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.

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.

Frankenweenie

Frankenweenie

Director ~ Tim Burton

Writers ~ Tim Burton, Leonard Ripps

1984, b/w, USA

Stars ~ Shelley Duvall, Daniel Stern, Barret Oliver

Tim Burton’s 1984 short shows that his approach was already clearly determined: he’d been making shorts since the Seventies, including an adaptation of ‘Hansel and Gretel’ and ‘Vincent’, about a boy that wants to be Vincent Price and succumbing to his taste in fantasy. Burton was the one to turn to for cookie dark fantasy and made him a poster boy for fun Goths. This sensibility is perfectly epitomised in ‘Frankenweenie’s central image of what appears to be a mini-golf course in a pet cemetery.

‘Frankenweenie’ features Shelley Duvall and the kid from ‘The Neverending Story’, Barrett Oliver, and a young Sofia Coppola. There are several distinctive shots, not only the mini-windmill and the car bearing down on the dogs-eye-view, but my favourite being young Victor’s brainwave framed between two electrically stimulated frog’s legs. 

When his beloved dog is hit by a car and dies, all Victor wants is his late dog back. Through the influence of Mary Shelley, James Whale and old Universal horrors, Victor brings his dog back to life: the attic laboratory made from ordinary household appliances is a treat. Instead of defying God, Victor here is simply defying grief and the true villain being not the cute dog-zombie but he hysteria of suburban America. In that, it is very much in the trend of the Eighties that the picket fence of slick Americana being sold and dominating screens across the globe was not necessarily to be trusted. But mostly it is a fun gateway horror that packs a lot of genre vibe in its short running time.

Disney judged it too scary and fired Burton. Of course, Burton had the last laugh as his sensibility proved perfect for capturing the camp and horror of Batman. Grown in reputation, ‘Frankenweenie’ hits that sweet spot as a gateway coming-of-age horror for melancholy outsiders: grim, funny, quietly subversive, sugar-coated bad taste, a little freaky and a little innocent.

 

Frankenweenie

Director ~ Tim Burton

Writers ~ Leonard Ripps, Tim Burton, John August

2012, b/w, USA

Stars ~ Winona Ryder, Catherine O'Hara, Martin Short

In adapting his renowned short, Burton’s expansion incorporates many more horror Easter Eggs and grotesqueries, including ‘The Munsters’, ‘Gremlins’, Kaiju amongst others. It embraces the freakishness far more than the original, wallowing in the otherworldliness and excess that animation allows. This isn’t grounded in the reality at all, and yet the emotional core is still relatable as coming-of-age concerns. This time, though, it is notable that Vincent (voiced by Charlie Tahan) is less an outcast – because how could he be with this menagerie of classmates? – but a wilful loner, taking solace in his genius. And this time, there’s room to give all the other misfits their own amusing subplots: highlights being the rooftop DIY rocket and the precognitive-poop cat.

The black-and-white stop motion is gorgeous, of course, sharp and clean and excellently lit, with Burton’s designs being typically pointy, rounded, ikky-cute. Even Victor simply walking home through the suburbs in the rain is impressive as a visual. How Burton balances between the wholesome and grim is quite the marvel and at the core of his talent and crossover success.

As always, there are gruesome details, like bolts inserted into gaping scars and the patchwork zombie dog wagging his tail off. The lynch mob hysteria is somewhat toned down to greatly disapproving locals and the tone less melancholic. It may all turn out okay in the end, and there’s certainly the essence of Burton being genre comfort food, but there is always a thread of real danger with the detail and fun always beguiling. ‘Frankenweenie’ is also agreeably, declaratively pro-creativity and pro-science, as proclaimed by the Vincent Price-ish teacher Mr. Rzykruski (Martin Landau). One minute you’re making a home-made space invasion movie; next, you’re reviving your dead dog with household accessories. 

The Mole People

The Mole Men

Director ~ Virgil W. Vogel

1956, b/w, USA

Writer ~ László Görög

Stars ~ John Agar, Cynthia Patrick, Hugh Beaumont

 

Starts with about five minutes of screen time of filler, a Professor of English Frank C. Baxter  (real) running through the history of hollow Earth in mythology. So it starts as it means to go on, and it is amazing how much feels else like padding. They spend an awful long time climbing down a hole in pursuit someone who is obviously already dead.

 

So, some archaeologists (who make anthropological deductions too) go the top of a mountain to investigate some ruins and then descend through the mountain to discover an ancient Sumerian civilisation that worship Ishtar (which apparently wasn’t a thing they did). (So if they go right at top and then go down, I’m not sure they descended enough to be below the Earth’s crust… more “hollow mountain” theory than “hollow Earth”?). The Sumerian are albino and vulnerable to intense light – making the archaeologists’ torch a religious weapon – but luckily for these stock American men, there is a Caucasian woman considered lower caste for one to fall in love with. The archaeologists masquerade as divine and use their torch as a threat to survive the Sumerians’ religious murderous inclinations whilst sitting around being all masculine. It’s up to Alan Napier as Elinu, the High priest, to add some life to proceedings with his dissent and conniving, and merely by not phoning in his part.

 

 

The Mole People, who we’ve come for, have the highlight of dragging people under into the dirt. They have agreeable clunky men-in-suit designs with memorable enough masks, and although they are apparently harvesting gigantic subterranean mushrooms (?) for food, they seem to be mostly for milling around for regular whipping. But it’s not a film to monopolise on the potential of that particular analogy.

 

Some impressive avalanche stock footage, a little commentary about hierarchies, slavery, racism and population control; but although this is loaded context and colouring, it doesn’t ultimately feel like proving much. The appeal now is in its datedness and silliness, its ambition far exceeding its budget.  

 

 

But there are reports of a possible remake with Robert Kirkman involved, and I will consider that promising as I am big devotee of ‘The Walking Dead’ comics.