All That Money Can Buy (aka The Devil and Daniel Webster)(1941) Reclaiming of a Lost Expressionist Classic (Review)

A full decade after the death of F. W. Murnau, and almost thirteen years after his American film debut with Sunrise (a.k.a. Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans), it took a “student” of both him and Max Reinhardt to revive German expressionism in Hollywood. Once again we find not just the canted camera angles and familiar lighting patterns, but also the lesser-known traits of a number of great films from the 1910s and 1920s. From the humour that can be found in Fritz Lang’s mordancy or the wild slapstick interludes of Murnau’s Faust, to the strange intermingling of Central European Christian spirituality and folklore, the radical political undercurrents, the fascination and fear of the flesh, and the alternately lush and austere pastoralism.

William Dieterle attracted the attention of Reinhardt early in his career, which led him to perform in a number of Reinhardt’s famous theatre productions (often playing a simpleton with great gusto), but his ambitions were always greater than that. After some false starts he returned to film acting with roles in Paul Leni’s Waxworks (1924), and F. W. Murnau’s Faust (1926), before returning to his original aspirations as a director, first in his native Germany and then in the United States. It was in the U.S. that he was given the opportunity to work with Reinhardt again on the 1935 star-studded Hollywood adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ensuring his status as a major Hollywood director. By 1941 Dieterle had directed the acclaimed biopic The Life of Emile Zola (1937), and The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), and had won enough success to set up his own production company, with RKO giving him both a large degree of autonomy and half of the crew that worked on Citizen Kane.

All That Money Can Buy is a direct result of this freedom and expertise, but it’s a film that has suffered through decades of gross mishandling. Outrageous recuts saw it first reduced in length by almost forty minutes, and various releases saw the film dumped out in unrestored and semi-restored forms under numerous titles until it finally re-emerged in its entirety in the 1990s. It now returns as a rich and sparkling Blu-Ray upgrade from the Criterion Collection, and the lavish treatment it’s received is the latest step to be taken in restoring this work to the canon of Great American Cinema. Never let it be said that the film maudit was an irrelevant or wasted concept …

“Folk horror” has become perhaps the most fashionable subgenre amongst current cinema trends, and when viewed from today’s vantage point, what’s immediately striking about All That Money Can Buy is the genuine feeling of “folkiness”. It’s a far cry from the urban outsiders point-of-view that dominates the much-discussed corpus of The Wicker Man adjacent cinema and television – even though many of those creators try to disguise it in their productions. The New England countryside is not romanticised or re-wilded as a setting for liberation and alternative “earthy” or sensual moralities, nor is it the domain of backwards “hicks” or cunning “village idiots” plotting intricate arcane and unknowable rituals.

It’s perhaps surprising to modern viewers that in Dieterle’s film Daniel Webster, along with a farmer’s union, give speeches that attack the punishing creditor and bankruptcy laws that afflict “his people”, creating important oppositions to the Devil’s seductive promises of untold riches and “men to work under you”. The countryside in All That Money Can Buy is a place of labour, of co-operation and competition, where hard work is tempered and undone by bad luck, and where there’s no concept of fate, but simply chance and opportunity, or lack thereof.

Set to Bernard Herrmann in Ralph Vaughn Williams mode, the harvest sequences feature imagery worthy of Dovzhenko as they follow the whole process of sowing and reaping (and subversively, conception, pregnancy and birth), with sun-dappled shots of people working, the lustrous growth of crops, bodies caught in swathes of white light, and the wind playing over heads of corn. A counterpoint to this is the New England gothic that’s reminiscent of Wisconsin Death Trip – mud and cracking white-washed walls, death and pestilence, rotting trees, meals of nothing but mashed potato and milk, and the bailiffs circling like vultures. From this imagery alone we can understand the frustration and despair that pushes Jabez to make a deal with the Devil, especially when promised heaven on Earth and the freedom of the New World. Tormented by the mocking of church bells and the protestant rhetoric of his mother, he finds only blight and a series of economic and social structures that seem to be designed to prey upon him for the enrichment of men like Miser Stevens (an American Scrooge if there ever was one).

Although the heart of Stephen Vincent’s short story is the climactic courtroom battle between Webster and Mr. Scratch for Jabez’s soul, there’s a sense that Dieterle was more interested in capturing the rhythms of life and milieu – but that doesn’t mean he suddenly develops a slack hand on the material. The sequence takes ghoulish delight in its assembly of unhappy spectres that form the jury, and with this group of famous American cutthroats and traitors Dieterle is able to create some of the strangest and most uncanny images in the history of mainstream Hollywood (the ghostly ballroom dance in Jabez’s new home or the gaunt and drawn faces at the windows of the house being some examples of this). The real feeling though, is out in the fields, in the crooks of those bent trees, and in the contrast between the humble homespun and the mansion on the hill.

There’s a lyricism that’s borne from the meeting of Hollywood studio artificiality and a European stylised realism that’s a legacy of the people who emigrated to the U.S. as political tensions increased during the 1930s and ’40s. It’s a heritage that’s recognised in the rich folklore and legends that abound in this part of America – the remnants of stories from the old homelands taking root and growing anew. The film remains as New England (specifically that stretch of the U.S. that burned witches and saw the Devil in every barn and row of corn), as it is Germanic, suggesting that the two heritages are either the same, or are uniquely entwined echoes of each other.

Walter Huston is a treasure as the devilish Mr. Scratch – his thin, haggard, twinkle-eyed form combining peasant charm with ancient sophistication, making him feel as real as any other member of the villager’s grange. Simone Simon is almost as sublime as Belle, carrying her kittenish femme fatale from Jean Renoir’s La Bête Humaine into a pan-European Jezebel act that would see her win the lead role in Cat People. Edward Arnold’s role as Daniel Webster takes a historically complex and far from heroic figure, and turns him into the quintessential champion of the common man – the dream of the exemplary politician who remains of similar stock to his the most unremarkable of his constituents. In this fantasy Daniel Webster is a starry-eyed believer in throwing off the “chains of the oppressor” and reclaiming the innate good in man, who’s as honest as a jug of his favourite homemade rum.

Bernard Hermann’s preceded David Lynch in his usage of the sounds of telegraphs and phone lines to produce the continuous, sinister whirring that accompanies the first appearance of Mr. Scratch. Hermann’s score itself adds an extra tone of the old world to the film, evoking numerous folk tunes like Devil’s Dream and Pop Goes the Weasel – the latter being a fantastic fiddle-led frenzy as Jabez chases Belle across a whirling and eerily-lit dance floor.

Dieterle would continue to make a series of eccentric and dreamy films after All That Money Can Buy (which were aptly described by film critic Dave Kehr as “high delirium”), but he would never again find the same purity of intention. Most of these productions would star Joseph Cotten (another Citizen Kane alumni), including Portrait of Jennie (1948) – a passion project of producer David O. Selznick that was based on the 1940 novella by Robert Nathan. Despite Hermann channelling Debussy for the score, Portrait of Jennie wasn’t a success at the time but is now considered a classic of the fantasy genre.

As for All That Money Can Buy, for two hours Dieterle stood shoulder to shoulder with his “teachers”, producing an American film quite unlike any other. It’s part John Ford and part Murnau, as rich and deep and lived-in as old oak, as close and as distant as the clothbound family Bible on the kitchen table, as pungent as the mown fields and as porous as a cloud, as childlike and as old as the hills.

Billy’s Archive – All that Money Can Buy