The Night of the Hunter (1955) | Little White Lies

The Night of the Hunter (1955)

16 Jan 2014 / Released: 17 Jan 2014

A black-and-white portrait of a serious-looking man wearing a cowboy hat and suit, with the word "Live" tattooed on his knuckles.
A black-and-white portrait of a serious-looking man wearing a cowboy hat and suit, with the word "Live" tattooed on his knuckles.
4

Anticipation.

A welcome revival.

5

Enjoyment.

Laughton is a canonical auteur solely on the strength of his only directing credit.

5

In Retrospect.

Few films since have proved so widely iconic and influential.

One of clas­sic cinema’s great, uncat­e­goris­able out­liers returns tri­umphant­ly to the big screen.

Even with­in the shoot-them-into-out­er-space-to-paint-a-flat­ter­ing-pic­ture-of-human­i­ty-for-alien-civil­i­sa­tions sub­set of movie mas­ter­pieces, The Night of the Hunter is unique. It is not a film noir, though it stars Robert Mitchum as a psy­cho­path­ic killer on the trail of stolen mon­ey, and is shot in a style inspired by Ger­man Expres­sion­ism; nor is it a silent film, though it opens and clos­es on moral cen­tre Lil­lian Gish in direct-address. It is both Chris­t­ian para­ble and folk tale, with its hymns, hom­i­lies, and orphans car­ried to safe­ty by nature’s benev­o­lence; but it is also ground­ed in the social con­cerns of its makers.

Davis Grubb, author of the source nov­el, was a boy in Moundsville, West Vir­ginia when the lone­ly­hearts killer Har­ry Pow­ers was hanged at prison there in 1932. Around that time, a Grubb fam­i­ly friend was radio evan­ge­list William Stidger, a lead­ing fig­ure of the Great Depression’s revival move­ment, where­in emer­gent mass media and acute need bred a new strain of Amer­i­can dem­a­gogue. (Stidger was a mod­el for Sin­clair Lewis’s Elmer Gantry.) Here, Mitchum is Preach­er Har­ry Pow­ell, a ham­my huck­ster and ser­i­al widow-murderer.

Play­ing on small-town shame, he insin­u­ates him­self into the fam­i­ly of Willa Harp­er (Shel­ley Win­ters, sym­pa­thet­i­cal­ly histri­on­ic for once) after hus­band Ben is exe­cut­ed, so as to pry the secret of his hid­den loot from the chil­dren, John and Pearl. (Threat­en­ing vio­lence and dan­gling affir­ma­tion, he’s at once a car­toon demon and a ter­ri­fy­ing metaphor for domes­tic abuse.) When­ev­er Mitchum sings Lean­ing on the Ever­last­ing Arms’, in his sleepy, sul­try bari­tone, it is not mere­ly sin­is­ter, but per­verse­ly iron­ic, and in a famil­iar way.

What gives The Night of the Hunter heft as an indict­ment of Amer­i­can reli­gious hypocrisy, is that it is one of the most spir­i­tu­al films ever made. The Coen broth­ers, who recre­at­ed DP Stan­ley Cortez’s stun­ning under­wa­ter shot of Win­ters in The Man Who Wasn’t There, and used Lean­ing on the Ever­last­ing Arms’ in True Grit, also nod­ded to inex­orable Har­ry Pow­ell (“Don’t he nev­er sleep?”) with No Coun­try for Old Men’s own pur­su­ing Fury. But while most films pur­port­ed­ly about evil” are actu­al­ly about oth­er, more world­ly con­cerns, The Night of the Hunter is ani­mat­ed with the belief that, as gospel’s Lou­vin Broth­ers sang, Satan is Real’. Its strug­gle is not between cul­ture and anar­chy, but between, well, remem­ber the lit­tle sto­ry of right hand/​left hand? Every ele­ment is scaled to the con­text from which good and evil originate.

With Cortez, direc­tor Charles Laughton cre­ates a Car­pen­ter Goth­ic aes­thet­ic of baroque shad­ows on bare walls, the sound­stage stark­ness off­set by envelop­ing pas­toral imagery in the out­door sequences. The com­po­si­tions have the fable-like pro­fun­di­ty of Gish’s per­for­mance, as the good shep­herdess who takes in John and Pearl when they flee down­riv­er. Laughton worked with James Agee on the screen­play, which shares a doc­u­men­tary-poet­ic open­ness with Agee’s oth­er treat­ments of Depres­sion-era pover­ty and father­less South­ern families.

From its guile­less expo­si­tion and com­i­cal­ly life-drawn Amer­i­cana, to its Scrip­ture quo­ta­tions and sen­si­tiv­i­ty to a child’s per­spec­tive, the film pro­ceeds with a sim­plic­i­ty of inex­haustible depth.

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