpheus]

Ok but for context we just received Devils Contract: The history of Faustian Bargain by Ed Simon & Faust/mephistopheles lore is one of the pools of knowledge I stick a straw in & suck ok

I love being a bookseller but my wallet can't take it anymore

[dweemeister]

The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941)

Also known as All That Money Can Buy, William Dieterle’s The Devil and Daniel Webster is a hallucinatory fantasy framed by its protagonist’s Faustian bargain. On a first glance, this adaptation of Stephen Vincent’s 1936 short story of the same name appears to be a typical rural fantasy from 1940s Hollywood. Once the protagonist, Jabez Stone, on an absurdly hard-luck day, announces his willingness to sell his soul to the devil, the innovative camerawork, lighting, and scoring/sound design kick in – setting a beguiling atmosphere until the film’s final moments.

Dieterle used the profits of The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) to form his own production company, and signed an exclusive contract with RKO Pictures to distribute the new production company’s films. This was the first film of that new contract, but neither the production company nor the RKO deal lasted beyond The Devil and Daniel Webster. This development is partly due to the cost overruns for reshoots after the horse pulling the carriage driven by actor Thomas Mitchell (the film’s original Daniel Webster) lurched, fracturing Mitchell’s skull – don’t worry, Mitchell was able to continue his long career as a character actor. Otherwise, this movie proved successful with audiences and critics, despite RKO’s fears that keeping “Daniel Webster”, who they must have thought as too antiquated a political figure from American history, would repel moviegoers. Despite the title, this is not Daniel Webster’s story, but Jabez’s. His hardships in the opening minutes of the film must have resonated with a nation and a world consumed by economic depression over that last decade. And as some desperate peoples discovered, it is an easy thing to compromise one’s values. If only to invite devastation and suffering later on.

We open in the village of Cross Corners, New Hampshire, 1840. A long winter is soon to make way for the spring. Jabez (James Craig) and Mary Stone (Anne Shirley) tend to the family farm, with Jabez’s devout mother (Jane Darwell) sometimes dropping by, reminding her son and daughter-in-law to live virtuously. Money is tight, and virtue often comes with a price tag unaffordable to the poor. On the verge of foreclosing on his farm, on a day where nothing goes right, Jabez exclaims: “Consarn it, that’s enough to make a man sell his soul to the Devil. And I would for about two cents!” Two pennies magically appear in his left hand and, backed by jarring lighting, enters cigar-puffing “Mr. Scratch” (Walter Huston). Scratch offers Jabez seven years of good luck and a fortune of Hessian gold in exchange for his soul. Jabez signs the contract, soon becomes one of the wealthiest men in America, and makes new friends far and wide – including U.S. Senator Daniel Webster (Edward Arnold). Unbeknownst to Jabez, Webster, too, has been speaking to Scratch. Webster’s presidential ambitions are no secret, and Scratch has been pestering Webster for a deal. But the film keeps its focus on Jabez – even as Webster assists in the metaphysical-legal drama that concludes this movie.

The Devil and Daniel Webster also features Lindy Wade as Mary and Jabez’s bratty son, Daniel; Gene Lockhart; H.B. Warner; and, two years before her star-making turn in Cat People (1942), Simone Simon as Scratch’s seductress-servant Belle.

At this time in American film history, the Motion Picture Production Code, enforced by the Hays Office, restricted the content of wide-release movies. Even in a film that celebrates virtue, depictions and mentions of Satan, hell, damnation, sin, and much more are instead in the form of allusions and roundabout dialogue. Rather than have Scratch announce himself as Satan and provide a grisly demonstration of his powers, he (and Walter Huston) adopts the persona of a genial salesman or an offbeat, out-of-the-way neighbor more articulate than anyone for miles. If there is menace in The Devil and Daniel Webster, it lurks beneath Mr. Scratch’s toothy grin and puffs of cigar smoke emanating from his mouth, as well as Belle’s calculated sensuality. The idea of danger, of the Stone family’s destruction by Satanic means, grips every scene – even when Walter Huston is nowhere to be found. Dieterle and screenwriters Dan Totheroth (1934’s The Count of Monte Cristo, 1938’s The Dawn Patrol) and Stephen Vincent Benét (adapting his own short story) deftly navigate the verbal gymnastics necessary to appease the Hays Office and Benét’s authorial intent – inadvertently painting numerous scenes with thick coats of dread.

Walter Huston seems to be relishing his role as Mr. Scratch, who is equally at home with religious metaphysics and a casual conversation doused in beers. Mr. Scratch/Satan/the Devil/what-have-you retains a charm throughout out the film, enticing the viewer to root for his cause, only to draw back because of his sinister intentions. As malevolent as his character is, Huston is magnetic, capable of convincing even the most earnest person to commit a cardinal sin. Scratch’s presence is everywhere, even in scenes where Huston is absent. Playing neither the Devil nor Daniel Webster, is James Craig as Jabez. Craig was best-known to audiences as journeyman at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) and sometimes, to put it more dismissive terms, a discount Clark Gable (Craig looks vaguely like Gable, but that’s where the similarities start and end). Unlike Huston, Craig elects to make Jabez homespun, folksy, and believably flawed. Up until the film’s closing passages, Jabez is a reactive character at the mercy of his own ill fortunes. Craig’s lack of star wattage and decision to play Jabez as plainly as possible works in the context of The Devil and Daniel Webster, framing Jabez as a deeply vulnerable soul that finds temptation in his worst moments attractive.

As the second title character in then-Senator Daniel Webster, Edward Arnold is cast against type as a secondary protagonist. Arnold, often typecast as a ruthless authority figure or criminal, does not truly shine until the film’s closing moments – the trial of Jabez Stone, tried in front of a judge and jury of murderers, Judases, and knaves. Even though The Devil and Daniel Webster is an adaptation, Jabez’s trial feels as if tacked on, that it is the best possible resolution to a narrative from a collection of terrible ideas. Arnold, delivering the screenplay’s soaring rhetoric in this scene, almost allows the film to get away with it. One last plaudit to French actress Simone Simon as Belle. One year removed from her starring role in Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People (1942), her sensuality injects risqué hints beckoning Jabez and simultaneously unsettles the viewer. Simon is underutilized, as it seems the film wants to develop Belle and Jabez’s relationship, and never quite accomplishing that.

Cinematographer Joseph H. August (1939’s Gunga Din, 1948’s Portrait of Jennie); editor Robert Wise (best known as the director of 1961’s West Side Story and 1965’s The Sound of Music); and special effects specialist Vernon L. Walker (1933’s King Kong, 1940’s Swiss Family Robinson) combine to craft an idiosyncratic feat of visual magic. The ghostly beams haloing Scratch and Belle during their character introductions herald their supernatural presence; unconventional harsh lighting and out-of-focus photography during critical scenes such as Jabez’s trial serve to disorient the viewer – allowing us into Jabez’s state of mind and the unusual events overtaking his life. Years before becoming an established Hollywood director, Wise’s editing is crisp, per usual. But in The Devil and Daniel Webster, his sense of timing – whether cutting quickly or otherwise – heightens Jabez’s despair, his mother’s simultaneous strength of faith and disappointment in her child, and Scratch’s cunning. The brief scenes where Scratch plays with his fiery fingers might be dismissed as simple street magic today, but it immediately telegraphs to the viewer that here is a character that poses a threat, an arsonist of lives.

In the same year he completed the score to Citizen Kane, Bernard Herrmann would also lend his compositional acumen to The Devil and Daniel Webster. Herrmann won an Academy Award for the latter, even though he believed that the former comprised his better work that year. And as much as I agree with Herrmann’s assessment of his own music, it does not make the score to The Devil and Daniel Webster as musically unworthy. Here, Herrmann – who had the uncommon privilege of scoring the film while production was taking place – weds American folk music influences with discordant musical innovations. Some may roll their eyes as the Scratch’s introduction plays an adaptation of “Pop Goes the Weasel”, but the instrumentation and the orchestral furiousness transform it into a danse macabre. Herrmann’s innovation here is one of sound mixing. Now practiced regularly among film score composers but rarely in the 1940s, overlaid audio creates the unearthly textures that mark Scratch’s introduction. Herrmann had individual string players play “Pop Goes the Weasel” multiple times, instructing the musician to vary how they played it on each instance – graceful or buzzsaw-like bowing here, pizzicato or col legno there. Once recording the individual string players was complete, Herrmann had their sounds mixed into one menacing, deeply layered cue. Perhaps the most effective musical moment occurs during a disturbing scene at a dance. That scene is set to the “Miser’s Waltz” – a seemingly tentative cue until the orchestra bursts into deathly dissonance.

Herrmann was also responsible for another aural innovation occurring during Scratch’s entrance. In this moment, the viewer can hear a sound fluctuating, reverberating in the background. Is it part of Herrmann’s film score? The general sound mix? That debate continues. The subliminal sound heard is a combination of two things: a recording of humming telephone wires in San Fernando, California in the dead of night and Herrmann painting the musical note C directly onto the film negative’ soundtrack during that scene. It seems like something out of twenty-first century Hollywood, but these tricks on the ears date from the second decade of synchronized sound in film.

Daniel Webster was considered one of the three lions of the United States Senate in the post-Jackson era, alongside Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun; the portrayal of Webster in The Devil and Daniel Webster glamorizes the man, unintentionally highlighting a political contradiction that haunts Dieterle’s movie. The film retains Webster’s faith in the American experiment’s righteousness and providential justice as he defends Jabez Stone. Such beliefs were under assault even by 1840 (the film’s setting), as sectional discord threatened to tear the United States asunder. Webster, like Clay, believed in the preservation of the Union at all costs. But unlike Clay, as a young firebrand, Webster had campaigned for slavery’s abolition (the slaveholding Clay believed, early on, in gradual emancipation and the deportation of freed blacks to Africa; Calhoun encapsulated the ideas of what would become the Confederacy). In 1850, with Southern secession appearing imminent, Webster lent his support to the Fugitive Slave Act (part of the Compromise of 1850), a law that obliged all free state citizens to, when asked, assist in locating and apprehending fugitive slaves. The compromise may have bought time for the North (to motivate its citizens and to gain the technological edge) in preparation for the Civil War to come. Webster, as the film foreshadows, sells his soul to Mr. Scratch. This decision was not, as portrayed in The Devil and Daniel Webster, in the name of presidential politicking, but one to uphold white supremacy – a betrayal of what Webster himself once stood for.

RKO might not have been satisfied with The Devil and Daniel Webster as a film and as business, yet the film nevertheless garnered admirers. Producer David O. Selznick (1939’s Gone with the Wind, 1940’s Rebecca) was likely among them. Seven years after The Devil and Daniel Webster’s release, Selznick greenlit Portrait of Jennie – another atmospheric fantasy that make astounding use of that era’s special effect. Some of the talent on Portrait of Jennie reads similarly to The Devil and Daniel Webster’s credits: director William Dieterle, cinematographer Joseph H. August, and composer Bernard Herrmann (who composed Jennie’s theme before dropping out).

The Devil and Daniel Webster upholds an American mythology, and tiptoes over the transgressions that it faintly alludes to. Says Mr. Scratch:

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… It’s true the North claims me for a Southerner and the South for a Northerner, but I’m neither.

A cinematic reimagining of The Devil and Daniel Webster should pay heed to this oft-forgotten line. Considering the United States’ political amnesia and its film industry’s reluctance to touch anything between the American Revolution and before Lincoln, don’t count on it.

My rating: 9/10

^ Based on my personal imdb rating. Half-points are always rounded down. My interpretation of that ratings system can be found in the “Ratings system” page on my blog (as of July 1, 2020, tumblr is not permitting certain posts with links to appear on tag pages, so I cannot provide the URL).

For more of my reviews tagged “My Movie Odyssey”, check out the tag of the same name on my blog.

[pasdetrois]

Before anyone with the name "Faust," and his myth was popular in the Middle Ages, the legend's overweening concern with words made manifest by a people fully enraptured by the idea of scripture, by this faith that language itself made reality (and could unmake it as well). A soul is sold to the Devil, after all, not in a gentleman's promise, but with a signature affixed to a contract, and the benefit is also words in the form of knowledge, at least for a bit. The central importance of the contract in Medieval Faust legends—its stipulations laid out as elegantly as a syllogism—attests to this. It would be a mistake, however, to understand Medieval reason as the anemic version we think of today, the parsing of logical fallacies and the valorization of "critical thought." For Medieval mystics and philosophers alike, language was the thorough-structure of reality which composed the universe, so just as it was a medium in which God dwelled, so would it be where Satan resided.

Ed Simon, Devil’s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain

[pasdetrois]

Magic itself is hardly a repudiation of God, rather such practices are confirmation of the supernatural, no matter how distasteful or torrid more rational theologians might find incantations and conjurations to be. Observing the similarities and continuities between magic and religion is not to denigrate either; far from it, it's to note that a transcendent realm amenable to intervening in the affairs of humanity is an axiom of both systems. There's much that Simon Magus shares with later iterations of the Faust myth—the overweening hubris, the prideful desire, the violent conclusion, and even women named Helen. What's different is that despite his reputation for necromancy, nowhere does Simon Magus interact with Satan. Read together, there's a suggestion that there's not much difference between abusing the grace of the Lord or the Devil's magic. Whether or not you sell your soul to Satan or to God, you've still sold your soul. The numinous realm, the astral plane, the transcendent dimension—the sacred—is a terrifying kingdom, defined by its difference from everything that is safe and familiar and human. What distinguishes Peter and Simon, the Apostles and the magicians, is less what supernatural reality they're interacting with than their reasons for doing so.

Ed Simon, Devil’s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain