The Night Of The Hunter. (12A.)
Directed by Charles Laughton. 1955
Starring Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters, Billy Chapin, Sally James Bruce, James Gleason, Peter Graves, Evelyn Varden and Lillian Gish. Out on 2-disc Blu-ray/ DVD from Criterion Collection. Black and white. 89 mins.
Because it happens to most everything else, it's a small wonder that nobody has made a musical of Night Of The Hunter. Everybody in the film seems to have their own tune or musical cue, and Walter Schumann's score offers up a variety of themes that ranges from gentle lullabies to storming menace. More than that, its mix of queasy menace and parenthesized sentimentality seems ideally suited to musical theatre.
Among the disc's copious extras, Simon Callow points out that Laughton, one of the silver screen's most acclaimed actors during the first couple of decades of the talkies, is now largely known only for his single turn behind the camera. It is a unique, even perverse endeavour: a gothic children film, a pulpit sermon about Christian hypocrisy.
It's a difficult film to synopsise. It is constantly shapeshifting, turning over new leaves to escape from the darkness it has unleashed and then flipping that leaf back. Rather than outline the plot, here are some key elements. On one extreme there is Mitchum as a woman-hating psycho killer preacher with LOVE and HATE tattooed on his knuckles. On the other is silent screen great Gish as a shotgun Mother Goose who looks after waifs and strays. Between them are the widow Winters who falls for Mitchum and her two children John and Pearl (Chapin and Bruce) trying to respect their father's dying wish not to reveal the hiding place of the $10,000 he stole and embarking on a down river boat ride to escape from the Mitchum.
Why people love The Night Of The Hunter.
It's like a marriage of Orson Welles and Terrence Malick. Using Welles' cameraman on The Magnificent Ambersons, Stanley Cortez, the film contains some truly remarkable monochrome images and carries a strong German expressionist influence. Yet their menace is tempered by elements of nature that Laughton often places in the foreground of a shot: giant rabbits, or a cobweb or an overbearing moon.
The German Expressionist influence is clearest perhaps in the scene in the bedroom where Mitchum lurches menacingly over Winters in a set that has been designed like a church steeple. The use of negative space is chilling; emphasising her vulnerability while sanctifying her. She made some unwise choices, let down her children but the composition absolves her.
For me, the most gobsmackingly inspired shot comes in the middle of the children's nighttime journey. They come ashore and sleep in a barn. As the animals shuffle in the foreground we see the oversized moon jump across the clear night sky to three distinct points until as dawn comes up the silhouette of the Preacher on a horse can be seen on the horizon, crooning his favoured spiritual, "Leaning." The cinema doesn't get much better than this.
The film's mix of dark and light is intoxicating. Night of The Hunter is a ghoulish figure from your nightmares gently cradling you in its arms and whispering soft words in your ears trying to soothe you back to sleep.
Why I don't like The Night Of The Hunter.
My loss I know, but I can't force it. I suspect that it is because of the cake-and-eat-it aspect. The film is a fierce expose of Christian hypocrisy yet it falls back on biblical homilies for its vision of the light. It may well be doing this ironically but I still baulk. The children's trip down the river is an allusion to Moses and bullrushes while the film opens with Gish delivering a sermon about the lilies in the field and judge not lest you be judged to the disembodied heads of five children, floating in the starry night sky.
Also, and it is heresy to say this, but I don't rate Mitchum's performance. The Preacher with his phallic flick knife and the stone-cold righteous certainty of his butchery should be one of the screen's most hideous, sickening villains, but Mitchum's performance, or the film's conception of him, is inconsistent and almost jokey in places. At times he seems like an unstoppable mythic force, ("doesn't he ever sleep?" John exclaims when he sees him on the horse at dawn) but at other times he is a pathetic shyster, too blundering and obvious to be scary.
Extras.
I think there is surely a rule of thumb that says the Making of should always be shorter than that whose making it is describing. So a whole second disc full of outtakes and behind the scenes footage is pushing it a bit. But then this is going to be bought almost exclusively by those who already love the film so it's like those deluxe editions of classic albums that give you a second disc full of demos, b-sides and oddities.
Audio commentary featuring second-unit director Terry Sanders, film critic F. X. Feeney, archivist Robert Gitt, and author Preston Neal Jones
Directed by Charles Laughton. 1955
Starring Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters, Billy Chapin, Sally James Bruce, James Gleason, Peter Graves, Evelyn Varden and Lillian Gish. Out on 2-disc Blu-ray/ DVD from Criterion Collection. Black and white. 89 mins.
Because it happens to most everything else, it's a small wonder that nobody has made a musical of Night Of The Hunter. Everybody in the film seems to have their own tune or musical cue, and Walter Schumann's score offers up a variety of themes that ranges from gentle lullabies to storming menace. More than that, its mix of queasy menace and parenthesized sentimentality seems ideally suited to musical theatre.
Among the disc's copious extras, Simon Callow points out that Laughton, one of the silver screen's most acclaimed actors during the first couple of decades of the talkies, is now largely known only for his single turn behind the camera. It is a unique, even perverse endeavour: a gothic children film, a pulpit sermon about Christian hypocrisy.
It's a difficult film to synopsise. It is constantly shapeshifting, turning over new leaves to escape from the darkness it has unleashed and then flipping that leaf back. Rather than outline the plot, here are some key elements. On one extreme there is Mitchum as a woman-hating psycho killer preacher with LOVE and HATE tattooed on his knuckles. On the other is silent screen great Gish as a shotgun Mother Goose who looks after waifs and strays. Between them are the widow Winters who falls for Mitchum and her two children John and Pearl (Chapin and Bruce) trying to respect their father's dying wish not to reveal the hiding place of the $10,000 he stole and embarking on a down river boat ride to escape from the Mitchum.
Why people love The Night Of The Hunter.
It's like a marriage of Orson Welles and Terrence Malick. Using Welles' cameraman on The Magnificent Ambersons, Stanley Cortez, the film contains some truly remarkable monochrome images and carries a strong German expressionist influence. Yet their menace is tempered by elements of nature that Laughton often places in the foreground of a shot: giant rabbits, or a cobweb or an overbearing moon.
The German Expressionist influence is clearest perhaps in the scene in the bedroom where Mitchum lurches menacingly over Winters in a set that has been designed like a church steeple. The use of negative space is chilling; emphasising her vulnerability while sanctifying her. She made some unwise choices, let down her children but the composition absolves her.
For me, the most gobsmackingly inspired shot comes in the middle of the children's nighttime journey. They come ashore and sleep in a barn. As the animals shuffle in the foreground we see the oversized moon jump across the clear night sky to three distinct points until as dawn comes up the silhouette of the Preacher on a horse can be seen on the horizon, crooning his favoured spiritual, "Leaning." The cinema doesn't get much better than this.
The film's mix of dark and light is intoxicating. Night of The Hunter is a ghoulish figure from your nightmares gently cradling you in its arms and whispering soft words in your ears trying to soothe you back to sleep.
Why I don't like The Night Of The Hunter.
My loss I know, but I can't force it. I suspect that it is because of the cake-and-eat-it aspect. The film is a fierce expose of Christian hypocrisy yet it falls back on biblical homilies for its vision of the light. It may well be doing this ironically but I still baulk. The children's trip down the river is an allusion to Moses and bullrushes while the film opens with Gish delivering a sermon about the lilies in the field and judge not lest you be judged to the disembodied heads of five children, floating in the starry night sky.
Also, and it is heresy to say this, but I don't rate Mitchum's performance. The Preacher with his phallic flick knife and the stone-cold righteous certainty of his butchery should be one of the screen's most hideous, sickening villains, but Mitchum's performance, or the film's conception of him, is inconsistent and almost jokey in places. At times he seems like an unstoppable mythic force, ("doesn't he ever sleep?" John exclaims when he sees him on the horse at dawn) but at other times he is a pathetic shyster, too blundering and obvious to be scary.
Extras.
I think there is surely a rule of thumb that says the Making of should always be shorter than that whose making it is describing. So a whole second disc full of outtakes and behind the scenes footage is pushing it a bit. But then this is going to be bought almost exclusively by those who already love the film so it's like those deluxe editions of classic albums that give you a second disc full of demos, b-sides and oddities.
Audio commentary featuring second-unit director Terry Sanders, film critic F. X. Feeney, archivist Robert Gitt, and author Preston Neal Jones
- Charles Laughton Directs “The Night of the Hunter,” a two-and-a-half-hour treasure trove of outtakes and behind-the-scenes footage
- New documentary featuring interviews with producer Paul Gregory, Sanders, Feeney, Jones, and author Jeffrey Couchman
- New video interview with Laughton biographer Simon Callow
- Clip from The Ed Sullivan Show in which cast members perform a scene deleted from the film
- A fifteen-minute episode of the BBC show Moving Pictures about the film
- Archival interview with cinematographer Stanley Cortez
- Gallery of sketches by author Davis Grubb, author of the source novel
- New video conversation between Gitt and film critic Leonard Maltin about Charles Laughton Directs
- Original theatrical trailer
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- PLUS: New essays by critics Terrence Rafferty and Michael Sragow
