In many ways, The Devil and Daniel Webster is different from all the other Faustian tales we have encountered over the years.  Not better, just different.

First of all, in most such stories, the Faustian character is a bachelor, one notable exception being Damn Yankees (1958), in which Joe Boyd is a married man.  But in any event, they all live comfortable lives.  They sell their souls because they are discontented.  As a result, we never understand why they would be so stupid as to agree to spend an eternity burning in the fires of Hell for a few decades of whatever it is they want:  wealth, power, fame, sex, or a baseball team that can beat the Yankees.

In The Devil and Daniel Webster, on the other hand, Jabez Stone (James Craig) is a poor farmer for whom everything seems to be going wrong.  In particular, the note on his farm is due the next day and he doesn’t have any money, meaning he will lose the farm.  He supports his mother, Ma Stone (Jane Darwell), and his wife, Mary (Anne Shirley), who falls off the wagon and is unconscious.  In his utter exasperation, he says that it’s enough to make a man sell his soul to the Devil.  Needless to say, the Devil, who goes by the name of Mr. Scratch (Walter Huston), shows up ready to make the deal.  At least this makes some sense.  Every man has his breaking point, and Jabez has reached his.  We might actually believe that a man might make a Faustian bargain under such desperate circumstances.

Second, in all other Faustian tales, the two principal characters are the man who sells his soul to the Devil and the Devil himself.  But in The Devil and Daniel Webster, the Faustian character is not in the title.  Rather, it includes some third character.  In fact, so prominent is the role of Daniel Webster in this movie that I’m almost surprised they found room in the title for the Devil.  Now, we all know who Daniel Webster is, a politician of note in the years leading up to the Civil War.  But the excessive adoration of Webster that this movie evinces is beyond anything most of us would ever have imagined.

Third, in most Faustian stories, the Devil lives up to the letter of the contract, but not the spirit.  He grants the Faustian character his wishes, only to undermine them in some way.  As Roger Ebert once argued, the Devil should do everything he can to satisfy the Faustian character so that he will tell all his friends about the good deal he made.  A little word-of-mouth advertising might net the Devil a few more souls.  In this movie, however, Mr. Scratch doesn’t pull any sneaky tricks.  He allows Jabez access to a big supply of gold coins, which solves most of his problems right there.  Mr. Scratch even goes beyond what was required in the agreement, beyond just the money.  He protects Jabez’s wheat against a hailstorm that destroys the wheat of all the other farmers.  And he sees to it that the Jabez family gets Belle (Simone Simon) for a maid so that Jabez can have an affair with her.  As a result, for seven years, the agreed upon length of time Jabez has before he must die and go to Hell, Jabez is on top of the world.

When Jabez first comes running into the house to tell his mother and Mary about the Hessian gold that he found underneath the barn, Ma Stone is suspicious.  “Most outlandish thing I ever heard tell,” she says.  “Doesn’t seem right somehow.”  Now, we all know that Jane Darwell has played in a lot of movies in which she has down-to-earth common sense and gritty wisdom, but this is a little too much.  On that very morning, the sheriff has stopped by to tell them that they will be thrown off the farm the next day.  They can’t sell the pig because he just broke his leg.  Mary’s tells Jabez the butter money is gone because she needed it to pay the vet to treat the horse.  He decides to sell the bag of seed he was going to use for the spring plowing, but it rips open and spills out onto the mud.  And then, ten minutes after Mary has fallen on her head and was knocked unconscious, Jabez comes running into the house to tell about the Hessian gold he just found.  And yet, Ma Stone suspects something.  Like what?  Does she think Jabez just committed highway robbery?  It’s almost as if she suspects Jabez must have sold his soul to the Devil.  Why accept a natural explanation like buried Hessian gold when there is a perfectly good supernatural explanation ready at hand?

In any event, for seven years Jabez is a happy man.  It is only when his time is up that he starts bellyaching, claiming that he has been cheated, which he has not.  He says, “You promised me prosperity, happiness, love, money, friendship.”  Mr. Scratch replies that all he promised him was money and all that it could buy.  More to the point, Jabez had the love of his wife, but he not only cheated on her, but also mistreated her.  He had friends, but once he got his hands on the money, he started taking advantage of them, until no one liked him anymore.  In short, he becomes such a jerk that we really don’t care if he does go to Hell.

That is what makes the intercession by Daniel Webster seem so unwarranted.  But intercede he does.  After admitting that the document in which Jabez signed over his soul is properly drawn, Webster says, “But you shall not have this man! A man isn’t property!”

This just a touch ironic in light of Webster’s speech promoting the Compromise of 1850 and his support for fugitive slave laws on the grounds that slave owners were entitled to the protection of their property.  However, the year in which this scene takes place is 1847, back when his opposition to slavery in principle was perhaps a bit more credible.  But then, this movie was made in 1941, long after we knew better.  In fact, one might say that Webster had made something of a Faustian bargain himself.  So, maybe he does belong in this movie.

All that may be beside the point, however, because when Webster says that Jabez is a “man,” he probably means a white man.  And not just any white man, but an American citizen.  Since slaves were neither white nor American citizens, their status as property undoubtedly seemed acceptable to him:  “Mr. Stone is an American citizen,” he continues, “and no American citizen may be forced into the service of a foreign prince.”

Mr. Scratch takes exception to the notion that he is a foreigner.  When asked if he is claiming to be an American citizen, he replies:

And who with better right? 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. 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. To tell the truth, Mr. Webster, though I don’t like to boast of it, my name is older in the country than yours.

That much having been established, Webster demands a trial by jury, saying that if he cannot persuade the jury to let Jabez go, then Mr. Scratch gets Webster’s soul too.  The jury consists of wicked Americans who now reside in Hell as the result of once having made the same deal that Jabez has, men such as Captain Kidd and Benedict Arnold.  In addressing the jury, Webster goes on at great length about how wonderful it is to be an American, which is just one long non sequitur.  But then he appeals to the fact that they all wish they had a second chance, so why don’t they give Jabez a second chance?  By doing so, he argues, they will be standing up for freedom, for America.

And so, Jabez is acquitted.  I guess the point of this story is that if you are an American citizen, you can sell your soul to the Devil and get away with it.  Perhaps this is what they mean by American exceptionalism.

Angel Heart is one of my favorite movies.  Unfortunately, I cannot begin to do justice to its style and tone, the music and the imagery, which I always find unnerving.  I might do better discussing the symbolism—the fans, the mirrors, the stairs and elevators—or the clever use of names, but I’ll just stick to the story; for the manner in which it is told can be confusing, and so much so that I was still not sure exactly what happened, even after a third viewing, especially since what we see is not always veridical, owing to distorted memories and perceptions.  For that reason, I believe it will be worthwhile to focus on the logic of the narrative, both as to the sequence of events and the metaphysics of the soul.

One of the problems with the story of Faust, the man in the German legend who sold his soul to the Devil, is that we never understood why anyone would make such a foolish bargain in the first place. A few decades of wealth, power, fame, and sex in exchange for an eternity of suffering the fires of Hell? The story fares much better when understood in the allegorical sense, of course, but it is always better if a story makes sense literally if it is to have much value figuratively.  Angel Heart at least makes an effort to satisfy both requirements.

Johnny Liebling is a crooner who thinks he knows a way to cheat Satan. He makes a pact with him, in which Satan gets Johnny’s soul in exchange for fame as a singer, under the name Johnny Favourite.  Having made the deal and benefited from it, he then performs a ritual that involves cutting the heart out of a soldier and eating it.  By so doing, Johnny is able to get rid of his own soul and replace it with that of the soldier, whose name is Harold Angel.

Let us pause for a moment to consider this.  It is common for those that believe in life after death to suppose that the soul and the body are two distinct entities.  In some versions of Christianity, the soul occupies the body during life on Earth, but when the body dies, the soul goes to an afterworld, like Heaven or Hell, where it will spend eternity.  Some Christians believe the soul will get a new body, others do not.  In either event, the soul is what is essential to the person, so the loss of the body it occupies here on Earth is not lamented.  Likewise, for those that believe in reincarnation, when a person dies, his soul is reborn into another body.  Again, it is the soul that is essential to the person, not the body that it occupies, so that here too the person is said to survive death.

With that in mind, the idea that Johnny acquired Angel’s soul would seem to be the reverse of the usual understanding of the relationship between the soul and the body.  Instead of saying that Harold Angel now has a new body, that of Johnny Favourite, the movie is saying that Johnny Favourite has a new soul, that of Harold Angel.  The identity is a function of the body, not the soul.  But that would seem to call into question the whole notion of immortality.

Let us continue with the narrative before trying to sort this out further.  Since Johnny has gotten rid of his old soul and has now acquired a new one, the one that used to belong to Harold Angel, he has escaped damnation. In addition, he planned to take on the soldier’s identity, allowing him to hide from Satan. As part of the ritual, the soldier’s dog tags are sealed up in a vase. Only if Johnny himself opens the vase himself will the ritual be undone.

Before Johnny can assume the identity of Harold Angel, World War II breaks out. Johnny is drafted and subsequently suffers an injury, which causes him to have amnesia. He spends some time in a hospital, during which he has extensive facial reconstruction.  His friends get him out, but his face is still in bandages, so they don’t know what he looks like with his new face.  They bribe the doctor to falsify records, making it appear that Johnny is still there as a patient. Not knowing what to do with him, they simply drop him off in a crowd of people in Times Square on New Year’s Eve of 1943, hoping that will jog his memory, for it was on a previous New Year’s Eve in Times Square that Johnny had ritually murdered the soldier. As a result of Johnny’s confused memory about acquiring the soul and taking on the identity of Harold Angel, he comes to believe that he is Harold Angel.

Ten years after the war, which is when the movie starts, this Harold Angel (Mickey Roarke), who knows only that he got messed up during the war and was sent home, has become a private detective. As such, he is hired by Louis Cyphre (Robert De Niro) to find Johnny Favourite. Angel does not realize it, but he has been hired by the Devil to find himself. We do not realize it either, at this point, and we are encouraged by the movie to like Angel and to identify with him.  He seems to be a nice guy, and after all, we usually like private detectives in movies.  He even blows bubble gum.

At one point in the movie, Johnny’s daughter Epiphany (Lisa Bonet) says that her mother told her that Johnny “was as close to true evil as she ever wanted to come.”  If this is so, then how is it that Angel is so likeable?  Or, since this is getting confusing, let us say that the when Johnny Favourite acquired the soul of Harold Angel, he became what we shall call Johnny Angel.  Therefore, Johnny Angel is likeable because he has the soul of Harold Angel, who was presumably a likeable person.  But this brings us back to the standard understanding, which is that the essence of the person is the soul, not the body.

Just as an aside, I cannot help but wonder how it makes sense for the Devil to make a pact with someone as evil as Johnny Favourite supposedly was.  Such a person is already destined for Hell, so what does he have to bargain with?  The Devil would naturally want to make a deal for the soul of someone who is a devout Christian, one who believes that Jesus Christ is his savior.  Now, that would be a soul worth the effort.  Why would the Devil waste his time providing all those worldly goodies for someone whose soul he already has in the bag?

Anyway, as Angel starts investigating, he begins experiencing disturbing images from the past. Little by little, he begins to suspect the truth. He is horrified at the idea that he might be Johnny Favourite, and as we have come to like him and identify with him, we are horrified too.

In his desperation to assure himself that he is who he thinks he is, he breaks open the vase, and the dog tags of the real Harold Angel fall out. The spell is broken. At this point, Louis Cyphre appears, announcing that Johnny’s soul now belongs to him.  But wouldn’t the soul to which Louis Cyphre now lays claim be the soul of Harold Angel, not the soul of Johnny Favourite?  The reason Cyphre has been going to all this trouble is that he wants the original soul of Johnny Favourite, not the Harold Angel substitute.

Recent memories that Johnny had distorted are replaced by accurate ones, memories of the gruesome way he murdered people in his effort to keep anyone from finding out that he was Johnny Favourite hiding out as Harold Angel.  And so now we find that this amalgam we are calling Johnny Angel, while being the likeable Harold Angel on the one hand, is also the evil Johnny Favourite on the other, and this evil side surfaces from time to time, something the good side has been unaware of.

Perhaps we are now in a position to interpret what happened in a way that is consistent both with the usual understanding the relationship between the soul and the body, on the one hand, and with the split personality of Johnny Angel, on the other.  When Johnny Favourite acquired the soul of Harold Angel, his own soul did not vanish, but rather remained in Johnny’s body alongside the new one.  When Johnny eventually died, the soul of the hapless Harold Angel would have gone to Hell, while Johnny Favourite’s soul would have passed through the Pearly Gates of Heaven to dwell among the righteous.  But now that the ritual has been undone, Harold Angel’s soul has been released, much in the way the dog tags were released from the vase, and Johnny’s body now has just the one soul, the one he had to begin with.  And that is why he can now remember the murders with such clarity.

Because Johnny had a way to cheat the Devil, this story works on a literal plane.  But a remark made by Louis Cyphre gives this Faustian story a new twist. Cyphre says that Johnny was doomed the minute he cut that boy’s heart out. In other words, all that dabbling in black magic and making a pact with the Devil was just so much hocus-pocus. In itself, it was harmless nonsense, and Johnny would never have gone to Hell for that. It was only when he did something truly evil, when he murdered that soldier, the very act that was supposed to undo the hocus-pocus, that Johnny was damned. By this remark, Cyphre links the literal understanding of this story with its allegorical one.