After so many viewings over the years it only lately occurred to me that Rod Serling would definitely have approved. Like the best of the original Zone it touches a part of you that you don't readily admit but doesn't blunt your curiosity as to the outcome...
It's certainly the spookiest film to come from America during some equally spooky years in world history. More than a little of a contemporary social agenda appears in the screenplay adapted from Benet's short story "The Devil and Daniel Webster," but above all bear in mind the filmed Webster's closing argument before the jury of "the quick or the dead" dates from shortly before America's entering the Second World War.
Everything about this film fits into place. William Dieterle's direction is old school in the best way. Joseph August photographs, Bernard Herrmann composes, Robert Wise edits. Herrmann won his lone Oscar for his work; it's not his most memorable film score but when it works it works very well indeed, and his concert suite is even better.
If Walter Huston, who could make ANY role believable, deserved an Oscar nomination then so did at least half a dozen others for simply helping the whole thing work. Familiar faces among the mostly unfamiliar cast, though you should notice Gene Lockhart, and Jane Darwell and John Qualen from The Grapes of Wrath, and a young Jeff Corey. You will quite involuntarily watch every move by Simone Simon. One brief and purposely underplayed scene with Qualen stayed with this impressionable viewer for many, many years...
The uninitiated may benefit from some on-line research before viewing. Read Benet's source story, required schoolroom reading in those days and on-line today, and follow up with the writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Washington Irving.
Learn more about Webster, very nearly played by Thomas Mitchell but far more ably portrayed by Edward Arnold, the presidencies of Martin Van Buren, John Tyler and James K. Polk, and the rise and fall of the American Whigs. Find out why Huston's character bears the name "Mister Scratch." Not to mention General Benedict Arnold (in the story he is mentioned but does not sit with the jury) and, in a fleeting reference to the character played by the sepulchral H. B. Warner, Justice John Hathorne of the Salem witch trials.
You see, my friends and hopeful students of history, those times are ours too.
It's certainly the spookiest film to come from America during some equally spooky years in world history. More than a little of a contemporary social agenda appears in the screenplay adapted from Benet's short story "The Devil and Daniel Webster," but above all bear in mind the filmed Webster's closing argument before the jury of "the quick or the dead" dates from shortly before America's entering the Second World War.
Everything about this film fits into place. William Dieterle's direction is old school in the best way. Joseph August photographs, Bernard Herrmann composes, Robert Wise edits. Herrmann won his lone Oscar for his work; it's not his most memorable film score but when it works it works very well indeed, and his concert suite is even better.
If Walter Huston, who could make ANY role believable, deserved an Oscar nomination then so did at least half a dozen others for simply helping the whole thing work. Familiar faces among the mostly unfamiliar cast, though you should notice Gene Lockhart, and Jane Darwell and John Qualen from The Grapes of Wrath, and a young Jeff Corey. You will quite involuntarily watch every move by Simone Simon. One brief and purposely underplayed scene with Qualen stayed with this impressionable viewer for many, many years...
The uninitiated may benefit from some on-line research before viewing. Read Benet's source story, required schoolroom reading in those days and on-line today, and follow up with the writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Washington Irving.
Learn more about Webster, very nearly played by Thomas Mitchell but far more ably portrayed by Edward Arnold, the presidencies of Martin Van Buren, John Tyler and James K. Polk, and the rise and fall of the American Whigs. Find out why Huston's character bears the name "Mister Scratch." Not to mention General Benedict Arnold (in the story he is mentioned but does not sit with the jury) and, in a fleeting reference to the character played by the sepulchral H. B. Warner, Justice John Hathorne of the Salem witch trials.
You see, my friends and hopeful students of history, those times are ours too.