A few months before filming began on The Night of the Hunter, Laurence Olivier learned about the film and campaigned heavily to play Preacher Powell, even though Mitchum was already cast in the role. Laughton was quite upset by the situation but United Artists agreed that Mitchum's name was more bankable than Olivier's when it came to ticket sales. Initially, Laughton had asked his wife, Elsa Lanchester, to play Miz Cooper but she didn't want to do it, the main reason being that it would put her in a "hypersensitive" situation with her husband.

Betty Grable was Laughton's first choice to play Willa, the role that eventually went to Shelley Winters. Teresa Wright was also considered for the part as well.

The Night of the Hunter was actor Charles Laughton's only directorial effort. Starting out on the British stage in 1926, he had been acting in film since 1928 and came to Hollywood in the early '30s. A portly, homely man with very particular idiosyncrasies and affectations, he was an unlikely candidate for movie stardom. Nevertheless he gave several unforgettable performances in popular and acclaimed American and British films of the decade, among them the imperious father in The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934), the fish-out-of-water valet in the comedy Ruggles of Red Gap (1935), Inspector Javert in Les Miserables (1935), and the title roles in Rembrandt (1936) and The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939). He was nominated for an Oscar® as Captain Bligh in Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) and won Best Actor as the British monarch in The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933). He also portrayed the reluctant Roman Emperor in Joseph von Sternberg's aborted I, Claudius (1937), one of the most legendary of all "lost films." Laughton continued acting into his sixties in such pictures as The Canterville GhostThe Paradine Case (1947), as Henry VIII again in Young Bess (1953), Spartacus (1960), and his final movie, Advise and Consent (1962). He received another Best Actor Oscar® nomination as the irrepressible barrister in Billy Wilder's Witness for the Prosecution (1957), in which he appeared with his wife of many years (although he was known to be homosexual), Elsa Lanchester.

Eager to continue the collaboration begun with Laughton on The Night of the Hunter, producer Paul Gregory bought the film rights to Norman Mailer's war novel, The Naked and the Dead. Laughton was at first eager to do it; he worked with Stanley Cortez on ideas for cinematography and sent him to Hawaii to scout locations. He hired the Sanders brothers to help him develop a script. But after six months, it became apparent Laughton was drawing the process out too long for undetermined reasons. Nevertheless, Norman Mailer wrote later about what he learned from him: "He gave me, in fact, a marvelous brief education in the problems of a movie director, as he would explain to me, sometimes patiently, sometimes at the edge of his monumental impatience, how certain scenes which worked in the book just weren't feasible for the movie." The story was eventually brought to the screen in 1958 - the only other movie Paul Gregory ever produced - with Raoul Walsh directing.

Cinematographer Stanley Cortez is the brother of actor Ricardo Cortez, who started out in the 1920s as a Valentino-like Latin Lover. Stanley Cortez's Oscar®-nominated photography for Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) solidified his reputation as a masterful black-and-white cinematographer. Among his other work is Since You Went Away (1944), The Three Faces of Eve (1957), and Samuel Fuller's Shock Corridor (1963). He won the Film Critics of America award in 1942 for The Magnificent Ambersons and a lifetime achievement award from the American Society of Cinematographers in 1990.

When Robert Mitchum first learned that Shelley Winters had won the part of Willa Harper, he said, "She looks and sounds as much like a wasted West Virginia girl as I do. The only bit she'll do convincingly is to float in the water with her throat cut."

Billy Chapin is the brother of TV child star Lauren Chapin (Father Knows Best).

James Gleason (Uncle Birdie) appeared with Charles Laughton in the film Tales of Manhattan (1942).

Laughton's uncredited assistants on the picture, Terry and Dennis Sanders, had only one short film to their credit before working on this - A Time Out of War (1954). They went on to film careers of their own, with Terry producing many of his brother's pictures, most of which were B-movies like Crime and Punishment USA (1959) and War Hunt (1962). Dennis Sanders' most notable work was the concert documentary, Elvis: That's the Way It Is (1970).

To promote the movie, Robert Mitchum and Shelley Winters did a guest shot on The Ed Sullivan Show in the spring of 1955. Winters recounted in her autobiography how the stress of doing live television caused Mitchum to drink and caused her to become "shrill and numb." The two got into costume - with Mitchum displaying the words "love" and "hate" on his hands - and performed their scene quite badly. Winters said she stuttered and lapsed into "Brooklynese," while Mitchum spoke so quietly their microphones had to be cranked up so loud "millions of viewers across the U.S. could hear our stomachs rumble." During the scene, according to Winters, Mitchum held up the wrong hand to illustrate a point about love and hate, and the audience laughed.

The children's father was played by Peter Graves, brother of James (star of TV's Gunsmoke series) Arness and perhaps best known for his role as Jim Phelps on the TV series Mission: Impossible and as Capt. Oveur in the comedy Airplane! (1980).

Lillian Gish is probably best known for her films with D.W. Griffith, the pioneer of American cinema - The Birth of a Nation (1915), Intolerance (1916), Orphans of the Storm (1921). Before appearing in The Night of the Hunter, she hadn't made a film since Portrait of Jennie (1948). Her remarkable career stretched from 1912 to her last film, The Whales of August (1987).

FAMOUS QUOTES from THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER

MOVIE TAGLINE: "The wedding night, the anticipation, the kiss, the knife, but above allÉthe suspense!"

RACHEL COOPER (Lillian Gish): "Beware of false prophets which come to you in sheep's clothing. But inwardly they are ravenous wolves."

HARRY POWELL (Robert Mitchum): "Now what's it to be, Lord, another widow? How many's it been? Six? Twelve?"

HARRY POWELL: "Lord, I am tired. Sometimes I wonder if you really understand. Not that you mind the killings. Your book is full of killings. But there are things you hate, Lord. Perfume-smelling things. Lacey things. Things with curly hair."

BEN HARPER (Peter Graves): "I robbed that bank cause I got tired of seeing children roaming the woodlands without food. Children roaming the highways in this here Depression. Children sleeping in old abandoned car bodies and junk heaps. And I promised myself I'd never see the day when my young'uns would want."

HARRY POWELL: "I come not with peace, but with a sword."

BEN HARPER: "What religion you profess, preacher?"
HARRY POWELL: "The religion the Almighty and me worked out betwixt us."

HARRY POWELL: "H-A-T-E. It was with this left hand that ol' brother Cain struck the blow that laid his brother low. L-O-V-E. You see these fingers, dear hearts, these fingers has veins that run straight to the soul of man, the right hand, friends, the hand of love. Now watch and I'll show you the story of life. These fingers, dear hearts, is always warrin' and tuggin', one agin the other. Now watch Ôem. Ol' brother left hand, left hand Hate's a fighter and it looks like Love's a goner. But wait a minute, wait a minute! Hot dog! Love's a winnin', yessiree. It's Love that won and ol' left hand's down for the count!"

ICEY SPOON: "When you been married to a man 40 years, you know all that don't amount to a hill o' beans. I been married to my Walt that long and I swear, in all that time I just lie there thinkin' about my cannin'. A woman's a fool to marry for that. That's something for a man. The good Lord never meant for a decent woman to want that, not really want it. It's all just a fake and a pipe dream."

WILLA HARPER (Shelley Winters): "I feel clean now. My whole body's just a quiverin' with cleanness."

HARRY POWELL: "You thought, Willa, that the minute you walked through that door I'd start pawin' at you in that abominable way men are supposed to do on their weddin' night. É Look at yourself. What do you see, girl? You see the body of a woman, the temple of creation and motherhood. You see the flesh of Eve that man since Adam has profaned. That body was meant for begettin' children. It was not meant for the lust of men. You want more children, Willa?"
W ILLA HARPER: "IÉno."
HARRY POWELL: "It's the business of this marriage to mind those two you have now, not to beget more."

WILLA HARPER: "Help me to be clean, so I can be what Harry wants me to be."

HARRY POWELL: "Don't touch my knife. That makes me mad, that makes me very mad."

RACHEL COOPER: "She'll be losin' her mind to a tricky mouth and a full moon, and like as not I'll be saddled with the consequences."

RACHEL COOPER: "I'm a strong tree with branches for many birds. I'm good for somethin' in this world and I know it, too."

RACHEL COOPER: "It's a hard world for little things."

Compiled by Rob Nixon