The Night of the Hunter

 THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER
Director ~ Charles Laughton
Writers ~ Davis Grubb, James Agee, Charles Laughton
1955, USA
Stars ~ Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters, Lillian Gish

Based upon Davis Gubb’s 1953 novel, this is Charles Laughton’s only film, adapted in 1955, apparently discouraged from more by the negative feedback it received. Taking from the case of the “Lonely Heart” murderer Harry F. Powers, hung for killing women and children for money,  Davis Grubb’s novel is in the lyrical style that traces back to Twain’s ‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’ mixed, the eccentric South of Sherwood Anderson’s ‘Winesburg, Ohio’, with the harder contemporary crime edge of Jim Thompson. But there’s also something of a Grimm’s fairy tale. It’s a heady, entertaining and ripe read and the film knows all it has to do is follow its lead.

In adapting, Laughton wanted to hark back the Silent Era, to capture some of its wonder, to make audiences that he felt had grown complacent sit up again. If ‘The Night of the Hunter’ initially feels dated, it always did. But perhaps this homage to the old and expressionistic ways caused unintentional amusement for those not sympathetic or attuned: certainly, several reviews of the time – many were scathing – accuse it of being laughable. Maybe they were too close? Certainly, opening with children’s faces in the stars and Lancaster riding his stolen car and talking to God are broad devices, let alone filming in unfashionable black-and-white. Yet a modern audience can perhaps identify these as setting a heightened reality adjacent to fairy tale and the deliberate artifice of storytelling. There’s an affectation with purpose, the delight of moviemaking. It has of course now been reclaimed as a classic, cited as a favourite and an influence on modern directors (Scorsese, Spike Lee, Del Toro). Small town oddballs in crime Americana is the stuff of the Coen brothers and David Lynch, after all. Likely Fifties’ critics weren’t ready for the mashups and genre-blending that would flourish as cinema developed, let alone elements such as exploitation and camp.

There was a lot of the objection to portraying a preacher as Evil, but Robert Mitchum as The Preacher knows to play to the gallery, ripe as a false missionary even to himself, justifying his misogyny and homicidal intentions by crediting God. He’s having a good time. He’s hulking and slimy and whenever he’s near the kids it is tense with unease and threat. In this world, he wears the right deception and knows that smalltown traditions and prejudices will pave his way and cover him just as he likes. With this, it’s hard not to take Mrs Spoon (Evelyn Varden) as equally villainous, representing bullying blind Faith. She will turn into a personified battle-axe at the end. There are no adults in town that will save the kids, too drunk, hypocritical or self-absorbed to help. The town will turn into an outraged lynch mob too, given a target, especially one that exposes how duped and hypocritical they are. Their own mother – a brittle Shelly Winters – gives herself over to religious fervour, re-imaging herself with masochistic martyrdom, lost after the state execution of her bank robber husband. It is the money that the Preacher has come for, and he knows the kids know where to find it.

It is consistently a fascinating and odd film. And then Preacher murders their mother in an excellent chapel-like bedroom and the film hits new heights, mother’s underwater corpse a truly nightmarish and ethereal vision, properly hitting horror strings with Mitchum lumbering up the cellar stairs like a Universal monster after the kids, letting out an animal howl when they get away and then the film moves from H.A.T.E to L.O.V.E. with its dreamy river journey. Against the desperation of The Depression, the kids float past the wildlife to an almost Disneyesque makeshift orphanage, owned by Miss Cooper. But even Miss Copper rounds them up with switches and smacks, the kind of violence called discipline rather than abuse, talking to them with a mixture of sternness and sentimentality. Like Mitchum, Lilian Gish as Mrs Cooper knows how to play to the gallery. Coming from silent cinema and a hiatus of disillusionment with Hollywood, Gish is every bit the match for Mitchum’s verbose scenery chewing.

All this is true to Grubb's book, the odd tone that is almost like Ray Bradbury in its floral flourishes of small-town whimsy conflicted with Dime Crime Novel cruelty and sensationalism. The film not only takes chunks of the novel’s dialogue but also its shadow-play: the silhouette cast from the streetlamp is straight from the novel, and the passage in the cellar is a chiaroscuro in prose. It never stops to surprise with its audacious mood changes, ending as a Christmas story and the message that the children will abide. The book has no qualms about suddenly changing into first person, for example. There is contention about who contributed to the script more, James Agee or Laughton’s rewrites, and with the evidence found on Agee’s first script it comes down on his side, but it sincerely captures the book, down to many details and the mood. It’s a good tracing.

At the end of David Lynch likewise exposé of American small-town underbelly, ‘Blue Velvet’ presents a synthetic songbird: similarly, ‘The Night of the Hunter’ is also earnestly artificial. Part of the power of ‘The Night of the Hunter’ is in trying to figure out what to make of it. It is preachy, blasphemous, exaggerated, lyrical, old-fashioned and timeless. The almost oxymoronic aesthetic and mood are masterclasses in filmmaking and capturing the nature of a playful, tricksy novel. Almost twee in its depiction of humanity’s ugliness, its Southern Gothic Serial Killer Fairy-Tale moonshine apparently too ahead of its time and baffling for the studio and audiences. But ‘The Night of the Hunter’s classic place now is assured. It is haunting, vivid, always surprising and still timeless and fresh.

Father Mother Sister Brother

Father Mother Sister Brother

Writer & Director ~ Jim Jarmusch

2025, United States-United Kingdom-Italy-France-Ireland-Germany

Stars ~ Tom Waits, Adam Driver, Mayim Bialik, Charlotte Rampling, Cate Blanchett

Family reunions held together by water, mystery, Rolexes, driving in cars, irresolution and “Bob’s your uncle”. Jarmusch returns to his anthology style where the stories are bonded by slice-of-life, mood and amusement. This lets loose his interest in all different people and classes again, but without culture clash as its source of amusement but rather concentrating on the unknowable mysteries of families.

 

Tom Waits defines the first story, there’s an almost Wes Anderson crispness arrangement for the second and a tangible warmth to the last (my favourite). Typically and deceptively slight but meaningful in its open-ended observations on the performative nature of families. Not as brave and soul-cleansing as ‘Paterson’ in its celebration of trivialities and introversion, this is middling filler Jarmusch with great performances and a relaxed, humane atmosphere. Not quite as satisfyingly oddball as his best, although reliably life-affirming.  

 

Lift to the Scaffold

 

Lift to the Scaffold

Elevator to the Gallows

Ascenseur pour l'échafaud

Director ~ Louis Malle

Writers ~ Roger Nimier, Louis Malle’ Noël Calef

1958, France

Stars ~ Jeanne Moreau, Maurice Ronet, Georges Poujouly

 

I can’t quite recall if it was Louis Malles’ ‘Lift to the Scaffold’ or his devastating ‘Au Revoir les Enfants’ that I saw first. They were featured on some World Cinema season on Channel 4 or BBC2 and they were certainly the first French films that I recall seeing. I mean, I had probably seen something badly dubbed Europudding during childhood, but nothing that I remember. They were quite the revelation. Amazon synopsises the film as a s a “French black comedy in which a crime of passion goes horribly wrong when the killer gets trapped in a lift.”  Although a succinct summary, I’m not sure about the “black comedy” part, although there’s definite incremental amusement in seeing the randomness of fate work on everyone. Although adapted from Noël Calef’s novel, it really isn’t so much the crime plot that you’ll come away with from ‘Lift to the Scaffold’, but Jeanne Moreau wandering aimlessly through the night streets of the city in a particularly Gallic romantic delirium, murmuring and thinking “Je’taime… Je’taime…” Surely many parodies of French films start here – all that posing and smoking – but the jazz-noir atmosphere is a triumph of mood and cool posture. Here is a film credited with starting the French New Wave and creating a new syntax between naturalism and score. However, one can argue that Jean-Pierre Melville’s ‘Bob le Flambeur’ (1956) pre-dates ‘Ascenseur’ in intent. If American noir thrillers were distinguished by being tightly wound and staged, the loose feel Malle offered was more akin to the improvised existential jazz and loneliness of Miles Davis’s trumpet. It is about accidents, incidentals and chaos theory usurping the clockwork ingenuity of the thriller anti-heroes.

The influence of Malle’s prior documentary work can be clearly seen in this low-budget streetwise grab for verisimilitude. Its influence can be seen on Cassavetes to Jarmusch, for example, not just the French New Wave. The unforgettable tracking shots of Moreau walking the city were made using a baby carriage and natural streetlight. It was ‘Lift to the Scaffold’ that truly put her on the map, although Moreau was already an established working actor; Malle cast her after her theatre performance on ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’. Her character was not key to the book, but she was brought in and bolstered to give more name draw appeal. An overheated interior, cold bitch exterior, sultry ice maiden Moreau drags the whole narrative along without make-up: filimng a star without make-up was in fact one of the appeals of the role for Moreau.

In fact, Davis’s contribution is mostly assigned to Moreau’s nocturnal search for her lover: it is the voice of her loneliness and longing. Reported by Simon Mas,

“On 4 December 1957 at 10 p.m., Davis and his band went to the Le Poste Parisien studios to record the score. The band drank together for an hour, played for four hours, then took two hours of editing, and left the studio by 5 a.m. the next day having finished the film score.”

The band may slip in later to provide some notation to the action, but without trumpet: it’s the raw, melancholic wail of Davis’s trumpet that is unforgettable.

The plot is split into three parallel narratives, even genres: the romantic-delirious woman; the foolhardy wildcard young lovers; the murderer stuck in the lift. It is a pleasure to watch them leisurely wander around and come together, bookended by Moreau’s romantic euphoria for a most satisfactory conclusion. There are always excellent little details to keep fascination with the deliberate pace almost distracting to how tightly wound the plot is. Disgust and outrage at the Algerian war underlies a lot of background, not just infidelity and romantic fantasy, giving proceedings political edge. It is all directed with flare and enough smarts even if it is Moreau and Davis’s digressions that linger.

Moreau talks of cinema as “a modern way of communicating with the world”, and “the mirror of the world”, and “truer than the truth”. The intention of reaching for more can be found in ‘Lift to the Scaffold’s mood taken from the streets, not reliant on make-up and full filmmaking artifice. But ultimately ‘Lift to the Scaffold’ remains a very entertaining thriller, taking sly digs at its characters, with a genre-instigating mood.

Minions & Monsters

Minions & Monsters

Director ~ Pierre Coffin

Writers ~ Pierre Coffin, Brian Lynch

2026, USA

Stars ~ Pierre Coffin, Trey Parker, Allison Janney

Well, from the start this isn’t what you might expect implied by that title – that’s “&”, not “versus”. Rather, it is a paean to movies and filmmaking with a host of in-jokes from the silent era through to Kaiju, ‘The Mummy’, and ‘The Blob’. There’s Harold Lloyd; ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still’; Cthulhu; ‘Citizen Kane’ is amusing (the minions can’t quite the transition to talkies). But it is not one of those films that is for kids with a few in-joke bones thrown to the accompanying parents: it doesn’t expect the youngsters to recognise silent film references but just to enjoy the slapstick and the giggling stupidity of the minions. And, having taken its time setting things in place, it becomes about the minions trying to make a monster movie (and sowing the seeds for the next generation of filmmakers?). 

Perhaps the Dort (Jesse Eisenberg) storyline doesn’t offer much more than time-filling and diversion, but the whole is fast, frenzied, mildly anarchic and amusing, colourful, and often surprising in its insistence in being cine-literate. The minions have emerged as a superlative comic invention from their ‘Despicable Me’ origins, and certainly a franchise film at this stage (it’s their seventh appearance) is surprising in its validity for existing rather than just cashing-in.

Pierre Coffin, one of the original creators and their continued voice, is reported to have been averse to making another minions movie until he heard the premise. It is stuffed full of gags and detail in the contemporary rapid-fire style that (in this case) rewards repeat viewings. Celebrating friendships and collaboration as much as giggly chaos, and the triumph and joy of creativity against the shortsighted cultish need to find a Big Boss. It is a kids’ film with oodles of wider appeal for cineasts. And like any bunch of gigglers, it’s immune to churlish criticism.