Nature of Good & Evil in Film

A strong sense of imagery related to an equally strong sense of the nature of good and evil can be found in William Dieterle's The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941) and Francis Coppola's The Godfather: Part II (1972). These films seem unrelated otherwise--one is set in rural New Hampshire, the other in the urban world of gangsters in the late 1950s and early 1960s; one has fantasy elements, the other is firmly set in reality and history. Both films have a strong sense of the spiritual and of the nature of the evil that opposes it, however, and both make good use of the every element of filmmaking at their disposal.

Dieterle's film is based on a short story by Stephen Vincent Benet, and Dieterle brings his capability with German Expressionism to a rural setting to create a world that never existed and make it very believable. It is evident from the beginning of this film that the course of the story will be unusual, for the first thing we see is a silhouette of the devil trying to tempt Daniel Webster from the path of righteousness as the American orator is writing a speech. The composition and the lighting in this sequence show the scene to be a deliberate evocation of characteristics rather than reality. Webster sits at a desk with a quill pen writing on a large pad of paper, and the background is not realistic but sets the orator and his desk in a sort of limbo, separated from the rest of the world. The devil is heard in a whisper that makes it clear he is intruding in

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