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What in my domain is that?
I meant to watch more seasonally appropriate movies this October, but then real life stepped up to supply the horror instead. Compared with nearly any item in the news lately, spending an hour and forty minutes in the company of the Devil was a relief.
I admit it helps when the Devil is played by Claude Rains. Having previously essayed the apex of heavenly bureaucracy in Alexander Hall's Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941), when offered the complementary chance to plumb the infernal-industrial complex with Archie Mayo's Angel on My Shoulder (1946) he took it deliciously; his Nick may in fact be my favorite screen Adversary, at once a crossroads trickster and a proud fallen angel and a sly stage manager of misfortune, as treacherously irresistible as a bad idea should be. I last saw this movie in 2011 and described it at the time as Mr. Jordan's evil twin: instead of a prizefighter prematurely translated to Heaven and returned to Earth only through some body-swapping celestial sleight of hand, its protagonist is a murdered racketeer offered an escape from Hell in the form of a diabolical substitution. To a Devil shivering in his office because a recent uptick in human morality means fewer stokers for the fires of the Pit, Eddie Kagle (Paul Muni, gloweringly handsome) represents a singular opportunity. First, he was bumped off by a trusted associate on his first day out of prison in four years and he wants revenge. He's already sworn to "crash out" of "the boiler room in the fifty-fifth circle of darkness" where his soul was consigned after a donnybrook with Hell's screws. Second, he bears a remarkable resemblance to a certain Judge Frederick Parker (also Muni, better groomed), an incorruptible crusader with reformist political ambitions whom Nick already holds partly responsible for the "labor shortage." In particular, the judge treats juvenile crime as a social problem instead of a fast track to incarceration—he's interfering with the Devil's future clientele. Silver-haired and silver-tongued, Nick disguises himself as one of his own damned trusties and proposes a deal: if they break out of Hell together, Nick will take care of finding his new best friend the necessary body to inhabit for his revenge on Earth so long as Eddie agrees to use that body to do a favor for Nick. It sounds good to Eddie; he just wants to be corporeal enough to handle a gun. The Prince of Darkness shouldn't have to do anything more than stand back and watch as the gangster's instincts send all the judge's good works down the chute. They ascend from the underworld via a freight elevator loaded with sulfurously hot ash cans and the rest of the movie sits back with popcorn as this seemingly idiot-proof plan absolutely backfires on Nick.
Not altogether surprisingly, my tolerance for default Christian metaphysics has really plummeted in recent years, which means I spent some time after this movie considering why it is that I find it touching and funny rather than anaphylactic—Claude Rains was a treasure, but I've seen movies he couldn't save. It helps that the screenplay by Harry Segall and Roland Kibbee is intelligent as well as witty and specifically free of the stupidity that so often afflicts bodyswap/doppelgänger stories. We learn early on that the honorable Frederick Parker comes from exactly the same kind of abusive slum background as crooked Eddie Kagle; not realizing he should blame demonic possession, his psychiatrist reads the startling break in the judge's behavior as a kind of post-traumatic reversion brought on by the strain of his job and the stress of his run for governor. Eddie is not, as he imagined, sticking it to the thoughtless privilege of "the Thou-Shalt-Not Gang, the Law-and-Order Brigade." He's stepping into his own alternate history, the life of the person he might have been if only a thing or two had been different, and I really appreciate that we never learn what those differences might have been, except that they were obviously nothing as simple as inherent good or evil. There's a clever hint in the abilities of Eddie-as-Parker. For all his criminal reflexes, he's limited by the capacities of his law-abiding body: the judge is a nonsmoking teetotaler, so Eddie's attempts to relax with a cigar and a shot of whiskey end in unconscious ignominy. When it comes to throwing punches, however, Parker's body has no difficulty remembering what to do. "Imagine that," Eddie marvels and mourns as he takes stock of his double's life, tough and upright, loving and well-loved. "I could have had all this—been all this—" He isn't so far from it, though, and the viewer notices before he does. At every turn, Eddie thwarts the Devil's intentions by doing nothing more than being his own stubborn, impulsive, not actually stupid self. Instead of meekly taking a hail of rotten vegetables from his opponent's goons at a campaign rally, he goes for the malefactors with both fists and won't stay down even when Nick implores him to, thereby rendering the judge a hero for life in the eyes of the at-risk kids brought to hear his speech: he demonstrated Captain America levels of Lawful Badass. Next day in his chambers, he's all set to let a couple off a rather gruesome insurance murder in exchange for the appropriate "fix" until he recognizes the woman as his former moll and the man as the reason she used to take "all them trips to Kansas City to see your poor old crippled mother! So this was your mother, eh?" and throws the money back in their faces before witnesses: Nick berates him for a fool, but Parker's sterling reputation is sealed. And though he falls in love, truly and sincerely, with the judge's fiancée Barbara Foster (Anne Baxter) who thinks he's just her lovely Fred in the throes of a nervous breakdown, he refuses to marry her once he understands how wrong it would be to steal another man's life and masquerade his way into his beloved's bed and heart—especially with Nick demurely encouraging him just for once to let the course of true love run smooth. But there's no road to Damascus in Angel on My Shoulder, not even when Eddie, for whom the penny has just dropped on the name "Mephistopheles," tears out of a church to "tell off the Devil!" (The minister responds distractedly, "Good for you, son.") Most importantly to me, I think, there's no redemption in the sense of theology rather than character growth. Nothing Eddie does in his second sojourn on Earth alters his fate in the afterlife, bails him out of his punishment or earns him passage to Heaven. The final scene finds him headed back to Hell—blackmailing the Devil as he goes, sure, but Hell for all eternity just the same. And he does the right thing anyway. Out of love of Barbara and sympathy for Parker, with nothing in it for him but knowing it was the right thing to do. That carries weight with me where more salvation-oriented narratives fall flat. It may not be irrelevant that Segall, who had previously won the Oscar for Best Original Story for Here Comes Mr. Jordan, was Jewish. That emphatic here-and-now-ness, even in a universe where God is understood to exist, feels recognizable to me.
But there is also Claude Rains, whose Devil may not have all the best tunes but certainly gets the best double-talk:
"How long you been down here?"
"Since time immemorial."
"The way you talk, you must have had a good education."
"The most liberal one."
"I only went to third grade."
"I went through the whole gamut of learning. I know everything."
"Stuck on yourself, eh? What's your name?"
"Well, I have a number of aliases. I have a long record under the name of Mephistopheles."
"Greek, eh?"
"Well, there are some who claim I'm more one nation than another, but that's not true, Eddie. I'm of all nations. I play no favorites."
"You look like a con man. Look, Mefipopoulos—"
"Call me Nick."
"You married?"
"Millions of women have adored me."
"Quite a guy with the ladies, huh?"
"I'm a fascinating fellow."
No argument. Mercury as much as Mefisto, he makes his entrance walking undramatically out of a wall of fire, checking the ticker tape and the temperature in an office that looks like a megalithic boardroom as he broods over his latest contest with his "Opponent"; he has a private smile, a musical snicker, and that caressing rough-edged voice that flexes itself like a cat's claws, one moment a confidential velvet murmur, the next as cold and remote as the space between stars. He's sensitive to chills and nervous about heights. He likes to appear where he shouldn't—behind closed doors, on the other sides of trees, until Eddie finally growls at him, "What are you gumshoeing around for?" Backstage at the judge's rally, he drifts merrily along at his protege's elbow until the laughter of a group of ministers sends him fading into the woodwork with his customary expression of blameless irony wiped off his face, recalling Thomas More's proud spirit who cannot endure to be mocked. Neat and unobtrusive in his false prisoner's black, he's always at the edges of the action, never at a loss for a plausible suggestion, until the charm drops without even a blink and the bitter hatred—and still, after all the aeons, the pride and bewilderment and pain: why should these stupid, crawling creatures be God's favored and he the first among angels condemned to fire and eternal defeat?—is there instead. I continue to regret that Rains never played Marlowe's Mephistopheles, or recorded The Screwtape Letters (1942). His last lines are anything but the beginning of a beautiful friendship, but they are right out of a folktale.
I cannot leave this movie without a shout-out to art director Bernard Herzbrun for creating a much weirder Hell than I expected from 1946. It has chains and furnaces and caverns of damned souls sweating in eternal toil, but also blasted volcanic plains and spattering rings of luminous stone, the hot ground seething with dry-sliding smoke and flames gushing up from cracked rock where there's nothing to burn; angularly lit by cinematographer James Van Trees, eerily wrecked and deserted, it's as theatrical as a stage set and frankly too idiosyncratic for me to think of it as camp. I like the sculpted stone map of the world in Nick's office, glittering all across the continents with what the viewer can only assume is the daily index of sins; the orchestra works its way somberly through variations on the Dies Irae. I have an ambivalent relationship with the genre of afterlife fantasy sometimes called the film blanc, but I can always make time for a good trickster and the chance to get better at ethics even when dead. This ascent brought to you by my trusty backers at Patreon.
I admit it helps when the Devil is played by Claude Rains. Having previously essayed the apex of heavenly bureaucracy in Alexander Hall's Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941), when offered the complementary chance to plumb the infernal-industrial complex with Archie Mayo's Angel on My Shoulder (1946) he took it deliciously; his Nick may in fact be my favorite screen Adversary, at once a crossroads trickster and a proud fallen angel and a sly stage manager of misfortune, as treacherously irresistible as a bad idea should be. I last saw this movie in 2011 and described it at the time as Mr. Jordan's evil twin: instead of a prizefighter prematurely translated to Heaven and returned to Earth only through some body-swapping celestial sleight of hand, its protagonist is a murdered racketeer offered an escape from Hell in the form of a diabolical substitution. To a Devil shivering in his office because a recent uptick in human morality means fewer stokers for the fires of the Pit, Eddie Kagle (Paul Muni, gloweringly handsome) represents a singular opportunity. First, he was bumped off by a trusted associate on his first day out of prison in four years and he wants revenge. He's already sworn to "crash out" of "the boiler room in the fifty-fifth circle of darkness" where his soul was consigned after a donnybrook with Hell's screws. Second, he bears a remarkable resemblance to a certain Judge Frederick Parker (also Muni, better groomed), an incorruptible crusader with reformist political ambitions whom Nick already holds partly responsible for the "labor shortage." In particular, the judge treats juvenile crime as a social problem instead of a fast track to incarceration—he's interfering with the Devil's future clientele. Silver-haired and silver-tongued, Nick disguises himself as one of his own damned trusties and proposes a deal: if they break out of Hell together, Nick will take care of finding his new best friend the necessary body to inhabit for his revenge on Earth so long as Eddie agrees to use that body to do a favor for Nick. It sounds good to Eddie; he just wants to be corporeal enough to handle a gun. The Prince of Darkness shouldn't have to do anything more than stand back and watch as the gangster's instincts send all the judge's good works down the chute. They ascend from the underworld via a freight elevator loaded with sulfurously hot ash cans and the rest of the movie sits back with popcorn as this seemingly idiot-proof plan absolutely backfires on Nick.
Not altogether surprisingly, my tolerance for default Christian metaphysics has really plummeted in recent years, which means I spent some time after this movie considering why it is that I find it touching and funny rather than anaphylactic—Claude Rains was a treasure, but I've seen movies he couldn't save. It helps that the screenplay by Harry Segall and Roland Kibbee is intelligent as well as witty and specifically free of the stupidity that so often afflicts bodyswap/doppelgänger stories. We learn early on that the honorable Frederick Parker comes from exactly the same kind of abusive slum background as crooked Eddie Kagle; not realizing he should blame demonic possession, his psychiatrist reads the startling break in the judge's behavior as a kind of post-traumatic reversion brought on by the strain of his job and the stress of his run for governor. Eddie is not, as he imagined, sticking it to the thoughtless privilege of "the Thou-Shalt-Not Gang, the Law-and-Order Brigade." He's stepping into his own alternate history, the life of the person he might have been if only a thing or two had been different, and I really appreciate that we never learn what those differences might have been, except that they were obviously nothing as simple as inherent good or evil. There's a clever hint in the abilities of Eddie-as-Parker. For all his criminal reflexes, he's limited by the capacities of his law-abiding body: the judge is a nonsmoking teetotaler, so Eddie's attempts to relax with a cigar and a shot of whiskey end in unconscious ignominy. When it comes to throwing punches, however, Parker's body has no difficulty remembering what to do. "Imagine that," Eddie marvels and mourns as he takes stock of his double's life, tough and upright, loving and well-loved. "I could have had all this—been all this—" He isn't so far from it, though, and the viewer notices before he does. At every turn, Eddie thwarts the Devil's intentions by doing nothing more than being his own stubborn, impulsive, not actually stupid self. Instead of meekly taking a hail of rotten vegetables from his opponent's goons at a campaign rally, he goes for the malefactors with both fists and won't stay down even when Nick implores him to, thereby rendering the judge a hero for life in the eyes of the at-risk kids brought to hear his speech: he demonstrated Captain America levels of Lawful Badass. Next day in his chambers, he's all set to let a couple off a rather gruesome insurance murder in exchange for the appropriate "fix" until he recognizes the woman as his former moll and the man as the reason she used to take "all them trips to Kansas City to see your poor old crippled mother! So this was your mother, eh?" and throws the money back in their faces before witnesses: Nick berates him for a fool, but Parker's sterling reputation is sealed. And though he falls in love, truly and sincerely, with the judge's fiancée Barbara Foster (Anne Baxter) who thinks he's just her lovely Fred in the throes of a nervous breakdown, he refuses to marry her once he understands how wrong it would be to steal another man's life and masquerade his way into his beloved's bed and heart—especially with Nick demurely encouraging him just for once to let the course of true love run smooth. But there's no road to Damascus in Angel on My Shoulder, not even when Eddie, for whom the penny has just dropped on the name "Mephistopheles," tears out of a church to "tell off the Devil!" (The minister responds distractedly, "Good for you, son.") Most importantly to me, I think, there's no redemption in the sense of theology rather than character growth. Nothing Eddie does in his second sojourn on Earth alters his fate in the afterlife, bails him out of his punishment or earns him passage to Heaven. The final scene finds him headed back to Hell—blackmailing the Devil as he goes, sure, but Hell for all eternity just the same. And he does the right thing anyway. Out of love of Barbara and sympathy for Parker, with nothing in it for him but knowing it was the right thing to do. That carries weight with me where more salvation-oriented narratives fall flat. It may not be irrelevant that Segall, who had previously won the Oscar for Best Original Story for Here Comes Mr. Jordan, was Jewish. That emphatic here-and-now-ness, even in a universe where God is understood to exist, feels recognizable to me.
But there is also Claude Rains, whose Devil may not have all the best tunes but certainly gets the best double-talk:
"How long you been down here?"
"Since time immemorial."
"The way you talk, you must have had a good education."
"The most liberal one."
"I only went to third grade."
"I went through the whole gamut of learning. I know everything."
"Stuck on yourself, eh? What's your name?"
"Well, I have a number of aliases. I have a long record under the name of Mephistopheles."
"Greek, eh?"
"Well, there are some who claim I'm more one nation than another, but that's not true, Eddie. I'm of all nations. I play no favorites."
"You look like a con man. Look, Mefipopoulos—"
"Call me Nick."
"You married?"
"Millions of women have adored me."
"Quite a guy with the ladies, huh?"
"I'm a fascinating fellow."
No argument. Mercury as much as Mefisto, he makes his entrance walking undramatically out of a wall of fire, checking the ticker tape and the temperature in an office that looks like a megalithic boardroom as he broods over his latest contest with his "Opponent"; he has a private smile, a musical snicker, and that caressing rough-edged voice that flexes itself like a cat's claws, one moment a confidential velvet murmur, the next as cold and remote as the space between stars. He's sensitive to chills and nervous about heights. He likes to appear where he shouldn't—behind closed doors, on the other sides of trees, until Eddie finally growls at him, "What are you gumshoeing around for?" Backstage at the judge's rally, he drifts merrily along at his protege's elbow until the laughter of a group of ministers sends him fading into the woodwork with his customary expression of blameless irony wiped off his face, recalling Thomas More's proud spirit who cannot endure to be mocked. Neat and unobtrusive in his false prisoner's black, he's always at the edges of the action, never at a loss for a plausible suggestion, until the charm drops without even a blink and the bitter hatred—and still, after all the aeons, the pride and bewilderment and pain: why should these stupid, crawling creatures be God's favored and he the first among angels condemned to fire and eternal defeat?—is there instead. I continue to regret that Rains never played Marlowe's Mephistopheles, or recorded The Screwtape Letters (1942). His last lines are anything but the beginning of a beautiful friendship, but they are right out of a folktale.
I cannot leave this movie without a shout-out to art director Bernard Herzbrun for creating a much weirder Hell than I expected from 1946. It has chains and furnaces and caverns of damned souls sweating in eternal toil, but also blasted volcanic plains and spattering rings of luminous stone, the hot ground seething with dry-sliding smoke and flames gushing up from cracked rock where there's nothing to burn; angularly lit by cinematographer James Van Trees, eerily wrecked and deserted, it's as theatrical as a stage set and frankly too idiosyncratic for me to think of it as camp. I like the sculpted stone map of the world in Nick's office, glittering all across the continents with what the viewer can only assume is the daily index of sins; the orchestra works its way somberly through variations on the Dies Irae. I have an ambivalent relationship with the genre of afterlife fantasy sometimes called the film blanc, but I can always make time for a good trickster and the chance to get better at ethics even when dead. This ascent brought to you by my trusty backers at Patreon.
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(Also hi.)
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(Also hi.)
I am delighted to have provided you with dinner theater.
(Hello!)
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...except in the obvious film.
I'm sorry. Couldn't resist.
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Well, there I was glad to have heard him!
(That film remains the youngest I have ever seen Rains, technically. The youngest I have ever really seen him is Universal's The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1935), which may or may not be a good completion of an unfinished Dickens novel, but is a great performance by Rains full melodrama ahead.)
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I've written remarkably little about him considering how much I like him. I think it's partly because I saw him in a lot of movies before I started really thinking about film. I wonder what I should rewatch.
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he demonstrated Captain America levels of Lawful Badass. --NICE
The final scene finds him headed back to Hell—blackmailing the Devil as he goes, sure, but Hell for all eternity just the same. And he does the right thing anyway. Out of love of Barbara and sympathy for Parker, with nothing in it for him but knowing it was the right thing to do. --and people like him show how fallacious a morality is that's built on an account book of deeds and thoughts, with goodies or tortures awaiting you--forever!!--at the other end.
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He really is. And an honorable opponent by his own lights, so at least you know how far you can't throw him to trust him.
--and people like him show how fallacious a morality is that's built on an account book of deeds and thoughts, with goodies or tortures awaiting you--forever!!--at the other end.
Yes! It matters so much to see that, I think especially now. Why do good things for other people? Because they need them. Why shouldn't that be enough?
(what better time to use the Hades icon?)
Absolutely.
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I've never seen him be bad in anything, no matter what the anything around him is like, but Angel on My Shoulder is just as charming as he is. Casablanca is where I saw him first, too.
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*steeplefingers, teethface*
Also, this was an excellent review and I liked Claude Rains already.
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I support this plan. I think you could do it, too.
Also, this was an excellent review and I liked Claude Rains already.
Thank you!
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I'm intrigued by the term "film blanc" - are there any examples you can recommend?
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Thank you! I really like it.
I'm intrigued by the term "film blanc" - are there any examples you can recommend?
I don't know much about the genre beyond what I linked! I think of Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941) as the type specimen—its modern yet ancient heavenly bureaucracy surely influenced Powell and Pressburger's more deliberately numinous A Matter of Life and Death (1946), not to mention Jack Benny's apocalyptically goofy The Horn Blows at Midnight (1945). I associate it with afterlives and otherworlds. There was a weird boom of secular angels on film in the 1940's that I think of as sort of the core of film blanc. The website looks as though it includes any non-horror fantasy in the definition and I feel that's a reach.
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he has a private smile, a musical snicker, and that caressing rough-edged voice that flexes itself like a cat's claws, one moment a confidential velvet murmur, the next as cold and remote as the space between stars.
I love this.
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It's in the TCM buffer! I believe it does not expire till tomorrow. You could watch it tonight.
I love this.
He's that good.