The Night of the Hunter ***** (1955, Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters, Lillian Gish) – Classic Movie Review 357

‘This morning we were married, and now you think I’m going to kiss you, hold you, call you my wife!’ – Robert Mitchum.

With a beautifully crafted, literate screenplay by James Agee based on the pulp novel by Davis Grubb, this admirable, uniquely haunting 1955 horror thriller work of art is Charles Laughton’s sole outing as director. And that’s a great shame because he’s created something hugely special and memorable here.

In a way, the triumph starts with the acting, with all the players working ahead of their usual game, under Laughton’s careful eye.

Robert Mitchum gives one of the performances of a lifetime as the religious fanatic, hell-fire-and-brimstone preacher Harry Powell with ‘LOVE’ and ‘HATE’ tattooed on his knuckles. He’s a terrifying figure, as a preacher turned serial killer, going round stalking and murdering the local populace. But he gets arrested for a minor crime of car theft and is sent to jail, where he shares a cell with condemned killer Ben Harper (Peter Graves) and tries in vain to get him to reveal the whereabouts of the $10,000 he’s stolen in a robbery and boasts about in his dreams.

After Ben is executed, the preacher goes to Cresap’s Landing to court his gullible young widow, Willa (Shelley Winters). He quickly marries her then starts to terrorise her two young children, nine-year-old John and four-year-old Pearl (Billy Chapin, Sally Jane Bruce) in his desperate quest for the stash of $10,000. John and Pearl have hidden the money in Pearl’s doll but they have sworn to their father to keep the money secret. The children eventually manage to evade the preacher’s clutches to escape down river, with the preacher following close behind.

Oozing evil charisma, Mitchum’s magnetic performance predates and seems like a dress rehearsal for his similar one in the original 1962 Cape Fear.

There’s also fine work from the kids (apparently coached by Mitchum) in very demanding roles, a superb Lillian Gish as the disturbingly saintly, and at the same time sinister Bible-bashing spinster Rachel who rescues them (‘it’s a hard world for little things’), as well as Evelyn Varden and Don Beddoe as the nice-seeming, café-running neighbours, who end up leading the lynch mob.

Shelley Winters is good, although she seems less secure as the kids’ widowed mother Willa who is trapped into loveless marriage by Mitchum and goes potty on her way to an early grave. Pitching this performance is tricky, and maybe she’s just a fraction off.

As well as a supremely thoughtful and imaginative chiller, The Night of the Hunter is an astonishing mood and atmosphere piece. Laughton achieves a surreal, strangely evocative atmosphere of rural America in the Depression, mostly conjured up imaginatively in the studio, and quite luminously caught in Stanley Cortez’s German Expressionist-style black and white cinematography. It’s designed and lit like a German silent horror movie, such as Nosferatu, which is appropriate because it really is a horror movie with Mitchum as the monster.

It was met with apathy and confusion on its original release, but over the years it’s gradually achieved the status of an American masterpiece. Laughton dubbed it a ‘nightmarish Mother Goose tale’. That’s right, it’s a perverse, nightmare fairy tale, with Mitchum as the Big Bad Wolf and Gish as Mother Goose.

A 1999 re-release in a lovely new 35mm print showed it in excellent health and in 2014 it was newly digitally restored in a beautiful print and released again in cinemas.

It was respectably remade for TV in 1991 with Richard Chamberlain.

http://derekwinnert.com/cape-fear-1962-classic-film-review-176/

http://derekwinnert.com/hobsons-choice-classic-film-review-342/

http://derekwinnert.com/spartacus-classic-film-review-122/

© Derek Winnert 2013 Classic Movie Review 356

Check out more reviews on http://derekwinnert.com/