Directed by Charles LaughtonThe Night of the Hunter was not successful in its initial release. Critics were mostly baffled by it, and audiences stayed away. It was the directorial debut of Charles Laughton, the famed British-American actor, as well as his last film. Its poor reception guaranteed that Laughton would not be given money to make another. He passed away in 1962. Since its release, The Night of the Hunter's reputation has slowly grown, and now it is considered among the all-time classics of American cinema. It belongs in fine company with many challenging films that were initially misunderstood or derided, to be later re-evaluated as masterpieces - Vertigo, Barry Lyndon, and The New World among them.
United States, 1955
Like those films, The Night of the Hunter was out of step with tastes of the time. There was nothing else in 1955 comparable to it - and nothing since, either. It's impossible to pigeonhole in a certain genre or style. It's been called a horror, a film noir, a fairy tale, and it fits all those definitions. It is equally moulded by American folklore and the Old Testament, Nosferatu and Bambi. Perhaps Charles Laughton himself described it best, as a "nightmarish Mother Goose story".
It opens on a startlingly weird image - the floating head of wise old Lillian Gish, former starlet of silent cinema, imposed onto a starry sky. She is lecturing a group of eager children (also disembodied heads dangling in the cosmos), quoting the verse from Matthew about the danger of false prophets, who come dressed in sheep's clothing but inwardly are wolves. We then meet one of these wolves - Reverend Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum), a wandering preacher with a drawling baritone voice and the unctuous manners of a salesman. He's also a Bluebeard, a serial killer who preys upon lonely widows and steals their money. His latest target is Willa Harper, whose deceased husband, in a fit of Depression-era desperation, robbed a bank and murdered two people in the process. Powell, spending time behind bars for his latest act of petty theft, meets John Harper in jail before his execution. Harper unwittingly lets slip that the stolen money remains hidden back home. The only people who know where it lies are his young children, little John and Pearl. Reverend Powell has a new family to target.
As Reverend Powell, Robert Mitchum gives one of the all-time great villainous performances. He is a hateful character, frightening and darkly comic. Mitchum based the performance on people he met in the South - con artists who knew they would be believed as long as they spoke with conviction and brandished a Bible. Powell wields Biblical language like a weapon, and prays with an open jackknife clasped between his hands. He's enough of a charismatic personality that we understand why so many fall for his act. On his fingers he has tattooed L-O-V-E and H-A-T-E. With them he tells the story of right hand, left hand, pantomiming a battle between the two forces where Love ultimately triumphs. Powell is not a realistic character, but a mythic one - H-A-T-E in the flesh. He's a honey-tongued fiend around easily seduced adults, and a cartoonish Big Bad Wolf when alone with the children.
Laughton always emphasizes the innocence of John and Pearl even in the horror of their circumstances. Their mother is dead - a scene of morbid, horrific beauty shows her body at the bottom of a river, peacefully swaying among the reeds with a slit in her throat - and a devilish madman pursues them. The Night of the Hunter often adopts the naive perspective of the children - as in the incredible sequence where they flee Powell on a riverboat. The river is an obviously artificial set made with expressionist, dreamy exaggeration. Pearl sings eerily as the current carries them from danger - the moon and stars appear magically close while storybook animals graze on the shore. The children hear snatches of lullabies drifting from windows of passing farm houses, and see the silhouette of Reverend Powell on the horizon, relentlessly in pursuit. "Don't he never sleep", John wonders in terror. It's like a classic Disney musical took a very dark turn.
The children find shelter with Rachel Cooper, the old woman whose warning against false prophets we heard at the film's beginning. She has taken in several other vagabond children, raising them as her own. Lillian Gish, who had captivated audiences decades earlier in the silent melodramas of D.W. Griffith, is marvelous as Rachel. She's the only adult immune to Powell's snakelike charms, and his equally powerful antithesis - a strong, unshakable force for good, protecting the innocent against evil. "I'm a strong tree with branches for many birds," she says, "I'm good for something in this world and I know it too."
In the dead of night Powell appears in Rachel's yard, singing the gospel song "Leaning on the Everlasting Arms". In his voice the song becomes a threat, a menace to the sleeping children inside. Rachel sits on the porch with a shotgun, undaunted. She begins singing along, redeeming the lyrics as a sincere expression of faith. The duet becomes a showdown of good versus evil, one of the most powerful in film history.
The Night of the Hunter is among the great American movies, and a personal favorite of mine. It is beautiful and frightening, unforgettable for its cinematography, performances, and boldly unconventional storytelling.
