Charles Laughton’s “The Night of the Hunter” (1955) is one
of the greatest of all American films, but has never received the attention it
deserves because of its lack of the proper trappings. Many “great movies” are
by great directors, but Laughton directed only this one film, which was a
critical and commercial failure long overshadowed by his acting career. Many
great movies use actors who come draped in respectability and prestige, but
Robert Mitchum has always been a raffish outsider. And many great movies are
realistic, but “Night of the Hunter” is an expressionistic oddity, telling its
chilling story through visual fantasy. People don’t know how to categorize it,
so they leave it off their lists.
Yet what a compelling, frightening and beautiful film it is! And
how well it has survived its period. Many films from the mid-1950s, even the
good ones, seem somewhat dated now, but by setting his story in an invented
movie world outside conventional realism, Laughton gave it a timelessness. Yes,
the movie takes place in a small town on the banks of a river. But the town
looks as artificial as a Christmas card scene, the family’s house with its
strange angles inside and out looks too small to live in, and the river becomes
a set so obviously artificial it could have been built for a completely
stylized studio film like “Kwaidan” (1964).
Everybody
knows the Mitchum character, the sinister “Reverend” Harry Powell. Even those
who haven’t seen the movie have heard about the knuckles of his two hands, and
how one has the letters H-A-T-E tattooed on them, and the other the letters
L-O-V-E. Bruce Springsteen drew on those images in his song “Cautious
Man”:
“On his right hand Billy’d tattooed the word “love” and on his left hand
was the word “fear” And in which hand he held his fate was never clear”
Many
movie lovers know by heart the Reverend’s famous explanation to the wide-eyed
boy (“Ah, little lad, you’re staring at my fingers. Would you like me to
tell you the little story of right-hand/left-hand?”) And the scene where the
Reverend stands at the top of the stairs and calls down to the boy and his
sister has become the model for hundred other horror scenes.
But
does this familiarity give “The Night of the Hunter” the recognition it
deserves? I don’t think so because those famous trademarks distract from its
real accomplishment. It is one of the most frightening of movies, with one of
the most unforgettable of villains, and on both of those scores it holds up as
well after four decades as I expect “The Silence of the Lambs” to do
many years from now.
The
story, somewhat rearranged: In a prison cell, Harry Powell discovers the secret
of a condemned man (Peter Graves), who has hidden $10,000somewhere around his
house. After being released from prison, Powell seeks out the man’s widow,
Willa Harper (Shelley Winters), and two children, John (Billy Chapin) and the
owl-faced Pearl (Sally Jane Bruce). They know where the money is, but don’t
trust the “preacher.” But their mother buys his con game and marries him,
leading to a tortured wedding night inside a high-gabled bedroom that looks a
cross between a chapel and a crypt.
Soon
Willa Harper is dead, seen in an incredible shot at the wheel of a car at the
bottom of the river, her hair drifting with the seaweed. And soon the children
are fleeing down the dream-river in a small boat, while the Preacher follows
them implacably on the shore; this beautifully stylized sequence uses the logic
of nightmares, in which no matter how fast one runs, the slow step of the
pursuer keeps the pace. The children are finally taken in by a Bible-fearing
old lady (Lillian Gish), who would seem to be helpless to defend them against
the single-minded murderer, but is as unyielding as her faith.
The
shot of Winters at the bottom of the river is one of several remarkable images
in the movie, which was photographed in black and white by Stanley Cortez, who
shot Welles’ “The Magnificent Ambersons,” and once observed he was
“always chosen to shoot weird things.” He shot few weirder than here,
where one frightening composition shows a street lamp casting Mitchum’s
terrifying shadow on the walls of the children’s bedroom. The basement sequence
combines terror and humor, as when the Preacher tries to chase the children up
the stairs, only to trip, fall, recover, lunge and catch his fingers in the
door. And the masterful nighttime river sequence uses giant foregrounds of
natural details, like frogs and spider webs, to underline a kind of biblical
progression as the children drift to eventual safety.
The
screenplay, based on a novel by Davis Grubb, is credited to James Agee, one of
the icons of American film writing and criticism, then in the final throes of
alcoholism. Laughton’s widow, Elsa Lanchester, is adamant in her autobiography:
“Charles finally had very little respect for Agee. And he hated the script, but
he was inspired by his hatred.” She quotes the film’s producer, Paul Gregory:
“. . . the script that was produced on the screen is no more James Agee’s . . .
than I’m Marlene Dietrich.”
Who
wrote the final draft? Perhaps Laughton had a hand. Lanchester and Laughton
both remembered that Mitchum was invaluable as a help in working with the two
children, whom Laughton could not stand. But the final film is all Laughton’s,
especially the dreamy, Bible-evoking final sequence, with Lillian Gish
presiding over events like an avenging elderly angel.
Robert
Mitchum is one of the great icons of the second half-century of cinema. Despite
his sometimes scandalous off-screen reputation, despite his genial willingness
to sign on to half-baked projects, he made a group of films that led David
Thomson, in his Biographical Dictionary of Film, to ask, “How can I offer this
hunk as one of the best actors in the movies?” And answer: “Since the war, no
American actor has made more first-class films, in so many different moods.”
“The Night of the Hunter,” he observes, represents “the only time in his career
that Mitchum acted outside himself,” by which he means there is little of the
Mitchum persona in the Preacher.
Mitchum
is uncannily right for the role, with his long face, his gravel voice, and the
silky tones of a snake-oil salesman. And Shelly Winters, all jitters and
repressed sexual hysteria, is somehow convincing as she falls so prematurely
into, and out of, his arms. The supporting actors are like a chattering gallery
of Norman Rockwell archetypes, their lives centered on bake sales, soda
fountains and gossip. The children, especially the little girl, look more odd
than lovable, which helps the film move away from realism and into stylized
nightmare. And Lillian Gish and Stanley Cortez quite deliberately, I think,
composed that great shot of her which looks like nothing so much as Whistler’s
mother holding a shotgun.
Charles
Laughton showed here that he had an original eye, and a taste for material that
stretched the conventions of the movies. It is risky to combine horror and
humor, and foolhardy to approach them through expressionism. For his first
film, Laughton made a film like no other before or since, and with such
confidence it seemed to draw on a lifetime of work. Critics were baffled by it,
the public rejected it, and the studio had a much more expensive Mitchum
picture (“Not as a Stranger”) it wanted to promote instead. But nobody who has
seen “The Night of the Hunter” has forgotten it, or Mitchum’s voice
coiling down those basement stairs: “Chillll . . . dren?”
