How to explain the appeal of this movie? I don't know if I can, but I'll try:

1. It was directed by William Dieterle--who has been ignored for far too long. Andrew Sarris, snotty auteur theorist bastard that he is (was?), consigned Dieterle to the Purgatory of "lightly likeable" directors, largely because his output was too varied to reveal any perverse stylistic tics (that's not how Sarris puts it, but that's what it amounts to...) It's true that, when he first got to Hollywood (from Germany) in the early thirties, Dieterle churned out Warner Brothers product like everyone else on the lot. Although, even there, he did manage to make some distinctive movies, movies that took the Warner genres and played intense variations on the very things that made even the studio's run-of-the-mill stuff interesting--such as Fog Over Frisco, which is often mentioned as the "fastest film ever made", virtually a 75-minute montage (sounds great hunh?--I think so too, but I've never seen it, and am not likely to, unless PBS decides to show it one day...) ; and Juarez, which takes the crusading great man biopic into strange realms of schizophrenic narration--the two separate storylines were filmed independently of each other and blended together in the editing room in such a way that the titular figure (played by Paul Muni), despite never doing anything but the "right thing", comes off as a callous bastard, rather than a hero (Bette Davis flipping out in Louis-Napoleon's chambers has a lot to do with this!). Anyway, once Dieterle left Warners, his career gets really interesting! First, he did the expressionistic Hunchback of Notre Dame, which has to be seen to be believed. Then came D&DW, with its misty New England sets, brilliant montages, frenetically haunted dances, crazy score (Bernard Herrmann) and unhinged Walter Huston performance... The film is often called an "American Faust", as if that explained anything! What never gets discussed is how the Faust legend had to be changed in order to fit it into an American context! Dieterle (a German who had witnessed the rise of Nazism) is offering the world the hope that the American discourse of individual rights--guaranteed by contract-- is a possible way out of the old-world script of inevitable power-relationships and infinite longing, as dramatized by Faust. Astonishingly, when critics deal with this at all, they act like all that legal stuff that gets tacked onto the story comes about by accident, or as the result of some misguided desire for a "happy ending". Later, in Dieterle's filmography, we come to a run of fascinating, otherworldly meditations on romance and the limits of its transformative power, from Love Letters through I'll Be Seeing You and Portrait of Jennie and Rope of Sand to September Affair (which is weaker than those which preceded it,but still interesting) . And there you have it, Mr. Sarris, a theme!!!! But perhaps that wasn't a good enough theme for him! John Ford and his idiotic ramblings about men and their codes of honour are much more interesting, right? Oh yeah, sure... I am indebted to my friend Jamie for articulating something I had always instinctively felt: i.e. that Dieterle, Borzage, and even Capra(!) have suffered throughout the history of film criticism, because the cahier de cinema people who pretty much invented the discipline were basically a bunch of misogynists who were quite happy to watch Hitchcock humiliate his actresses, but had little time for sensitive explorations of the dynamic between romantic partners (which they viewed as sentimental, apolitical trash). In today's academic climate, oddly enough, the same old pantheon remains pretty much intact, because the people studying the films are out gunning for Ford, Hitchcock, Hawks and their masculinist aesthetic--and movies by men that treat women seriously would just weaken their theses...