The 1935 Fox Films Dante’s Inferno (directed by Harry Lachman) traces the rise and fall of an entrepreneur. Its protagonist, Jim Carter (played by Spencer Tracy), begins the story as a stoker on a cruise liner. The narrative opens with a burst of flames from the ship’s boiler, and the ensuing scene goes on to show the protagonist competing at shovelling coal for a bet in the sweltering engine-room. Interspersed are shots of the superstructure directly above with a number of elegant and vapid passengers following the game below. This initial sequence thus concisely conveys the main features of the film’s social agenda through imagery that anticipates that of two of its later ‘infernal’ sequences. Having won the game but lost his job — and now in search of employment in an amusement park — Carter encounters ‘Dante’s Inferno’ as an educational sideshow run by the idealistic but unbusinesslike ‘Pop’ McWade and his niece, Betty. He decides to ‘put Hell on a paying basis’, takes over Pop’s ailing enterprise, marries Betty, drives another stall-operator out of business and into suicide, and continues to develop his grand new ‘Inferno Concession’. From then on, his increasingly ambitious projects start to go disastrously and edifyingly wrong. For instance, his new hell concession contravenes building regulations (he has bribed the inspector) and its structure collapses, severely injuring Pop. From his hospital bed Pop shows his protégé a copy of Inferno with illustrations by Gustave Doré (first published in 1861–66), describing it as a ‘message’ to ‘those who live ruthlessly’ and warning him that ‘[l]ike you, Dante found himself on the wrong road’.
Keywords: Alighieri, Dante – Divina Commedia – Inferno; productive reception; film adaptations; Lachman, Harry – Dante’s Inferno; ethics; motion pictures; capital market
Part of Metamorphosing Dante Containing:
Frontmatter / Manuele Gragnolati, Fabio Camilletti, Fabian Lampart
Metamorphosing Dante / Fabio Camilletti, Manuele Gragnolati, Fabian Lampart
Dante’s ‘Strangeness’: The Commedia and the late Twentieth-Century Debate on the Literary Canon / Federica Pich
Irish Dante: Yeats, Joyce, Beckett / Piero Boitani
Dante as a Gay Poet / Nicola Gardini
Dante’s Inferno and Walter Benjamin’s Cities: Considerations of Place, Experience, and Media / Angela Merte-Rankin
‘Il mal seme d’Adamo’: Dante’s Inferno and the Problem of the Literary Representation of Evil in Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus and Wolfgang Koeppen’s Der Tod in Rom / Florian Trabert
‘Una modesta Divina Commedià’: Dante as Anti-Model in Cesare Pavese’s La luna e i falò / Tristan Kay
Reclaiming Paradiso: Dante in the Poetry of James Merrill and Charles Wright / Rachel Jacoff
‘Perché mi vinse il lume d’esta stella’: Giovanni Giudici’s Rewriting of Dante’s Paradiso for the Theatre / Erminia Ardissino
Per-tras-versionidantesche: Post-Paradisiacal Constellations in the Poetry of Vittorio Sereni and Andrea Zanzotto / Francesca Southerden
Human Desire, Deadly Love: The Vita Nova in Gide, Delay, Lacan / Fabio Camilletti
Wives and Lovers in Dante and Eugenio Montale / Rebecca West
Man with Snake: Dante in Derek Jarman’s Edward II / James Miller
Rewriting Dante after Freud and the Shoah: Giorgio Pressburger’s Nel regno oscuro / Manuele Gragnolati
‘Misi me per l’alto mare aperto’: Personality and Impersonality in Virginia Woolf’s Reading of Dante’s Allegorical Language / Teresa Prudente
‘Hell on a Paying Basis’: Morality, the Market, and the Movies in Harry Lachman’s Dante’s Inferno (1935)
From Giorgio Agamben’s Italian Category of ‘Comedy’ to ‘Profanation’ as the Political Task of Modernity: Ingravallo’s Soaring Descent, or Dante according to Carlo Emilio Gadda / Manuela Marchesini
Literary Heresy: The Dantesque Metamorphosis of LeRoi Jones into Amiri Baraka / Dennis Looney
Transferring Dante: Robert Rauschenberg’s Thirty-Four Illustrations for the Inferno / Antonella Francini
‘Anzichè allargare, dilaterai!’: Allegory and Mimesis from Dante’s Comedy to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s La Divina Mimesis / Davide Luglio
A Cardboard Dante: Hell’s Metropolis Revisited / Ronald de Rooy
Backmatter / Manuele Gragnolati, Fabio Camilletti, Fabian Lampart
Title
‘Hell on a Paying Basis’
Subtitle
Morality, the Market, and the Movies in Harry Lachman’s Dante’s Inferno (1935)
Author(s)
Nick Havely
Identifier
Description
The 1935 Fox Films Dante’s Inferno (directed by Harry Lachman) traces the rise and fall of an entrepreneur. Its protagonist, Jim Carter (played by Spencer Tracy), begins the story as a stoker on a cruise liner. The narrative opens with a burst of flames from the ship’s boiler, and the ensuing scene goes on to show the protagonist competing at shovelling coal for a bet in the sweltering engine-room. Interspersed are shots of the superstructure directly above with a number of elegant and vapid passengers following the game below. This initial sequence thus concisely conveys the main features of the film’s social agenda through imagery that anticipates that of two of its later ‘infernal’ sequences. Having won the game but lost his job — and now in search of employment in an amusement park — Carter encounters ‘Dante’s Inferno’ as an educational sideshow run by the idealistic but unbusinesslike ‘Pop’ McWade and his niece, Betty. He decides to ‘put Hell on a paying basis’, takes over Pop’s ailing enterprise, marries Betty, drives another stall-operator out of business and into suicide, and continues to develop his grand new ‘Inferno Concession’. From then on, his increasingly ambitious projects start to go disastrously and edifyingly wrong. For instance, his new hell concession contravenes building regulations (he has bribed the inspector) and its structure collapses, severely injuring Pop. From his hospital bed Pop shows his protégé a copy of Inferno with illustrations by Gustave Doré (first published in 1861–66), describing it as a ‘message’ to ‘those who live ruthlessly’ and warning him that ‘[l]ike you, Dante found himself on the wrong road’.
Is Part Of
Place
Vienna
Publisher
Turia + Kant
Date
2011
Subject
Alighieri, Dante – Divina Commedia – Inferno
productive reception
film adaptations
Lachman, Harry – Dante’s Inferno
ethics
motion pictures
capital market
Rights
© by the author(s)
This version is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Bibliographic Citation
Nick Havely, ‘‘Hell on a Paying Basis’: Morality, the Market, and the Movies in Harry Lachman’s Dante’s Inferno (1935)’, in Metamorphosing Dante: Appropriations, Manipulations, and Rewritings in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, ed. by Manuele Gragnolati, Fabio Camilletti, and Fabian Lampart, Cultural Inquiry, 2 (Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2011), pp. 269–84 <https://doi.org/10.25620/ci-02_16>
Language
en-GB
page start
269
page end
284
Source
Metamorphosing Dante: Appropriations, Manipulations, and Rewritings in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, ed. by Manuele Gragnolati, Fabio Camilletti, and Fabian Lampart, Cultural Inquiry, 2 (Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2011), pp. 269–84
Format
application/pdf

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Cite as: Nick Havely, ‘‘Hell on a Paying Basis’: Morality, the Market, and the Movies in Harry Lachman’s Dante’s Inferno (1935)’, in Metamorphosing Dante: Appropriations, Manipulations, and Rewritings in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, ed. by Manuele Gragnolati, Fabio Camilletti, and Fabian Lampart, Cultural Inquiry, 2 (Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2011), pp. 269–84 <https://doi.org/10.25620/ci-02_16>