The Night of the Hunter (1955)

USA, 93 minutes
Directors: Charles Laughton, Robert Mitchum, Terry Sanders
Writers: Davis Grubb, James Agee, Charles Laughton
Photography: Stanley Cortez
Music: Walter Schumann
Editor: Robert Golden
Cast: Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters, Lillian Gish, Don Beddoe, Evelyn Varden, Peter Graves, James Gleason, Billy Chapin, Sally Jane Bruce

Anyone who watches true-crime TV is likely well acquainted with the feebleness and gesture of last resort that has become the word "evil" in such contexts. It's what people say when they don't know what else to say about the horrors that confront us, horrors that seemingly have been with us for all time. But in The Night of the Hunter the whole notion of evil is taken on and aired out quite deliberately and self-consciously. Harry Powell (played by Robert Mitchum) famously goes about the picture with "L-O-V-E" tattooed on the knuckles of his right hand and "H-A-T-E" on the knuckles of his left, and he's got a funny little story to tell about that too. It's something of a conceit that wears thin the more often one sees the picture, but it's also a useful avenue in to the fanciful, occasionally alienating extravagances of this project and what makes it work so well as a whole, in spite of some of its rather painful limitations.

The Night of the Hunter must stand as yet another example, with Casablanca and The Third Man, of a uniquely collaborative happy accident. It's Charles Laughton's only film-directing credit; Laughton was better known as a classical Shakespearian-style actor on stage and in the movies (he did direct a few theater productions as well). It's on a short list of James Agee's screenplays, with The African Queen; Agee was better known as a journalist and novelist who slummed as a film critic. And, perhaps most significantly, it's only one of dozens of photography credits for Stanley Cortez, whose work ranges among The Black Cat, The Magnificent Ambersons, Abbott and Costello Meet Captain Kidd, Sam Fuller pictures Shock Corridor and The Naked Kiss, a couple of episodes of TV's "Family Affair," and Chinatown.


Indeed, it's arguable that if this picture belongs to any one single auteur it would be Cortez, whose stark black and white imagery is often the most animating aspect of the picture, offering up one indelible image after another: the shadow of Harry Powell in his preacher's hat on the wall of the Harper children's bedroom when he first shows up at the Harper home in the night, the corpse of Willa Harper (played by Shelley Winters) in her Model T at the bottom of the river, a house and barn that the runaway children find for a night's shelter by the side of the river, and more: water, sky, moon, shadow. The stars in nighttime skies. The sun behind clouds. It is a remarkable film visually.

Yet it often feels as if it moves and proceeds like a TV show, like an episode, say, of "Gunsmoke," though of course with a good deal more attention paid to the production values of the visuals. (It's analogous in this way to the episodes of the "Alfred Hitchcock" TV show that Hitchcock himself directed—or for that matter to Psycho.) I suspect this effect is largely the result of how poor the performances of the child actors are (Billy Chapin as John Harper and Sally Jane Bruce as Pearl Harper), which is not to complain specifically about them—they are obviously doing the best they can—but rather about the enormous burden placed on them for this story. They are expected to portray complex roles with deeply mixed motivations, harboring a highly charged secret that their fugitive father (rather unfairly) laid on them shortly before his incarceration and eventual execution. John and Pearl are critically central to the story, and thus necessarily a pervasive presence all through the picture. That only exacerbates the problem.

It's not a problem that sinks the whole thing, but rather more like the annoyance of a small blister one suddenly notices at the start of a long hike with others. There's not much else to do but bear up with it because it's not a problem that's going to go away or be easily mitigated, and there's certainly no point in abandoning the effort altogether. Because make no mistake—The Night of the Hunter is definitely a film to be seen at least once. It's strange and scary and it moves in unusual ways to its internal rhythms: Agee's strange charged language, all its fanciful elements, and Cortez's brilliant photography. There are terrific performances too from Shelley Winters, Lillian Gish, Evelyn Varden, and, of course, especially from Robert Mitchum.

Mitchum, in fact, is basically the center of gravity of it and this role certainly has to be up there with the best he ever did. You could probably make the case that this is his picture too, as much as anyone's. He's a con man posing as a preacher, actually a psychopath drawn cold and fine—even a kind of serial killer, to put a point on it, well before serial killers had caught on as such—and he inhabits the role every inch. He roams through the picture in deceptively laid-back fashion, dressed in black and wearing his preacher's hat, moving slow and easy, accepting with pleased equanimity that his mission in life is to swindle the vulnerable for money, willing to kill anyone who gets in his way with his frightening switchblade knife, and otherwise rearing back and singing a haunting hymn about Jesus and providence.

I think a good deal of what I like about The Night of the Hunter is that even as it makes its various approaches in stark black and white, and I'm not just talking about the photography, the more one looks at it and turns it about this way and that to examine, the more complexity there is to it. The most overtly pious person here, the nosy interfering Icey Spoon (played by Evelyn Varden), turns out to be the most viciously shallow, shown in various turns that are actually pretty funny. The widow Rachel Cooper (played by Lillian Gish) is a kind of "catcher in the rye" type of character, collecting orphans and minding them like a mother duck. But she has actually been abandoned by her own son, for reasons never made clear. She sings hymns, tells Bible stories, and bakes cookies until you almost want to throw up, but she keeps a shotgun around too and she's not afraid to haul it out and use it on a moment's notice.

And so this very strange, compact picture goes. Its primary business appears at first to be some kind of morality tale, and then it appears to be perhaps some kind of amoral thrill ride, and then, in the end, it becomes something not at all easy to get to the bottom of, something about good and evil and the American experience and how we all make our own beds. I've seen it a few times now and it's one of those that only seem to get better and stranger and more confounding. "They abide and they endure," says Rachel Cooper from her Christmas pantry as her parting shot to the camera, speaking perhaps of the children, perhaps of innocents more abstractly, or perhaps just rotely quoting Bible verse again. And then: The end. So weird.