SYNOPSIS

In the depths of the Great Depression of the 1930s in the rural South, Ben Harper has committed murder while robbing a bank to get enough money to keep his family from being hungry and homeless. Awaiting hanging, Harper shares a cell with Harry Powell, a deranged, self-appointed preacher with the words LOVE and HATE tattooed on his knuckles. Harry, temporarily in the pen for car theft, tries to get Harper to tell him where he hid the cash, but all he learns is the location of Harper's family. When he's released from jail, Harry goes to the town and seduces Harper's widow, Willa, into marriage, despite the suspicions of her young son, John. Although John's little sister Pearl also adores and trusts the preacher, John reminds her they swore to their father never to reveal the hiding place of the stolen money. The Reverend Powell soon reveals his true intentions and begins tormenting the kids in an effort to learn their secret. When the na•ve Willa discovers her husband threatening John and Pearl, Harry kills her and dumps her body in the river. The children escape with the money hidden in Pearl's doll, and Harry takes off after them.

Director: Charles Laughton
Producer: Paul Gregory
S creenplay: James Agee, Charles Laughton (uncredited), based on the novel by Davis Grubb
Cinematography: Stanley Cortez
Editor: Robert Golden
Art Direction: Hilyard Brown
Music: Walter Schumann
Cast: Robert Mitchum (Rev. Harry Powell), Shelley Winters (Willa Harper), Lillian Gish (Rachel Cooper), James Gleason (Birdie Steptoe), Evelyn Varden (Icey Spoon), Billy Chapin (John Harper), Jane Bruce (Pearl Harper), Peter Graves (Ben Harper), Don Beddoe (Walt Spoon).
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Why THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER is Essential

A simple recount of the story of The Night of the Hunter cannot do justice to this unique film, often considered one of the most extraordinary contributions to American cinema. Directing a movie for the first and only time, British actor Charles Laughton creates a poetic and unusual parable of greed, corruption, and redemption in a visual and rhythmic style that consciously echoes both German Expressionism and the films of cinema pioneer D.W. Griffith. Aided by former Griffith star and muse Lillian Gish, stunning imagery from renowned cinematographer Stanley Cortez, and evocative music by Walter Schumann, Laughton transformed Davis Grubb's novel into the closest thing to a gothic fairy tale ever put on film. All the classic elements of that form are there - dead parents, a wicked guardian, children in peril, a secret that must be guarded at all cost, a magical journey through a world populated by animals and shadows, the longing for the peace and safety of home, and a fairy godmother figure (Gish) who brings a resolution to the story and redemption for the children.

"It's really a nightmarish sort of Mother Goose tale we were telling," Laughton said. "We tried to surround the children with creatures they might have observed, and that might have seemed part of a dream. It was, in a way, a dream for them."

Laughton worked with James Agee on the screenplay for The Night of the Hunter but the famous author of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men had a severe drinking problem (he died the same year) and the screenplay he delivered was a mammoth script by Hollywood standards that Laughton had to whittle down to an acceptable length. Luckily, Laughton had a more positive experience with his second-unit directors, Terry and Denis Sanders, whose documentary film, A Time Out of War (1954) won an Oscar, and cinematographer, Stanley Cortez. The latter once remarked: "Apart from The Magnificent Ambersons, the most exciting experience I have had in the cinema was with Charles Laughton on Night of the Hunter..every day I consider something new about light, that incredible thing that can't be described. Of the directors I've worked with, only two have understood it: Orson Welles and Charles Laughton."

Although critical reaction was generally favorable, the film was a commercial flop on its release, and it's not hard to understand why. One of the strangest movies in American film history, it was a total anomaly in the midst of the 1950s. It was an adult story told through the eyes of children, an almost Biblical tale steeped in barely suppressed sex and violence with elements of pure horror and touches of macabre humor. Yet images from the movie remain in the mind's eye long after viewing it - the preacher pursuing the children up the cellar stairs like the Frankenstein monster; the dead mother in her car at the bottom of the river, her long blond hair swaying in the current with the underwater vegetation; the deliberately unrealistic look of the journey down river with animals dominating the forefront of the image as they seem to watch the strange figures adrift in their boat; the unexpected and terrifying appearance of the preacher on his stolen horse silhouetted on the horizon; the face of Gish appearing in a starry sky in the film's finale.

For all these poetic and almost ethereal qualities, film scholars have noted the intense physicality of The Night of the Hunter, not only in its juxtaposition of light and shadow but in the harsh emptiness of the depressed rural towns against the eerie nighttime river landscape. The film may also be seen as a child-like vision of the confusing and contradictory nature of sex and the trap inherent in denying it or burying it under false religiosity. The children's widowed young mother, trapped in a small-minded gossip-ridden town, is easy prey for the repressed and tortured preacher with his condemnation of lust (even as his pocket knife bursts with fury through his clothes at the first stirring of desire). She is so swayed by what she believes is true religious fervor, she willingly accepts both sexual rejection by the preacher and her own murder as salvation. On the other hand there is the benevolent Rachel, who spouts Bible verses about compassion and forgiveness and does not condemn. She wants to protect her blossoming young ward Ruby from making mistakes she'll regret, but she also presents the girl with an eye-catching brooch that acknowledges her need to feel attractive and adult. The most honestly religious or spiritual voice in the movie, she looks on the temptations and realities of the physical world with a gentle bemusement.

Much of the film's power, however, is due to the incredible central performance of Robert Mitchum. Making full use of his tough-guy image and sleepy-eyed sexuality while equally playing against it, the persona he and Laughton create for the preacher is that of a brutal coward and a repressed psychotic. Many observers - Mitchum included - consider this his most complex and rich performance. One thing is certain, however - he's one of the most terrifying characters in cinema, worthy of taking his place beside any of the monsters lurking under the beds or in the minds of children scared and bewildered by the world around them.

The Night of the Hunter had to wait several decades before it took its rightful place alongside other revered works of the American cinema like John Ford's The Searchers (1956) and Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958). It was the sole directorial effort of actor Charles Laughton and he took the film's commercial failure very hard, abandoning any future plans to direct another film.

by Rob Nixon & Jeff Stafford