Eric Red Recommends #13

Last Updated on July 28, 2021

By ERIC RED

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NIGHT
OF THE HUNTER
(1955)

Director:
Charles
Laughton.

Writer: James Agree (based on the
novel by Davis Grubb).

Cast: Robert Mitchum, Shelly Winters, Lillian
Gish.

“It’s a hard world for little things.”

In 1930’s rural south, a studly, charismatic and
utterly psychotic backwoods preacher Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum) travels
the countryside, seducing widows and murdering them for their money.
Mitchum has “L-O-V-E” tattooed on the fingers of one hand, “H-A-T-E” on the
other, and his trademark sermon consists of wrestling his fists to show the
eternal battle of good and evil.

The preacher targets a
widow, Willa Harper (Shelly Winters) and her two small children John and
Pearl, because he knows her executed bank robber husband hid his stolen
money with them. The loot is stashed in the little girl’s doll, a secret
only the kids know. After a cruel game of psychological manipulation by the
murderous Mitchum to find out where the cash is hid, the two children run
away from home and flee with the doll across the countryside, relentlessly
pursued by the evil preacher in a mythical storybook odyssey.

Few films capture the
quality of a fairy tale and the sinister visual logic of a nightmare as this
spellbinding thriller. Both a suspense film and a fable of the pure
goodness of children framed against the hypocritical corruption and evil of
adults, it endures as an ode to childhood.

Filmed in richly stylized
Film Noir black and white, “NIGHT OF THE HUNTER” is poetic, suggestive and
expressionistic, unique in style and tone. It’s a greatly influential film,
of course, often homaged. I mean, how many times has the letters on the
fingers of both hands bit been ripped off since?

It also features a famous iconic screen boogieman in Robert
Mitchum’s insane serial killer Reverend Harry Powell. Wearing a big black
hat and black suit, driving town to town in his Model T and packing a
switchblade, Mitchum engages in vitriolic and misogynistic monologues with
God. “There are things you do hate, Lord. Perfume-smellin’ things, lacy
things, things with curly hair,” he says. “Not
that you mind the killings! There’s plenty of killings in your book,
Lord…” Swaggering, sleepy eyed, thunder
voiced, fearsomely omnipotent, Mitchum unleashes a magnetic portrayal of
pure human evil.

“What
religion do you profess, preacher?” Someone asks. “The religion the
Almighty and me worked out betwixt us,” the reverend smilingly replies, with
a manly charm only Mitchum can muster. It was classic “against type”
casting for the good guy star, effective as Henry Fonda’s against the grain
casting as the icy blue eyed killer gunslinger in Sergio Leone’s “ONCE UPON
A TIME IN THE WEST.”

To get close to the kids and find the
money, the preacher Powell marries the sweet, simple-minded and sex starved
single mother Willa, but refuses to fuck her on their wedding night…or
ever. Before long, he cunningly drives her mad with sexual frustration and
misguided religious fervor, driving a wedge between she and her children,
whom he can now intimidate and terrorize to give up the loot. But the
little boy swore an oath to his father to protect his younger sister and not
tell where the money is. In a suspenseful and dangerous cat and mouse, they
outwit the preacher and get away in a canoe downriver. But the devil of a
reverend is hot on their heels.

The preacher doesn’t meet
his match until the end, when the two kids’ journey leads them to a feisty,
compassionate old woman named Rachel Cooper who houses a flock of abandoned
children. The role is played with tremendous presence and sympathy by
immortal silent screen star Lillian Gish (those silent films stars could act
volumes without saying a word). Devoutly religious, she’s nobody’s fool,
and quickly sees through the demented reverend when he comes a’callin. The
preacher has a switchblade, but old woman packs a pump shotgun and she knows
how to use it.

The stage is set for a
suspenseful showdown. There’s a haunting scene where the evil reverend sits
in the yard of the house singing his trademark religious hymn as he stalks
the kids. The old woman sits in the rocking chair on the porch, toting her
shotgun, patiently waiting for him to make his move. Unexpectedly, she
starts singing along with him and joining in the hymn, as good and evil meet
in musical flashpoint. It is typical of the film’s lovely poetic
flourishes.

Cinematographically,
the movie maintains a constant visual tension between poetic lyricism and
dark menace, in true fairy tale fashion. This is typified by the opening
helicopter God’s Eye View shots over a pastoral small town, lowering on a
group of children playing in a backyard of a farmhouse, as the camera
descends further to discover the legs of a female corpse in an open
basement.

In another scene
surreally shot in a water tank, a murdered woman sits in a car sunk in the
river, her hair floating in the reeds like a macabre but idyllic water
fairy. In another, the escaping kids are
hiding in a barn, and through the opening they see the preacher is coming up
the hill, his singing echoing supernaturally, evoking the nightmare everyone
has as a kid of something bad relentlessly chasing you that you can’t get
away from. For a film about
children, there is a lot of horror and sexuality in the subject matter, but
the original Brother’s Grimm’s fairy tales were very violent and scary, so
the film stays true to its child’s fable roots.

Surprisingly, this was
the only film that classic screen star Charles Laughton (”WITNESS FOR THE
PROSECUTION”) ever directed. I’d argue ”NIGHT OF THE HUNTER” is the best
film by a first time director ever made. People will disagree, but I’m
convinced the film owes its uneven but unique visual flair to Laughton’s
inexperience behind the camera. This is because you
do original cinematic things as a first time director and
shoot great film you never will on your later shows, precisely because you
don’t really know what you’re doing. Production inexperience and ignorance
of safe conventional coverage means you put the camera in unusual places and
get shots unique in nature, since lacking the safety net of developed
technique, you must rely on gut instinct.

Personally, I did some of
my best shots and sequences in any of my films on my first picture “COHEN
AND TATE,” like shooting car interior sequences from 16 angles and using
long lenses with shallow focus at night, simply because it felt right and I
was directing by pure instinct. I still remember the pressure of the
cameraman, editor and producers all telling me my footage would never work
(old crew guys hate taking orders from a 25-year old kid) but mostly it
did. Like Werner Herzog said, “You make your first film with your balls.”

I liked “NIGHT OF THE
HUNTER” so much that right after “THE HITCHER,” I wrote an update of it set
in contemporary New York City called “CANAL STREET.” Rutger Hauer loved the
script and was going to play the Robert Mitchum role, (who in my script was
a cop) as a follow up to his role as John Ryder.

Sigh. One of the ones that
got away…

BUY THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER DVD HERE

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