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.