The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941)

Director

• William Dieterle

Starring

• Edward Arnold
• Walter Huston
• James Craig
• Jane Darwell
• Simone Simon

Last On

13:25-15:05 Tue 30th Dec 2008 100m
Five

Synopsis

Variously known as All That Money Can Buy and The Devil and Daniel Webster, this features a fine musical score that rightly won an Academy Award for composer Bernard Herrmann (Citizen Kane, Psycho). Would that the rest of the movie were as good. It's that hoary old Faust tale again, with New England farmer James Craig (wholly inadequate and utterly charmless) selling his soul to scene-stealing, wicked Walter Huston's Mr Scratch. Lawyer Daniel Webster (Edward Arnold) is hijacked into the story to plead Craig's case. There's one particularly strange expressionistic banquet sequence, where all the guests have sold their souls to Satan, but this is a rigidly humourless and prosaic telling of an old, old story. It has many admirers, but, truth to tell, it hasn't really worn very well.