MovieChat Forums > The Devil and Daniel Webster Discussion > Who was on the jury?

Who was on the jury?

posted 14 years ago by Pamactress
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Ernest Hemingway, Truman Capote, Jacqueline Susann, Mario Puzo, and Oscar Wilde were specifically identified. Was anyone able to recognize who the additional jurors were supposed to be?

I remember in the old Walter Huston/Edward Arnold film that the jurors were referred to as a "jury of the damned," e.g., Benedict Arnold. Is that the case here as well? Are the writers suggesting that Wilde, Capote et al are in the same league as traitors and murderers? Since several of the writers included were notorious homosexuals, is there some implied criticism of homosexuality here? Unusual, in Hollywood.

[–] Gluck-3 14 years ago

I don't think the filmmakers cared about paying tribute to the older film, and the "jury of the damned" idea was most likely replaced with simply stuffing the jury with recognizable authors of note, for the fun of it. (Perhaps with the possible exception of Jacqueline Susann.) While the homosexual theory is interesting, I'd highly doubt there was any anti-gay malice in mind, and the fact that a good several of the identified authors were gay was just a coincidence. (I mean -- come on. Reason tells us that Hollywood types would be especially sensitive toward gays.)

I could see an effort to present suitably "famous" writers was made with the unidentified authors in the back row, given their various costumes, but no one was instantly obvious to me. (And it didn't help that the images flew too fast.) For those who aren't experts on the likenesses of celebrity authors, probably one would need to freeze-frame and make a bit of a study. In the front row, the woman sitting next to Mario Puzo (she even got a close-up at one point) struck me as Emily Dickinson.

Exploring the "jury of the damned" idea, it kind of makes sense to people the jury with villainous types, because who would have had the clout to call heaven, to get the good spirits to participate? These dead folks were identified in the film as those from the "other world," but the only other world the key participants could have direct access to would be those from hell. And if the jury consisted of parties from hell, wouldn't this have been a fixed jury? (The bad people would be in cahoots with the Devil, wouldn't they?) And if by some lark, the dead from heaven could be summoned, wouldn't the "prosecutor" -- played by Jennifer Love Hewitt, whose character was actually supposed to be the Devil incarnate -- have rejected such jurists? After all, wouldn't the ones from heaven have a built-in bias against the Devil?

For another matter, if Jennifer Love Hewitt was the actual Devil, do you think there could have been "some implied criticism of" women here?

The lesson: sometimes viewers need to go with the flow, and not read too deeply into such matters.