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The Night of the Hunter is a 1955 American thriller film directed by Charles Laughton and starring Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters, and Lillian Gish. The screenplay by James Agee was based on the 1953 novel of the same title by Davis Grubb. The plot focuses on a corrupt minister-turned-serial killer who attempts to charm an unsuspecting widow and steal $10,000 hidden by her executed husband.
The Night of the Hunter
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This film has been preserved in the National Film Registry in 1992.
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The novel and film draw on the true story of Harry Powers, who was hanged in 1932 for the murder of two widows and three children in Clarksburg, West Virginia. The film's lyrical and expressionistic style with its leaning on the silent era sets it apart from other Hollywood films of the 1940s and 1950s, and it has influenced later directors such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Robert Altman.
Why It Rocks
- The film serves as a dark allegory of good versus evil that defies conventional genre definition with its occasionally outrageous dark humor, bucolic settings contrasted with gothic images, and an unsettling child's-eye perspective.
- The children’s flight from Harry, which ends with their rescue by Rachel, is one of the most supernally eerie sequences ever filmed. The toylike boat that carries them along the moonlit Ohio is framed in the foreground by a succession of immense, looming close-ups of frogs and caged birds and spider webs and a pair of shivering rabbits. The extended sequence may be a bit boring and lagging for some audiences since it's so grandiloquently obvious, but this was probably the point with the scenery and symbolism.
- Robert Mitchum completely steals the movie as Harry Powell and provides a near-perfect performance -- which may be his greatest -- as a deranged preacher planning to terrorize children. His cunning and his torpor, which always carried a sadistic, sensual edge, achieve here a kind of apotheosis. He’s more malevolently erotic in this film, with its storybook homilies and bejeweled night skies than in any of his hothouse melodramas.
- The other major actors -- namely Shelley Winters and Lillian Gish also provide decent, but convincing performances that really add to the eerie illusion.
- Casting Lillian Gish for the film was a smart choice for a number of reasons. Not only because she was Griffith’s greatest actress but also because in such films as Way Down East and Broken Blossoms and Orphans of the Storm she expressed both the luminescence of her virginal heroines and also their affrighted souls. In the film, Rachel may be the savior of these orphans of the storm, but there is also the suggestion of a life once lived apart from the goodness she engenders. (She speaks cryptically of her estrangement from her son.)
- The film uses a lot of powerful, silent imagery with visual influences from the likes of D.W. Griffith, silent German Expressionism, and The Magnificent Ambersons, and yet despite recalling so many other movies, it still manages to remain one-of-a-kind.
- Charles Laughton -- whose only directed film this was -- tapped into the feeling tone of Griffith’s pastoralism; and slipped inside the sinister, chiaroscuroed lubricity of the early Lang and Murnau movies. He gave the aestheticism of those movies a new lease on life and a new appalling comic tone, too: Perhaps the most disturbing and original aspect of the film is how deeply funny this frightening story truly is.
- The movie can be seen not only as a kind of summation of what came before but also as a forerunner of what would come later, in the yin-yang tonal shifts and slapstick humor of such films as The Manchurian Candidate, Lolita, Bonnie and Clyde (also set in the Great Depression) and Blue Velvet. And so another paradox is that the movie's both recipient of a tradition and a precursor of a new one. It's one reason, in particular, the film seems so fresh, despite being shunned back in its release in 1955. It lacks the well-oiled sameness of mood that even the most notable Hollywood movies of its time had. Its crazy-quilt emotionalism is much closer to how we experience the world now. Still, the extreme mood swings in the film have always disrupted audiences, even its most fervid appreciators. The movie is amazingly soulful and yet, unless you get the hang of it, it can be baffling.
- The Davis Grubb novel on which it’s based is highflown, hillbilly Gothic, but Laughton recognized at its core the glowing radium of a resonant tale. No other American movie has so intimately resembled an elaborate children’s fable as imagined by a child. The look of the film — shot by Stanley Cortez — leaves the impression of something newly imprinted, as if everything were being seen through the eyes of a rapt cherub for the first time. There’s an exaggerated purity to the imagery. The film’s terrors are epically black, the enchantments are transcendent, and starlit.
- Mitchum’s roving preacher Harry Powell is a false prophet whose falseness is instinctively sensed by children, even though most adults are taken in by him. With L-O-V-E tattooed across his right fingers, and H-A-T-E tattooed across the left, Powell is a flagrant demon; his pocket switchblade slices through his trousers when he’s aroused. (If there is such a thing as Old Testament Freudian, Harry Powell personifies it.)
- His nemesis is Miss Rachel, played by Lillian Gish, a mother hen who gathers up foundlings and runaways and brings them into her home. Rachel is as immaculate as Harry is depraved; she lives by the Scriptures and knows them well enough to recognize when they are being fouled. She's a worthy adversary for Harry because, one feels, her purity has already been tested. She has seen enough of life to account for the Harry Powells of the world, while Harry has no real conception of purity except as something he must annihilate.
- However, despite the main characters' alignments, nothing is as simple as it seems in the film. The visuals are conceived in tones of jet black and pearl, but the film is far from schematic: The darkness and the light are always bleeding into each other. Rachel abhors Harry, but hearing him in the night intoning “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms,” she joins in the singing even though she sits inside her house with a rifle in her lap to defend her brood against him. Harry is a trickster who seems to have entered into the story in order to the test the spiritual mettle of the pure-in-heart, and those not so pure-in-heart, too. If the film has any literary antecedent, it would not be Davis Grubb’s book, but rather Melville’s The Confidence Man or Twain’s The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg, comic-horror texts with a sly, enraged comprehension of man’s weakness and duplicity.
- This film adaptation manages to avoid the novel's sudden shift into Sunday School fantasy. The last third of the film is almost a throwback to an earlier age when films abandoned plotting for scenes of visual splendor and moments of piercing tenderness. Part of what grounds this film is its pitiless honesty.
- The film expresses the sheer terror that men can hold for women and women for men. Willa and Harry are driven by more than the secret of where the money is hidden; they’re separated from each other by something insuperably elemental between the sexes, a difference, in the movie’s terms, almost of species. Harry’s murder of Willa occurs off camera, but we see its aftermath: her submerged body resting in a rusted open convertible at the bottom of the lake, her long hair streaming out in an undercurrent thick with delicate water grass.
The Only Bad Quality
- Shelley Winters' performance as Willa in the film -- while definitely not bad -- is noticeably weaker than the majority of the non-Mitchum cast, which already has a lot of unbalanced acting.
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