THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER (1955)
Directed by Charles Laughton
United Artists, 92 minutes, black and white, Not rated.
★★★★
Charles Laughton only directed one film, but his The Night of the Hunter shows up on a lot of lists as the second-best movie in English of all time (after Citizen Kane). It's bit too soaked in mid-20th century Protestant sin to hold up as number two, but it's one heck of a film. The Night of the Hunter is like a mash of Marjoe, Huckleberry Finn, and Cape Fear and had enormous impact on Robert Altman, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Martin Scorsese. Sly homages show up in films from everyone from the Coen Brothers to Spike Lee.
It opens big, with Ben Harper (Peter Graves in a cameo) with seconds to spare before he's arrested for murder and robbery. He has just enough time to hide $10,000 in his daughter Pearl's doll and swear her (Sally Jane Brace) and her older brother John (Billy Chapin) to secrecy of its whereabouts, as they will need the money once he's dead. They can't even tell their mother, Willa (Shelley Winters). That's just the opening tease. Ben will be hanged but before that happens, he shares a cell with the Rev. Harry Powers (Robert Mitchum) who's in the clink for stealing a car.
The story of Powers is based on a real-life counterpart from 1932 and a 1953 Davis Grubb short story. It was adapted for the screen by a more famous writer, James Agee. Powers is a misogynist and serial killer who slathers on religion like a plasterer with a trowel full of Bible verses. He picks up enough from Ben talking in his sleep to head straight for Clarksburg, West Virginia, when he's released. His objective is to marry Willa and find out where the money was stashed. His party trick is to use his self-inflicted knuckle tattoos to discourse on holiness and sin; one hand says LOVE, the other HATE. He believes in this, just not with the moral he spouts. Since this is a 1955 film, there is an inference that Powers is a closeted gay man, though the historical record doesn't indicate he was. In the film, Powers twice registers disgust for lustful women.
The Night of the Hunter is variously categorized as a thriller, a horror film, or a film noir. It's actually a hillbilly Southern Gothic movie, but it certainly shares noir's love of darkness. Mitchum is one of the creepiest film sociopaths I've ever seen, one who does scarier things with psychological terror than any splatter film could hope to duplicate. He is so evil that he could be Satan's body double. You might find one of the film’s themes of a child's innate intuition a bit hard to take, but it's necessary for the plot. The latter third depicts Ben and Pearl's flight down the Ohio River with Powers in slow but relentless pursuit. It's a half hour of tension that has you watching through splayed fingers.
The Ohio River sequences are ironic given that Lillian Gish is one of redemptive figures in the film. She plays the Good Samaritan orphan-gatherer Rachel Cooper. Those who follow film history scuttlebutt might have heard that Gish's famed ice floe scene in Way Down East (1920) was widely thought to be the Ohio River. It was actually filmed near White River Junction, Vermont, but never mind. Gish, who was 62 in 1955, is a combination Mother Hen and a rifle-toting spitfire.
Several small roles stand out. Don Beddoe and Evelyn Varden appear as Walt and Icey Spoon, who make the transition from henpecked husband and busybody matchmaker to would-be lynch mob leaders. They would have been the Falstaffian comic relief, were that role not occupied by James Gleason as Uncle “Birdie” Steptoe, a widower with dreams of getting his scow back on the river. If only it weren't as river worthy as a chunk of lead and he were as good at boat repair as he was at drinking. Normally such roles would be out of place in a spine-chilling film like The Night of the Hunter, but the movie needs a few stress reducers.
Parts of The Night of the Hunter are as dated as a Martin and Lewis coloring book, but it remains a powerful portrait of sheer wickedness. It has been called “expressionistic” film making and certainly bears resemblance to the shadows, moodiness, and distressing themes of German expressionist films from the Weimar Republic. Walter Schumann's score is also eerily expressionistic. The film's religion, good and bad, is too heavily applied to make it a perfect Weimar analogy, but when it works, The Night of the Hunter sticks like a switchblade.
Rob Weir
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