By Hank Reineke
My earliest introduction to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s
immortal Faust was not through the
original work of the revered German playwright. Perhaps original work is not
the best description of Goethe’s exploratory tragedy. The premise behind its conception – the
selling of one’s soul to the Devil for personal rewards and glorified ambition
- were based firmly in the tradition of austere Germanic folklore and accompanying
Teutonic condemnation. This allegorical fable
has formed the basis of so many subsequent films, books, and television scenarios,
that the concept has now passed into cliché.
My earliest encounter with a Faustian fable was likely Stephen Vincent Benét’s 1936 celebrated
short story The Devil and Daniel Webster. Benét’s tale transported the misguided and
tragic exchange of souls from Goethe’s grim, decaying German village to the
rugged hills and blue skies of New Hampshire. Benét’s short story was simply one more link in a long tradition. His tale was inspired by an earlier (1824) Washington
Irving short story also inarguably Faustian in execution.
One of my favorite films from childhood was RKO’s Academy
Award winning production of The Devil and
Daniel Webster (1941), which featured Walter Huston as the titular demon. If the fresh air setting of The Devil and Daniel Webster was
filtered almost completely through a prism of Americana, F.W. Murnau’s silent
epic Faust: a German Folktale (1926) is
most certainly its grim progenitor, one mirroring the darkest impulses of pre-War
Weimar Republic Germany. Working closely
from the storyboard charcoal sketches and ink and pencil concept drawings of his
imaginative expressionistic set designers Robert Herlth and Walter Röhrig, his
production of Faust Murnau would effectively
create a visually sodden and nightmarish world.
The film begins with a brilliantly choreographed
celestial argument between a gleaming, white-winged Archangel and a series of
Devils (the “Three Scourges of Hellâ€). The former champions the notion that man is essentially righteous and of
good will. The Devil’s cynically counter
– sadly, perhaps more realistically - that “No man can resist evil.†Choosing to test their argument, the Devil’s
wager they can tempt and transform a good man such as the humble, learned Faust
into a selfish, self-interested individual, motivated only by his personal
pleasures.
Faust (played by Swede Gösta Ekman) is a doctor and a
well-intentioned man of science, frail, elderly, and long-bearded. He is spending his golden years in a humble
garret, warmed by a hearth and surrounded by the piles of books accumulated over
a lifetime. These books, essentially,
signify the collective knowledge of man. Though he is also a dabbling alchemist, there’s no notion he’s
interested in the accumulation of gold in pursuit of riches and comfort. He’s more interested in the exacting exercise
of scientific formula.