The Night of the Hunter (1955): The First Shall Be Last and the Last Shall Be First (Review)

By the late 1940s, it seemed that Charles Laughton, that great Scarborough-born star of the silver screen, was losing interest in acting. Believing his performances in films like The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), Rembrandt (1936) and The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) were unlikely to be bettered, Laughton still kept his hand in with lesser pictures that amused him but, in the main, he returned to what many actors describe as their first love; theatre. In 1947 he collaborated with Bertolt Brecht on a new English version of his play Galileo for the stage and director Joseph Losey, which saw Laughton take the lead role. Three years later, Laughton achieved one of his greatest successes on the stage, directing and starring in Don Juan in Hell, the oft-excised third act of Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman. From here, it seemed that Laughton was bitten with the directing bug and, for much of the 1950s, he directed several plays on Broadway, including The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial. It was his work in America’s prestigious theatreland that caught the eye of producer Paul Gregory. Believing his formidable talents as a theatre director, combined with his equally formidable experience in cinema, meant that Laughton had it in him to be a great filmmaker, the producer sent him a 1953 Davis Grubb novel entitled The Night of the Hunter for his consideration. Laughton read it and was delighted by what he called its “nightmarish Mother Goose story”. He subsequently travelled to Grubb’s home in Philadelphia, whereupon he immediately hit it off with the author and agreed to helm the movie adaptation of his book. Released in 1955, The Night of the Hunter was Laughton’s directorial debut…it was sadly also his swansong too.

Like Grubb’s novel, the film draws from the true story of Harry Powers, a serial killer who operated in the late 1920s and early 30s, using ‘Lonely Hearts’ advertisements to lure his victims to their deaths. The law eventually caught up with Powers in 1932 when he was hanged for the murder of two widows and three children in Clarksburg, West Virginia. Laughton’s film is also set in the region and centres around a serial killer named Harry Powell, a misogynistic ‘preacher’ played memorably by Robert Mitchum, who targets widows for their fortunes and believes his murderous acts are ‘The Lord’s Work’. Incarcerated for the theft of a motor vehicle, Powell finds himself sharing a cell with Peter Graves’ Ben Harper, a bank robber who stole ten thousand dollars and killed two men in the process. Sentenced to be hanged, Harper is set to take the whereabouts of the loot to his grave, but a tendency to talk in his sleep alerts Powell to the fact that the man has left behind a wife and two children, and that he made his offsprings swear an oath not to reveal where he had stashed the money. Following Harper’s execution, Powell is released and immediately sets out to locate the dead man’s family with a view to ingratiating himself into their lives in the hope that he can lay his hands on the missing money. What follows is a rich dark narrative in the great tradition of the American Gothic as Powell, just like his real-life inspiration before him, marries and subsequently murders Harper’s widow Willa (Shelley Winters) before terrorising her two children John and Pearl (Billy Chapin and Sally Jane Bruce) for the location of the loot. Forced to flee their home, the two children take sanctuary with Lillian Gish’s Rachel Cooper, a tough old coot who takes in strays, leading to a tense all-night stand-off between their protector and their hunter that the title alludes too.

Viewed today, it’s initially maddening that anyone would watch The Night of the Hunter and not appreciate it for the classic it is, but that was indeed the case with cinemagoers and critics back in 1955. There have been many reasons put forward over the years as to why it failed to find the reception it deserved, including poor promotion from United Artists who simply did not know what to make of a film that resolutely failed to fit any standard genre they were familiar with, to religious authorities such as the League of Decency, the Protestant Motion Picture Council and the Roman Catholic Diocese of Cheyenne all objecting to the film’s content and subject matter. It was, I believe, even banned outright in Memphis! But in my view the film was done a great disservice the very people who could have convinced audiences to seek it out – the critics. In a spectacular case of inverted snobbery, many decreed the film to be pretentious and suitable only for audiences in arthouses.

Delve deeper, and you can see that the reason the film failed to score with anyone upon its original release is that it simply mystified them. I don’t think it would be remiss of me to say that the average film critic working back then were not film historians. Their job was simply to identify whether a movie was good or not via the established tropes and trends of the day and, in the 1950s, Hollywood cinema was emboldened by America’s significant post-war status as a new world leader. The films produced then were muscular in their modernity, looking forward and capturing the hearts and minds of what has now become known as the boomer generation. Where The Night of the Hunter failed – or, rather, where critics and audiences failed The Night of the Hunter – was in its committed desire to look backwards rather than forwards and it did this by an infusion of styles and motifs that were redolent of silent cinema. Laughton’s whole intention with the picture was to “restore the power of silent film to the talkies” and he did this by watching and learning from original nitrate prints of many DW Griffith movies from that era in extensive preparation ahead of filming.

The influence of Griffith on how The Night of the Hunter looks cannot be denied – it’s there in Laughton’s beautiful compositions of the rural, white picket fence Americana and it’s most certainly apparent in the casting of Lillian Gish as Rachel Cooper. A true icon of silent cinema, Gish had starred in many of Griffith’s key features and was intrigued by Laughton’s offer because she had heard he had been viewing her past work. When she asked him why, he replied that “When I first went to the movies, they sat in their seats straight and leaned forward. Now they slump down, with their heads back, and eat candy and popcorn. I want them to sit up straight again”. Once again, Laughton’s commitment to restoring a kind of primal power the first era of cinema possessed to modern-day audiences was apparent. But Laughton’s silent cinematic influence on didn’t just stop at Griffith and America, he also looked to the greats of German Expressionism too, employing their practices of distortion, shadows, strange camera angles and surrealism to create The Night of the Hunter‘s disturbing, adult fairy tale atmosphere. With art director Hilyard Brown, Laughton hit upon the idea that a child would not wholly be aware of their surroundings, focusing on some details and leaving other sketchy. This peculiarly abstract, minimal nature is in evidence throughout John and Pearl’s escapades; a series of flashing neon lights advertises the wares of several shops, but they’re not actually attached to anything particular or presented in the correct, realistic order.

Likewise, the scale of things is also off in several shots. Laughton also employed several shots that recalled painterly imagery and art history. For example, the composition of the riverside feels very much like a pastoral painting, whilst the duped Willa is routinely framed artistically – a shining halo above her pillow foreshadows her tragic fate at the hands of Powell; lashed to the front seat of an old jalopy, submerged in the depths of the river, her hair streaming out Ophelia-like in the river’s current and amongst the weed – a truly visually iconic highpoint in a film packed with a surfeit of them. As befits Powell’s self-appointed preacher status, religious imagery is also a key feature to the film with Willa’s bedroom resembling a chapel in the scenes after he has inveigled his way into her bed. Meanwhile in the climactic stand-off between Rachel and Powell, Laughton chose a lighting arrangement that playfully twists the received wisdom of good and evil; key light is placed off Gish in the foreground, ensuring her position on the rocking chair out on the porch casts her in inky silhouette, whilst Mitchum patiently waits in the background, wholly illuminated. The decision to shoot the film in black and white too was a wholly conscious one, again recalling the power of the silent era but mixing it up a little to provide something new and contemporary in cinematographer Stanley Cortez’s use of the experimental Kodak Tri-Ex b/w film.

Having previously worked with Brecht, it has been suggested that Laughton encouraged Robert Mitchum to stylise his performance with the Brechtian acting approach of Verfremdungseffekt – essentially forever tipping the audience the wink that this is Hollywood A list actor Robert Mitchum playing a role, acting in quotation marks. Overall the decisions Laughton made to step away from the perceived wisdoms of reality in cinema, his callbacks to the golden age of silent cinema in both the US and Europe and some of the imagery he chose to play with, alongside a hefty dose of camp and knowing dialogue or imagery (Powell’s flick knife snaps open, cutting through his pocket with phallic innuendo as he watches with repulsion a burlesque striptease) was, to use a somewhat irritating though understandably apt phrase, ahead of its time. It was only when the notion of film scholarship became more prevalent in the New Hollywood era of the 1970s, when cinema began to be appreciated more as an art form with its own traditions, styles and history, that The Night of the Hunter began to be regarded by critics and audiences alike as a classic in which Mitchum’s performance as Powell – with his iconic Love and Hate tattooed fingers and deep baritone voice, alarming the nightmarish fears of the innocent babes in the woods – remains one of cinema’s finest and truest bogeymen.

The Criterion Collection released this week is a package that fully appreciates the film’s classic status. A new digital transfer restored by UCLA Film & Television Archive is accompanied by a plethora of extras including audio commentaries, archive interviews and a new video interview with Laughton’s biographer Simon Callow, as well as a new documentary on the film. But best of all, it contains Robert Gitt’s 2002 film Charles Laughton Directs The Night of the Hunter, a meticulously crafted documentary of outtakes and rushes that captures Laughton’s abilities as a director and the work he put into getting his vision realised. It runs to a a stonking 158 minutes and showcases just how a classic came to be.

The Nightingales’ drummer, joins us to talk about all manner of things including working with Cumming and Lee, her formative musical influences, the things that have got her through lockdown, the thrill of getting back on the road to tour the Four Against Fate album, and which stand-up comedian Graham sounds most like.

PATREON POP SCREEN

Thanks for reading Mark’s review of Night of the Hunter

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