All That Money Can Buy

All That Money Can Buy (1941), also known as The Devil and Daniel Webster, is a fantasy drama from William Dieterle you can watch online on iFILM. It's an American spin on the Faust legend, replanted on the struggling farms of 19th-century New England.

Drowning in debt, farmer Jabez Stone blurts out that he'd trade his soul for a little money. A courtly stranger named Mr. Scratch takes him up on it — seven years of prosperity in exchange for that soul. The crops come in, the barn fills with gold, and Stone slowly trades away his conscience, his friends and his family's love. When the bill comes due, only the famed orator and senator Daniel Webster will argue his case, in a midnight trial judged by the damned.

Adapted from Stephen Vincent Benét's short story, the film belongs to Walter Huston, whose sly, almost likable devil earned him an Oscar nomination. The eerie score is Bernard Herrmann's, and it handed him the only Academy Award he ever took home. A gothic parable about the price of greed that still bites eighty years on. Stream The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941) online on iFILM.