30 Years of Brilliance: 1930-1959
Robert Mitchum as "Reverend" Harry Powell
'The Night of the Hunter' is a film noir dramatic movie made in 1955, directed by Charles Laughton and starring Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters and Lillian Gish.
Based on a stark novel by Davis Grubb, Charles Laughton's sole film as a director is a Depression-set fable of psychosis and faith, strikingly sinister and yet deeply humane.
On its release, 'The Night of the Hunter' was not successful with either the critics or the public, which possibly explains why it was Laughton's soe venture into directing, but during he intervening years it has markedly increased in stature and has influenced a later generation of directors such as David Lynch and Martin Scorsese.
On AFI's list of 100 Years... 100 Thrills the move ranked number 34. In 1992, it was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the United States Library of Congress and was selected for preservation in its National Film Registry.
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Told mostly from the point of view of children, the story is like a fairy tale in it simplicity, and yet seethes with adult complications. It is set in West Virginia in the 1930's, along and around the Ohio River.
The trigger is a stash of money stolen by hard-up bandit Ben Harper (Peter Graves) and entrusted to his children John (Billy Chapin) and Pearl (Sally Jane Bruce) which makes Ben's desperate widow Willa (Shelley Winters) an object of attraction for one of the screen's most unforgettable villains. "Reverend" Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum), in black-and-white clerical garb with a puritan flat hat that curls into a set of demonic-looking horns, is associated with the Bible and a switchblade; with the words 'LOVE' and 'HATE' tattooed on his knuckles, his sermon consists of an allegorical talk about these forces locked in conflict illustrated as he arm wrestles with himself.
Powell's wooing of Willa is high pressure, fooling the woman into believing that her marriage will lead to her salvation. One night she overhears him questioning the children about the money and she realizes the truth. That night Powell murders her as she lies in bed and disposes of her bidy in the river. The children, who instinctively never trusted him, flee after the murder, the money stashed in the litte girl's doll. he escape along the river and find refuge in the house of Rachel Cooper (Lillian Gish), an elderly but kind and deceptively tough lady whose farm is open to the many underage runaways who come down the path.
Mitchum, usually associated with cynical heroes, here plays a sincerely committed villain, moonlighting as a serial killer of loose women but sexually obsessed with the money he feels he needs to fund his bloody crusade. The nocturnal escape down river, shot in expressionist mochrome, is a magical sequence, with close-ups of strange-looking swampland flora and fauna. With Evil/Hate so powerfully conveyed, 'The Night of the Hunter' needs an equally strong force to represent Good/Love. Laughton managed to get silent star Lillian Gish to come out of retirement to play the kindly Rachel. Like the snake in Eden, Powell threatens Rachel's idyll, working his seamy charm on one of the older girls to find a way onto the farm.
In a remarkable siege finale, Mitchum's menacing drone of an edited hymn ("Leanin'") is joined and completed by Gish, who knows the full lyric ("Lean on Jesus") and adds her voice to his banishing his darkness aurally before he is actually defeated.
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