October 1, 2019 (XXXIX: 6) Charles Laughton: NIGHT OF THE HUNTER (1955, 92m)

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DIRECTOR Charles Laughton WRITING James Agee wrote the screenplay with contributions from Charles Laughton from a novel by Davis Grubb. PRODUCER Paul Gregory MUSIC Walter Schumann CINEMATOGRAPHY Stanley Cortez EDITING Robert Golden The National Film Preservation Board, USA, selected the film...an entry into the National Film Registry in 1992. CAST Robert Mitchum...Harry Powell Shelley Winters...Willa Harper Lillian Gish...Rachel Cooper James Gleason ...Uncle Birdie Steptoe Evelyn Varden...Icey Spoon Peter Graves...Ben Harper Don Beddoe...Walt Spoon Billy Chapin...John Harper Sally Jane Bruce...Pearl Harper Gloria Castillo ...Ruby (as Gloria Castilo) CHARLES LAUGHTON (b. July 1, 1899 in Victoria Hotel, Scarborough, Yorkshire, England, UK—d. Died: December 15, 1962 (age 63) in Hollywood, Los Angeles, California) was an English stage and film actor (65 credits). Laughton was trained in London at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and first appeared professionally on the stage in 1926. His film career took him to Broadway and then Hollywood, but he also collaborated with Alexander Korda on notable British films of the era, including The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his portrayal of the title character. He was also nominated for Oscars for roles in Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) and Witness for the Prosecution (1957). Daniel Day-Lewis cited Laughton as one of his inspirations, saying: "He was probably the greatest film actor who came from that period of time. He had something quite remarkable. His

generosity as an actor, he fed himself into that work. As an actor, you cannot take your eyes off him." Having cultivated a lauded acting career on stage and screen, Laughton still “wanted to direct a film, and producer Paul Gregory thought David Grubb’s bestselling novel ‘The Night of the Hunter’ was a perfect opportunity for Laughton to make his filmmaking debut. When Robert Mitchum agreed to play the most important role of the film, a budget was quickly secured and Laughton’s adventure was ready to begin. However, the film’s poor box office results really hit Laughton pretty hard, making him give up on the idea of returning to the director’s chair” (Cinephilia & Beyond). Still, “As years and decades went by, Laughton’s movie garnered more and more respect. Today, sixty years upon that fateful box office disappointment, Laughton’s name is written in permanent marker in the book of greatest filmmakers that ever lived, as the movie is often cited as one of the most important and influential films in the history of American cinema” (Cinephilia & Beyond). These are some of the other films he acted in: Piccadilly (1929), Down River (1931), Payment Deferred (1932), The Sign of the Cross (1932), Island of Lost Souls (1932), The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934), Ruggles of Red Gap (1935), Les Misérables (1935), Rembrandt (1936), I, Claudius (1937), The Beachcomber (1938), Sidewalks of London (1938), Jamaica Inn (1939), The

Laughton—NIGHT OF THE HUNTER—2 Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), They Knew What They Wanted (1940), It Started with Eve (1941), Tales of Manhattan (1942), This Land Is Mine (1943), The Man from Down Under (1943), Passport to Destiny (1944), The Canterville Ghost (1944), The Suspect (1944), Captain Kidd (1945), Because of Him (1946), The Paradine Case (1947), Leben des Galilei (Short) (1947), On Our Merry Way (1948), Arch of Triumph (1948), The Big Clock (1948), The Girl from Manhattan (1948), The Bribe (1949), The Man on the Eiffel Tower (1949), The Strange Door (1951), O. Henry's Full House (1952), Abbott and Costello Meet Captain Kidd (1952), This Is Charles Laughton (TV Series) (1953), Salome (1953), Young Bess (1953), Hobson's Choice (1954), Under Ten Flags (1960), Spartacus (1960), Wagon Train (TV Series) (1960), and Advise & Consent (1962).

JAMES AGEE (b. November 27, 1909 in Knoxville, Tennessee—d. May 16, 1955 (age 45) in New York City, New York) was an American novelist, journalist, poet, screenwriter and film critic. In the 1940s, he was one of the most influential film critics in the U.S., and, as Bruce Jackson has said during the Buffalo Film Seminars, Agee established serious film criticism in the U.S. Despite barely passing many of his high school courses, Agee was admitted to Harvard College's class of 1932, and, while there, Agee took classes taught by famous New Criticism critic I. A. Richards, and his classmate was the future poet, translator and critic Robert Fitzgerald, with whom he would eventually work at Time. After graduation, Agee was hired by the Time Inc. as a reporter, and moved to New York City, where he wrote for Fortune magazine in 1932-1937, although he is better known for his later film

criticism in Time and The Nation. In 1934, he published his only volume of poetry, Permit Me Voyage, with a foreword by Archibald MacLeish. In the summer of 1936, during the Great Depression, Agee spent eight weeks on assignment for Fortune with photographer Walker Evans, living among sharecroppers in Alabama. While Fortune did not publish his article, Agee turned the material into a book titled Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). It sold only 600 copies before being remaindered. Agee left Fortune in 1937, and, in 1941, he became Time's film critic. From 1942-1948, he worked as a film critic for The Nation. Agee on Film (1958) collected his writings of this period. Three writers listed it as one of the best film-related books ever written in a 2010 poll by the British Film Institute. In 1948, Agee quit his job to become a freelance writer. One of his assignments was a well-received article for Life Magazine about the silent movie comedians Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd and Harry Langdon. The article has been credited for reviving Keaton's career. As a freelancer in the 1950s, Agee continued to write magazine articles while working on movie scripts. Going beyond film criticism, he was nominated for an Oscar for the screenplay for The African Queen (1951). From 1952-1953, he wrote for the television series Omnibus. His autobiographical novel, A Death in the Family (1957), won the author a posthumous 1958 Pulitzer Prize and was adapted three times for television with the title All the Way Home in 1963, 1971, and 1981. DAVIS GRUBB (b. July 23, 1919—d. July 24, 1980) was an American novelist and short story writer. Influenced by accounts of economic hardship by depression-era Americans that his mother had seen firsthand as a social worker, Grubb produced a dark tale that mixed the plight of poor children and adults with that of the evil inflicted by others. The Night of the Hunter became an instant bestseller and was voted a finalist for the 1955 National Book Award. It was famously filmed as a psychological thriller by Charles Laughton with a screen adaptation written by James Agee. His 1969 novel Fools' Parade would also be made into a motion picture starring James Stewart. Some of Grubb's short stories were adapted for television by Alfred Hitchcock and by Rod Sterling for his Night Gallery series. STANLEY CORTEZ (b. November 4, 1908 in New York City, New York—d. December 23, 1997 (age 89) in Hollywood, California) was an American cinematographer (86 credits) who was twice nominated for Oscars. These are some of the films he worked on: Four Days Wonder (1936), Armored Car (1937), The Wildcatter (1937), I

Laughton—NIGHT OF THE HUNTER—3 Cover the War! (1937), The Lady in the Morgue (1938), Personal Secretary (1938), Exposed (1938), Risky Business (1939), They Asked for It (1939), The Forgotten Woman (1939), Laugh It Off (1939), Margie (1940), The Black Cat (1941), San Antonio Rose (1941), A Dangerous Game (1941), Badlands of Dakota (1941), Moonlight in Hawaii (1941), Sealed Lips (1942), Eagle Squadron (1942), The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), The Powers Girl (1943), Since You Went Away (1944), Let There Be Light (Documentary) (1946), Smart Woman (1948), The Man on the Eiffel Tower (1949), The Admiral Was a Lady (1950), Abbott and Costello Meet Captain Kidd (1952), Shark River (1953), The Diamond Queen (1953), Yesterday and Today (1953), Dragon's Gold (1954), Black Tuesday (1954), The Night of the Hunter (1955), Man from Del Rio (1956), The Three Faces of Eve (1957), Thunder in the Sun (1959), Dinosaurus! (1960), Back Street (1961), Shock Corridor (1963), The Naked Kiss (1964), The Candidate (1964), Nightmare in the Sun (1965), Young Dillinger (1965), The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini (1966), Blue (1968), The Bridge at Remagen (1969), Doomsday Machine (1972), and Another Man, Another Chance (1977).

ROBERT MITCHUM (b. August 6, 1917 in Bridgeport, Connecticut—d. July 1, 1997 (age 79) in Santa Barbara, California) was an American film actor (133 credits) who rose to prominence starring roles in several classic noir films. He is generally considered a forerunner of the antiheroes prevalent in film during the 1950s and 1960s. His best-known films include Out of the Past (1947), The Night of the Hunter (1955), Cape Fear (1962), and El Dorado (1966). Mitchum was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for The Story of G.I. Joe (1945). He is also known for his role as U.S. Navy Captain Victor “Pug” Henry in the epic two-part television miniseries The Winds of War (1983) and War and Remembrance (1988). These are some of his other film appearances: The Human Comedy (1943), Hoppy Serves a Writ (1943), Aerial Gunner (1943), Border Patrol (1943), Follow the Band (1943), Leather Burners (1943), The Lone Star Trail (1943), Beyond the Last Frontier (1943), Corvette K-225 (1943), Cry 'Havoc' (1943), 'Gung Ho!': The Story of

Carlson's Makin Island Raiders (1943), Johnny Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1944), Girl Rush (1944), Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944), Nevada (1944), Undercurrent (1946), Crossfire (1947), Rachel and the Stranger (1948), Blood on the Moon (1948), The Red Pony (1949), The Big Steal (1949), My Forbidden Past (1951), His Kind of Woman (1951), Macao (1952), One Minute to Zero (1952), 1952 The Lusty Men (1952), Angel Face (1953), She Couldn't Say No (1953), Second Chance (1953), River of No Return (1954), Track of the Cat (1954), Not as a Stranger (1955), Man with the Gun (1955), Foreign Intrigue (1956), Bandido! (1956), Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957), Fire Down Below (1957), The Enemy Below (1957), Thunder Road (1958), The Angry Hills (1959), The Wonderful Country (1959), Home from the Hill (1960), The Sundowners (1960), The Grass Is Greener (1960), The Longest Day (1962), Two for the Seesaw (1962), Rampage (1963), The Way West (1967), Villa Rides (1968), Anzio (1968), Secret Ceremony (1968), The Good Guys and the Bad Guys (1969), Ryan's Daughter (1970), The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973), The Yakuza (1974), Farewell, My Lovely (1975), Midway (1976), The Last Tycoon (1976), The Big Sleep (1978), Matilda (1978), Breakthrough (1979), That Championship Season (1982), The Hearst and Davies Affair (1985), North and South, Book I (1985), Mr. North (1988), Scrooged (1988), Midnight Ride (1990), Cape Fear (1991), Tombstone (1993), Woman of Desire (1994), Backfire! (1995), Dead Man (1995), The Sunset Boys (1995), and The Marshal (TV Series) (1995). SHELLY WINTERS (b. August 18, 1920 in St. Louis, Missouri—d. January 14, 2006 (age 85) in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, California) appeared in numerous films (160 credits) and won Academy Awards for The Diary of Anne Frank (1959) and A Patch of Blue (1965), and received nominations for A Place in the Sun (1951) and The Poseidon Adventure (1972). These are some of the other films she appeared in: There's Something About a Soldier (1943), What a Woman! (1943), Sailor's Holiday (1944), Knickerbocker Holiday (1944), She's a Soldier Too (1944), A Thousand and One Nights (1945), Abie's Irish Rose (1946), A Double Life (1947), Red River (1948), The Great Gatsby (1949), Winchester '73 (1950), Phone Call from a Stranger (1952), Meet Danny Wilson (1952), O'Rourke of the Royal Mounted (1954), Playgirl (1954), Mambo (1954), I Am a Camera (1955), The Night of the Hunter (1955), The Big Knife (1955), Odds Against Tomorrow (1959), Lolita (1962), The Balcony (1963), Thirty-Minute Theatre (TV Series) (1965), Harper (1966), Alfie (1966), The Scalphunters (1968), Wild in the Streets (1968), Arthur? Arthur! (1969), Bloody Mama (1970), Flap (1970), Blume in Love (1973), Cleopatra Jones (1973), The Tenant (1976),

Laughton—NIGHT OF THE HUNTER—4 King of the Gypsies (1978), The Magician of Lublin (1979), S.O.B. (1981), The Delta Force (1986), Purple People Eater (1988), The Silence of the Hams (1994), Backfire! (1995), Raging Angels (1995), The Portrait of a Lady (1996), and La bomba (1999).

LILLIAN GISH (b. October 14, 1893 in Springfield, Ohio—d. February 27, 1993 in New York City, New York) was a pioneering American actress of the screen (119 credits) and stage, as well as a director and writer. Her film acting career spanned 75 years, from 1912, in silent film shorts, to 1987. Gish was called the First Lady of American Cinema, and is credited with pioneering fundamental film performing techniques. Gish was a prominent film star from 1912 into the 1920s, particularly associated with the films of director D. W. Griffith, including her leading role in the highest-grossing film of the silent era, Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915). At the dawn of the sound era, she returned to the stage and appeared in film infrequently, including well-known roles in the controversial western Duel in the Sun (1946) and the offbeat thriller The Night of the Hunter (1955). She also did considerable television work from the early 1950s into the 1980s and closed her career playing opposite Bette Davis in the 1987 film The Whales of August. In her later years, Gish became a dedicated advocate for the appreciation and preservation of silent film. These are some of the other films and television series she appeared in: An Unseen Enemy (Short) (1912), Two Daughters of Eve (Short) (1912), So Near, Yet So Far (Short) (1912), In the Aisles of the Wild (Short) (1912), The Painted Lady (Short) (1912), The Musketeers of Pig Alley (Short) (1912), Gold and Glitter (Short) (1912), Brutality (Short) (1912), The New York Hat (Short) (1912), The Burglar's Dilemma (Short) (1912), A Cry for Help (Short) (1912), Oil and Water (Short) (1913), The Unwelcome Guest (Short) (1913), A Misunderstood Boy (Short) (1913),

The Left-Handed Man (Short) (1913), The Rebellion of Kitty Belle (Short) (1914), Lord Chumley (Short) (1914), The Angel of Contention (Short) (1914), Man's Enemy (Short) (1914), The Tear That Burned (Short) (1914), The Folly of Anne (Short) (1914), The Sisters (Short) (1914), A Duel for Love (Short) (1914), His Lesson (Short) (1915), The Lost House (Short) (1915), Enoch Arden (Short) (1915), Captain Macklin (Short) (1915), The Lily and the Rose (1915), Daphne and the Pirate (1916), Sold for Marriage (1916), An Innocent Magdalene (1916), Intolerance: Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages (1916), Diane of the Follies (1916), The Children Pay (1916), The House Built Upon Sand (1916), Souls Triumphant (1917), Hearts of the World (1918), The Great Love (1918), True Heart Susie (1919), The Greatest Question (1919), Way Down East (1920), Orphans of the Storm (1921), The White Sister (1923), Romola (1924), Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925), La Bohème (1926), The Scarlet Letter (1926), Annie Laurie (1927), The Enemy (1927), The Wind (1928), One Romantic Night (1930), Top Man (1943), Miss Susie Slagle's (1946), Portrait of Jennie (1948), Robert Montgomery Presents (TV Series) (1951-1954), Campbell Summer Soundstage (TV Series) (1954), The Cobweb (1955), Kraft Theatre (TV Series) (1955), Playwrights '56 (TV Series) (1955), The Alcoa Hour (TV Series) (1956), Orders to Kill (1958), The Unforgiven (1960), The Ed Sullivan Show (TV Series) (1961), The Spiral Staircase (TV Movie) (1961), Theatre '62 (TV Series) (1961), Mr. Novak (TV Series) (1963), Follow Me, Boys! (1966), Warning Shot (1967), The Comedians (1967), A Wedding (1978), The Love Boat (TV Series) (1981), and Sweet Liberty (1986). JAMES GLEASON (b. May 23, 1882 in New York City, New York—d. April 12, 1959 (age 76) in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, California) was an American film actor (164 credits) who was also a playwright and screenwriter (28 credits). Gleason was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance as boxing manager Max "Pop" Corkle in the 1941 film Here Comes Mr. Jordan. These are some of his film appearances: Polly of the Follies (1922), The Count of Ten (1928), The Broadway Melody (1929), Puttin' on the Ritz (1930), Her Man (1930), The Big Gamble (1931), Rule 'Em and Weep (Short) (1932), Blondie of the Follies (1932), Penguin Pool Murder (1932), Clear All Wires! (1933), Orders Is Orders (1934), West Point of the Air (1935), Don't Turn 'em Loose (1936), The Big Game (1936), Manhattan Merry-Go-Round (1937), On Your Toes (1939), Meet John Doe (1941), Babes on Broadway (1941), A Date with the Falcon (1942), My Gal Sal (1942), The Falcon Takes Over (1942), Tales of Manhattan (1942), Manila Calling (1942), Crash Dive (1943), A Guy Named Joe (1943), Once Upon a Time

Laughton—NIGHT OF THE HUNTER—5 (1944), Arsenic and Old Lace (1944), The Keys of the Kingdom (1944), A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945), The Clock (1945), Home, Sweet Homicide (1946), The Bishop's Wife (1947), Smart Woman (1948), The Dude Goes West (1948), Incident (1948), When My Baby Smiles at Me (1948), The Life of Riley (1949), The Yellow Cab Man (1950), Riding High (1950), The Jackpot (1950), Joe Palooka in The Squared Circle (1950), Two Gals and a Guy (1951), Joe Palooka in Triple Cross (1951), I'll See You in My Dreams (1951), The Story of Will Rogers (1952), What Price Glory (1952), The Life of Riley (TV Series) (1953-1955), The Night of the Hunter (1955), The Girl Rush (1955), The Female Animal (1958), Rock-a-Bye Baby (1958), Once Upon a Horse... (1958), The Last Hurrah (1958), and Money, Women and Guns (1958).

Adrian Danks: “The Man in Black: The Night of the Hunter” The Night of the Hunter is a film that I am little frightened to write about; scared that the act of writing might irrevocably change what is, for me and many others, a remarkable, magical and elusive movie. I worry and wonder whether what I see and experience time and again might only be, to quote one of the film’s characters, “all just a fake and a pipe dream”. This feeling is mired in the film’s almost hallucinatory imagery, its complex rendering of time, its delicacy and its astonishing creation of an ‘artificial’ and dream-like universe. The film performs one of the most difficult tasks in cinema, being both idiosyncratically self-conscious and emotionally engaging. It is a film that should not work – bursting with a conflation of styles, tones and registers. It is also one of the most deliriously synthetic fugues the cinema has to offer.

The only film directed by legendary actor and one-time collaborator with Bertolt Brecht (on Galileo), Charles Laughton, The Night of the Hunter is probably the most successful attempt to ‘translate’ the ideas of Brecht into the realms of commercial narrative cinema (though it is very different to what is conventionally called Brechtian in cinema and draws heavily on James Agee’s pungent script, Davis Grubb’s evocative source novel and Stanley Cortez’s eye-popping cinematography). In the central role, Mitchum’s wife-serial-killing Harry Powell comes on like Mack the Knife let loose in a magical kingdom of expressionist lighting, shadow plays and gorgeously set-designed ’30s backwoods Americana. Despite focusing upon its two very affective child-leads, it is the extraordinary, almost-possessed Mitchum who holds centre stage, commanding the screen both aurally and pictorially. Lesley Stern has called Mitchum’s performance “histrionic”, but more accurately he is a miasmic body upon which the film’s mix of styles, histories and registers can be played out.1 The Night of the Hunter is essentially the allegorical tale of two innocents (John and Pearl) who are cut adrift from the familiar underpinnings of a stable family life. They are chased by Powell across a luminous, almost cut-out cinematic landscape before coming to rest in the nurturing Mother Goose-like world of Rachel Cooper (Lillian Gish). One of the film’s most striking aspects is its continual reference, in a variety of guises, to the acts and purposes of storytelling. This obsession stretches from the incredibly stylised images that open the film to the closing direct-to-camera aphorisms delivered by Gish’s character. The film starts with a curiously non-diegetic flourish. Cooper appears in a field of stars reading short pithy maxims from the Bible. There is a dissolve to the heads of five children floating in the same starry substance, listening intently to the lessons that Cooper reads to them from the “good book”. This cuts to a series of helicopter shots that gradually draw us towards Powell. The register then shifts as “realistic” establishing shots are followed by wildly rear-projected images of Powell flailing over the wheel of a car while talking aloud to some sort of Old Testament God: “Your book’s full of killin’s”. This disorientating opening provides a model for how the film works: a clash of the anachronistic and the modern; a delirious mix of cinematic styles; a rigorous foregrounding of stories and their interpretations; a juxtaposition of dramatic modes and registers. The act of storytelling is used as a means to fix and make sense of an elusive world of signification where everything becomes contingent and embodied in character, spectator and teller. For example, Powell’s over-the-top performance of the tale of love and hate, left-hand right-hand, Cain and Abel, is for some a

Laughton—NIGHT OF THE HUNTER—6 compelling interpretative allegory and for others a sign of his Pentecostal-fuelled fakery. The Night of the Hunter is also a fascinating film in terms of its treatment of time. At various points the film refers to domestic, pastoral, linear, gendered, narratological and generational conceptions of time and ranges across the varied experiences of “being in time” available to the cinema. This obsession with heterogeneous time, a time that also darts backwards and forwards across cinema history and memory, is visualised by Pearl and John’s dreamy, timeless, ebbing-and-flowing free-fall journey downriver. The long scenes of the children’s flight have a gentle and archaic rhythm and tempo, furthering the film’s extraordinarily dynamic and poetic use of visual and aural motifs. But this is also a film that is out of time. It is both anachronistic and visionary; while fitting into neither the broader context of the mid-’50s or an earlier epoch it also doesn’t quite work as a film ahead of its time and was a box-office failure. It reaches back into cinema history, to the irises, wipes, mise en scène and performance styles of silent cinema, to the traditions of expressionism, stage melodrama, primitivism and a kind of American Gothic. It makes one glance back to the cinema of Griffith (most particularly through the figure of Gish) and Murnau but also plants itself ‘firmly’ within the shifting co-ordinates of ’50s American cinema through its use of sweeping helicopter shots, the dominating presence of one of the great stars of the era, Robert Mitchum, and a strikingly modern sexual pathology. The Night of the Hunter is a film to haunt the mind. Its greatness lies in its ability to seem to belong to another cinema, another time, one that has ‘never’ existed in Hollywood. For example, the beautiful images of a submerged Willa (Shelley Winters) with throat slit and hair gently waving in the silent water are both horrible and extraordinarily gentle. They are like nothing else I have seen and felt in cinema. The Night of the Hunter is both an idyll and a cul-de-sac; a desert-island movie that bares close relation to the body of cinema, to the deeply American work of writers like Mark Twain, but that is also outside of it. It is subsequently, in almost every way, one of the great solitary works of cinema: magical, lyrical, theatrical, gloriously filmic and haunted by its own traditions. It is, perhaps, the greatest first and last work the cinema has known – an epic cinema alive to the fantastic and magical

nature of the medium itself. As François Truffaut said, “It makes us fall in love again with an experimental cinema that truly experiments, and a cinema of discovery that, in fact, discovers”.2

Terrence Raferty: “The Night of the Hunter: Holy Terror” (Criterion) The Night of the Hunter (1955)—the first film directed by Charles Laughton and also, sadly, the last—is among the greatest horror movies ever made, and perhaps, of that select company, the most irreducibly American in spirit. It’s about those venerable American subjects fear, sex, money, and religion, and for the beleaguered

children who are its heroes, salvation comes at the end of a long, drifting journey down a river: our old native idea of finding the way to someplace better. These Depression-era West Virginia kids, John Harper (Billy Chapin) and his little sister, Pearl (Sally Jane Bruce), orphaned by the recent death of both their parents, light out on the river in a tiny boat to escape the grasping hands of their stepfather, one Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum). In flight, John and Pearl just go where the gentle current takes them, sleeping when they can and meandering past other small creatures, who seem to be watching over them anxiously from the riverbank: owls, rabbits, frogs, even spiders. Toward the end of the film, the children’s savior, an old woman (Lillian Gish) who gathers in the many orphans the river washes up, looks into the camera and says, “It’s a hard world for little things.” In The Night of the Hunter, all the little things, human and otherwise, know too well and too soon how hard the world is. When John and Pearl are sleeping, in their fragile craft on the river and with the night animals keeping vigil, you feel as if you were inside their heads, dreaming a child’s dreams, part blind terror and part sweet hope. The river sequence is the centerpiece of The Night of the Hunter, and the clearest indication of Laughton’s extraordinary visual gifts, but the film is stuffed with beauties: a superb ghostly image of the children’s murdered mother (Shelley Winters), her body lifeless under the water of that same indifferent river and her blonde hair trailing upward toward the light; an extreme long shot of the preacher on horseback, silhouetted against the first faint light of dawn as John watches from a hayloft and whispers to himself, “Don’t he never sleep?”; a wonderful scary-comic scene, expressionistically lit, of Powell scrambling up cellar stairs in pursuit of the escaping children.

Laughton—NIGHT OF THE HUNTER—7 Laughton, in his midfifties at the time of filming, had been a very famous actor on the stage and screen in his native England for nearly three decades, and a prominent (usually flamboyant) character actor in Hollywood since the thirties. His best-known starring roles were in Alexander Korda’s The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), Leo McCarey’s Ruggles of Red Gap(1935), Frank Lloyd’s Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), and William Dieterle’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939); he had also acted in films directed by Jean Renoir (This Land Is Mine, 1943), Alfred Hitchcock (The Paradine Case, 1947), and David Lean (Hobson’s Choice, 1954), and in the theater had worked with Bertolt Brecht (on a 1947 Los Angeles production ofGalileo, for which he was also credited as codirector). Even for someone as experienced in the theatrical arts as Laughton, though, The Night of the Hunter presented some pretty formidable challenges. The 1953 novel, written by the West Virginian Davis Grubb, tells a strong, uncomplicated story, but in an idiom with which readers and filmgoers were still not entirely familiar: what we now call southern gothic. William Faulkner had been introducing elements of the grotesque into his fiction for a while (see especially the ingenious use of a corncob in his self-described 1931 “potboiler” Sanctuary), and powerful whiffs of the outré had recently been wafting from the humid dramas of Tennessee Williams and the melancholy stories of Carson McCullers. But in 1955, the southern style, redolent of strange sex, bad booze, old-time religion, and the collective regional memory of defeat, was for the general public fairly exotic stuff. (Flannery O’Connor, who was second only to Faulkner in her understanding of the South’s tortured consciousness, brought out her first collection of stories that year.) It’s a style that, at its best, makes horrors lyrical, that gives the darker, damper aspects of the human condition a weird kind of shine. Grubb’s novel, which is no longer in print, is a good middle-range exemplar of the style, written in the rolling, replete, mock-biblical prose typical of southern gothic, and plotted with a keen sense of the sensational. The story revolves around the preacher’s attempts to get his hands—LOVE tattooed on one, HATE on the other—on a stash of money stolen by the Harper children’s father, who was Powell’s cell mate in the penitentiary. After Harper’s execution, Powell, oozing piety, marries the widow and begins sniffing around for what he considers

his just, providential reward; he’s convinced (rightly) that the kids know where the loot is hidden. And after the new Mrs. Powell comes to her untimely and unnatural end, and the children flee, the story becomes a simple chase, the black-clad demon harrowing the innocents, pursuing them with all his unholy ardor. In approaching this unusual material, Laughton made several remarkably canny decisions right at the start, beginning with his choice of screenwriter: James Agee, the Tennessee-bred journalist, fiction writer, and film critic

who had a few years before supplied John Huston with the elegant script for The African Queen (1951). Agee was steeped not only in the right kind of southern sensibility but also in the work of the silent-film pioneer D. W. Griffith, which Laughton, with near miraculous intuition, believed should be the touchstone for the telling of the story; Griffith was the master of heightened, poetic melodrama,

and that’s what Laughton wanted for The Night of the Hunter. He screened as many of Griffith’s movies as he could dig up at the Museum of Modern Art, and hired the terrific cinematographer Stanley Cortez, who had done brilliantly imaginative work in black and white on Orson Welles’s second film, The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). The black-and-white imagery of The Night of the Hunter is in a different, more deliberately archaic style from that of the Welles film, keyed to the basic emotions of love and fear, just as the great silent movies were. It’s as if Laughton had resolved to recover something the movies had lost, some secret, long-forgotten cache of letters from ancestors—the scripture of the art’s early magic. Perhaps as an aid to invoking the mighty spirits of the elders of cinema, he cast the sixty-one-year-old Gish, the most piercing of Griffith’s actors, in the role of the Harper children’s ultimate protector, Miz Rachel Cooper. The sequences she appears in, near the end of the picture, have a tone that borders on reverence. Laughton frames her with the unfussy eloquence Griffith favored, often shooting her still-lovely face straight on as she tells the children stories or addresses the audience directly; when she speaks, he confers on her the air of authority Griffith gave her in the old days, in movies like Broken Blossoms(1919) and Way Down East (1920), in that time when movies didn’t need to speak at all.

Laughton—NIGHT OF THE HUNTER—8 The other female star of The Night of the Hunter, Shelley Winters, is cast ideally to type, as a gullible sexual optimist doomed to perish early; she’d already played a variation on that theme in George Stevens’s A Place in the Sun (1951), and would do so again in Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita in 1962. (There’s something about her—an unseemly eagerness—that appears to bring out the worst in men.) But Mitchum as the alarming preacher is a really daring bit of counterintuitive casting. For the previous ten years or so, he had been perhaps the coolest and toughest of film noir heroes. With his loose, lazy walk, his somnolent eyes, and his deep, buttery drawl, he always gave the impression of a man who could not be fazed, even in the direst circumstances. Harry Powell is not that sort of character. It isn’t just that Mitchum is playing a villain, or even that he’s using his indolent manner to convey a profoundly sinister kind of unctuousness. What’s truly startling about his performance is how buffoonish he allows himself to be, in between bouts of menace. His Harry Powell is a man whose composure masks the most unruly impulses—imperfectly capped wells of lust and greed and violence that tend to leak in moments of crisis, and not in attractive ways. When Miz Cooper threatens him with a shotgun, he hops away, whooping like a big skittish animal. Small things have to run; the larger beasts are expected to stand their ground. Maybe the most radical aspect of The Night of the Hunter, and its least appreciated virtue, is its sense of humor. More conventional horror movies overdo the solemnity of evil. The monster in The Night of the Hunter is so bad he’s funny. Laughton and Mitchum treat evil with the indignity it deserves. And that, perhaps, is the reason this one-of-a-kind movie didn’t catch on with audiences on its initial release. It was an abject flop at the box office, and Laughton never directed another film. He died seven years later. The failure of The Night of the Hunter was not, forty-five years ago, much remarked upon: it was a modestly budgeted picture, a little thing in Hollywood terms. But it has drifted slowly, steadily down the river of the years between then and now, and the long flow of time has brought it to a better place, where critics and filmmakers and moviegoers honor it and even feel protective toward it. The world seems harder than ever, and we all feel, individually, smaller and more vulnerable. Laughing at evil may be an idea whose time has come.

Roger Ebert: “Night of the Hunter” Charles Laughton's "The Night of the Hunter” (1955) is one of the greatest of all American films, but has never received the attention it deserves because of its lack of the proper trappings. Many “great movies” are by great directors, but Laughton directed only this one film, which was a critical and commercial failure long overshadowed by his acting career. Many great movies use actors who come draped in respectability and prestige, but Robert Mitchum has

always been a raffish outsider. And many great movies are realistic, but “Night of the Hunter” is an expressionistic oddity, telling its chilling story through visual fantasy. People don't know how to categorize it, so they leave it off their lists. Yet what a compelling, frightening and beautiful film it is! And how well it has survived its period. Many films from the mid-1950s, even the good ones, seem somewhat dated now, but by setting his story in an invented movie world outside conventional realism, Laughton gave it a timelessness. Yes, the movie takes place in a small town on the banks of a river. But the town looks as artificial as a Christmas card scene, the family's house with its strange angles inside and out looks too small to live in, and the river becomes a set so obviously artificial it could have been built for a completely stylized studio film like "Kwaidan" (1964). Everybody knows the Mitchum character, the sinister “Reverend” Harry Powell. Even those who haven't seen the movie have heard about the knuckles of his two hands, and how one has the letters H-A-T-E tattooed on them, and the other the letters L-O-V-E. Bruce Springsteen drew on those images in his song "Cautious Man”: "On his right hand Billy'd tattooed the word "love” and on his left hand was the word "fear” And in which hand he held his fate was never clear” Many movie lovers know by heart the Reverend's famous explanation to the wide-eyed boy ("Ah, little lad, you're staring at my fingers. Would you like me to tell you the little story of right-hand/left-hand?”) And the scene where the Reverend stands at the top of the stairs and calls down to the boy and his sister has become the model for hundred other horror scenes. But does this familiarity give "The Night of the Hunter” the recognition it deserves? I don't think so

Laughton—NIGHT OF THE HUNTER—9 because those famous trademarks distract from its real accomplishment. It is one of the most frightening of movies, with one of the most unforgettable of villains, and on both of those scores it holds up as well after four decades as I expect "The Silence of the Lambs" to do many years from now. The story, somewhat rearranged: In a prison cell, Harry Powell discovers the secret of a condemned man (Peter Graves), who has hidden $10,000somewhere around his house. After being released from prison, Powell seeks out the man's widow,Willa Harper (Shelley Winters), and two children, John (Billy Chapin) and the owl-faced Pearl (Sally Jane Bruce). They know where the money is, but don't trust the “preacher.” But their mother buys his con game and marries him, leading to a tortured wedding night inside a high-gabled bedroom that looks a cross between a chapel and a crypt. Soon Willa Harper is dead, seen in an incredible shot at the wheel of a car at the bottom of the river, her hair drifting with the seaweed. And soon the children are fleeing down the dream-river in a small boat, while the Preacher follows them implacably on the shore; this beautifully stylized sequence uses the logic of nightmares, in which no matter how fast one runs, the slow step of the pursuer keeps the pace. The children are finally taken in by a Bible-fearing old lady (Lillian Gish), who would seem to be helpless to defend them against the single-minded murderer, but is as unyielding as her faith. The shot of Winters at the bottom of the river is one of several remarkable images in the movie, which was photographed in black and white by Stanley Cortez, who shot Welles' "The Magnificent Ambersons," and once observed he was "always chosen to shoot weird things.” He shot few weirder than here, where one frightening composition shows a street lamp casting Mitchum's terrifying shadow on the walls of the children's bedroom. The basement sequence combines terror and humor, as when the Preacher tries to chase the children up the stairs, only to trip, fall, recover, lunge and catch his fingers in the door. And the masterful nighttime river sequence uses giant foregrounds of natural details, like frogs and spider webs, to underline a kind of biblical progression as the children drift to eventual safety. The screenplay, based on a novel by Davis Grubb, is credited to James Agee, one of the icons of American film writing and criticism, then in the final throes of

alcoholism. Laughton's widow, Elsa Lanchester, is adamant in her autobiography: “Charles finally had very little respect for Agee. And he hated the script, but he was inspired by his hatred.” She quotes the film’s producer, Paul Gregory: “. . . the script that was produced on the screen is no more James Agee's . . . than I'm Marlene Dietrich.” Who wrote the final draft? Perhaps Laughton had a hand. Lanchester and Laughton both remembered that Mitchum was invaluable as a help in working with the two children, whom Laughton could not stand. But the final film is all Laughton's, especially the dreamy, Bible-evoking

final sequence, with Lillian Gish presiding over events like an avenging elderly angel. Robert Mitchum is one of the great icons of the second half-century of cinema. Despite his sometimes scandalous off-screen reputation, despite his genial willingness to sign on to half-baked projects, he made a group of films that led David Thomson, in his Biographical Dictionary of Film, to ask, “How can I offer this hunk as one of the best actors in the movies?” And answer: “Since the war, no American actor has made more first-class films, in so many different moods.” “The Night of the Hunter,” he observes, represents

“the only time in his career that Mitchum acted outside himself,” by which he means there is little of the Mitchum persona in the Preacher. Mitchum is uncannily right for the role, with his long face, his gravel voice, and the silky tones of a snake-oil salesman. And Shelly Winters, all jitters and repressed sexual hysteria, is somehow convincing as she falls so prematurely into, and out of, his arms. The supporting actors are like a chattering gallery of Norman Rockwell archetypes, their lives centered on bake sales, soda fountains and gossip. The children, especially the little girl, look more odd than lovable, which helps the film move away from realism and into stylized nightmare. And Lillian Gish and Stanley Cortez quite deliberately, I think, composed that great shot of her which looks like nothing so much as Whistler's mother holding a shotgun.

Laughton—NIGHT OF THE HUNTER—10 Charles Laughton showed here that he had an original eye, and a taste for material that stretched the conventions of the movies. It is risky to combine horror and humor, and foolhardy to approach them through expressionism. For his first film, Laughton made a film like no other before or since, and with such confidence it seemed to draw on a lifetime of work. Critics were baffled by it, the public rejected it, and the studio had a much more expensive Mitchum picture (“Not as a Stranger”) it wanted

to promote instead. But nobody who has seen "The Night of the Hunter” has forgotten it, or Mitchum's voice coiling down those basement stairs: "Chillll . . . dren?” The Cinemaphilia & Beyond page on Night of the Hunter includes Agee’s script, a video interview with cinematographer Stanley Cortez, a 34-minute audio of Laughton telling the story of the film, and much more:

https://cinephiliabeyond.org/the-night-of-the-hunter-the-extraordinary-single-directorial-entry-in-charles-laughtons-career/

COMING UP IN THE FALL 2019 BUFFALO FILM SEMINARS (SERIES 39)

Oct 8 Masaki Kobayashi Harakiri 1962 Oct 15 Nicholas Roeg Don’t Look Now 1973

Oct 22 Mel Brooks Blazing Saddles 1974 Oct 29 Larisa Shepitko The Ascent 1977

Nov 5 Louis Malle Au revoir les enfants 1987 Nov 12 Charles Burnett To Sleep With Anger 1990

Nov 19 Steve James, Frederick Marks & Peter Gilbert Hoop Dreams 1994 Nov 26 Alfonso Cuarón Roma 2018

Dec 3 Baz Luhrmann Moulin Rouge 2001

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CONTACTS: ...email Diane Christian: engdc@buffalo.edu…email Bruce Jackson bjackson@buffalo.edu...for the series schedule, annotations, links and updates: http: //buffalofilmseminars.com...to subscribe to the weekly email informational notes, send an email to addtolist@buffalofilmseminars.com....for cast and crew info on any film: http: //imdb.com/

The Buffalo Film Seminars are presented by the State University of New York at Buffalo and the Dipson Amherst Theatre, with support from the Robert and Patricia Colby Foundation and the Buffalo News.