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.

Exit 8

 EXIT 8
8-BAN DEGUCHI
Director  ~ Genki Kawamura
Writers ~ Kotake Create, Kentaro Hirase, Genki Kawamura
2025, Japan
Stars ~ Kazunari Ninomiya, Yamato Kochi, Naru Asanuma

Our hapless protagonist The Lost Man is caught in a time loop inspired by a 2023 video game by Kotake Create. He must figure out the surrounding anomalies in order to find the way out: sometimes they are not so obvious, sometimes a flood. 

It is a limited scenario which involves most of the action repeatedly going around corners of a subway tunnel. The anxiety of being trapped in a time loop or paradox (see ‘The Rose of Nevada’ for another contemporary variation) creates the tension. Defined by perpetual uneasiness, puncutated by moments of creepiness, and inevitably tied in with the Lost Man’s emotional concerns, just to keep things tidy as his reality glitches. But also the potential horror of a repetative everyday worklife, a life undercooked and pressured into an overcrowded train daily. You have to spare some sympathy for the mild type, regularly targeted by the supernatural and other forces that put them through the wringer in a bid to make them learn to be more confrontational. And how many genre reality breaks happen because of pending parenthood?

It is Yamato Kôchi as The Walking Man that will leave the most impression as much as the tiles of the subway walls: he is panicky where The Lost Man is muted and offers the uncanny smile since the ‘Smile’ franchise. Although it may suffer from its intentional repetitiveness, Kawamura expands from the simplicty and limitations of the source to convincing feature-length. It could be seen as unfairly finger-wagging at introverts and mild people and simply to look up from your phone, although there is no sense of meanness here, just the horror of being trapped both externally and internally. If anything, the film is a note to pay attention to your surroundings, to note the nuances and differences. It is a example of how to successfully adapt a non-fighty game and a decent, off-the-wall entry into indie reality-breaks genre, even if it feels like watching someone else playing at times.

In a Lonely Place

In a Lonely Place

Novel~ Dorothy B. Hughes, 1947

 

Director ~Nicholas Ray

Writers ~ Andrew Solt, Edmund H. North

1950, USA

Stars ~ Humphrey Bogart, Gloria Grahame, Frank Lovejoy

 

Dorothy B. Hughes’ novel is the tale of a serial killer shamming his way from place to place, a psychological study with noir garb. As a female writer, she convincingly traces Dixon Steele’s infatuation with women, through jealousy and misogyny to barely checked anger and murderous intent. Steele is not quite as arrogant as Lou Ford in ‘The Killer Inside Me’, but similarly convinced he has others fooled, that he’s untouchable. It is Los Angeles, post-World War II and there’s a strangler on the loose, murdering women. Dix is pretending to be a writer and ingratiates himself with an old friend working on the case. The eponymous place is one of misogyny and anger which cannot help but flare up in Dix. He is a damaged man, a monster emerging from that fog of the first pages, prowling the streets at night. 

A prolific and award-winning novelist, Hughes’ book is ahead of its time in focusing on a serial killer’s mindset and toxic masculinity, it exudes noir suspense where the battleground is between the sexes and psychologies rather than criminality. One of its best moments is where the two very different women of his infatuation rub up against each other in his lounge. Sensationalism and sleaziness aren’t the agenda: indeed, the kills happen “off screen”, as it were. To get it out of the way: Dixon Steele is a name worthy of 'Carry On'. Dix’s descent/escalation into murderous sexism is repellent and Hughes isn’t interested in making him charm the reader, although we can see how he might be perceived to have charm to the other characters: we’re too privileged with an awareness to his inner workings and jealousy. One can almost sense it as a woman’s writing experiment in speculating about violent men, although there is a hardboiled attitude that fits it in untroubled with the thriller genre.

Developed by Humphry Bogart’s own independent Santana Productions, the film has come to feature on several “best of” lists, including from ‘Slant’ and Robert Ebert. It is obvious given the censorship at the time that was no doubt impossible for Bogart to be cast as an irredeemable serial killer, no matter how audiences were used to him being an anti-hero, which makes Hugh’s book a strange choice. The adaption is quite an altered beast from the novel, although general details remain. Here, Dix is a screenwriter rather than a faux author which opens the film’s major addition as a commentary of the Hollywood of the time. Nicholas Ray’s fifth film, ‘In a Lonely Place’ is often mentioned along with ‘Sunset Boulevard’ as insider barbs and sour criticisms of the system. Indeed, one of the more impressive meta-moments is the scene where Steele describes that just an everyday scene in the kitchen can relay that they’re in love.

Dix’s ambiguity is the film’s own: we start with his looking in a rearview mirror, giving a zinger that he never watches his own films, almost losing his cool at a roadside altercation and left framed alone against the stop stencilled in the road. It’s a neat summary of his dilemma: reflection, intelligence, temper, warning, loneliness. Such is the ambiguity of his wryness and nihilism that we aren’t sure if he’s guilty of killing the hat check girl. Although the era was averse to criticism of the military, the suggestion of PTSD is there in both book and movie, but it also riffs on Bogart’s own temperament. Louise Brooks’ wrote in Sight and Sound that,

 

‘In a Lonely Place’ gave him a role that he could play with complexity because the character's pride in his art, his selfishness, his drunkenness, his lack of energy stabbed with lightning strokes of violence, were shared equally by the real Bogart.

(Brooks, Louise. Sight and Sound, Winter 1966/67,

Volume 36 Number 1, "Humphrey and Bogey.")

 

And if Dix’s character tapped into brawly Bogart’s own, the disillusion with the studio system comes from all the filmmakers. The screenplay is credited to  an authorship that is contested but includes Ray’s penchant for improvisation. Ray takes credit for rewriting the book’s ending which arguably elevates this story into a maturity that genre pictures rarely manage.

Once we have the measure of Dix, the film subtly slips to his love interest Laurel Grey. It is a much-lauded performance by Gloria Graeme, sensual, sleek, vulnerable, smart, in some ways just as elusive and slippery as Dix. It would seem that Dix also acts as Ray’s avatar, a chance to express his own difficulties with his reckless and sensitive self and the marriage to Graeme.

She was forced to sign a contract that agreed that she would not nag him, would always defer to the instructions without putting forward ideas of her own, that kind of disagreeably sexist stuff. But she did sign and in fact the shoot, despite the difficulties star and director may have been going through, apparently went smoothly. Indeed, despite the contract it plays very much as Graeme’s revenge on aggressive and possessive men. Graeme and Ray’s separation during production was kept a secret with Ray essentially living on set for a while. It is a wonder that the film doesn’t implode with all the background baggage, but rather it seems to hone so much focus and surely provided a more devastating and less tropey finale. It is an obvious passion- and passionate project.

There are plenty of quotable and sardonic lines (“What a grip. Comes from counting all that money.”), Bernett Guffey’s cinematography that delves into more grey than typical black-and-white high contrast, a memorable courtyard set between their apartments (based upon one of Ray’s actual addresses), a bedrock of strong side characters and Hadda Brooks singing to add to the jazzy heartbreak feel. Its strength is in focusing on fleeting happiness (“I was born when she kissed me…”, etc.), how people aren’t what we want them to be despite the romance, on how our key flaws ruin everything, how anger destroys what chance there may have been. How we leave ourselves in that lonely place. There’s a whole adult feel to the film that elevates it from mere genre delights to speaking of the simple tragedy of being who you are.