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.

Guillermo Del Toro's Pinocchio

 

Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio

Directors – Guillermo del Toro, Mark Gustafson

Writers – screenplay by Guillermo del Toro & Patrick McHale based on the book "Pinocchio" written by Carlo Collodi

Stars – voices: Ewan McGregor. David Bradley, Gregory Mann, Benjamin Evan Ainsworth

 

Well, I dislike a film pointing to itself and insisting on its magical-ness all the time (see also: ‘Babylon’). I just happened to have the subtitles on at the start of Guillermo Del Toro’s adaptation of ‘Pinocchio’, and the first was “Magical uplifting music plays”.  And the musical numbers were the kind that do nothing for me – so I appreciated the gag where several numbers were cut short.

But Del Toro can’t help but lean towards horror (yes: the giant crucifix too) so you have the horror of war – fanatical, filicidal fascism – but also the creation of Pinocchio is not that far away from ‘Frankenstein’ and the melodramatic shadow-play of German expressionism. I quite liked ADD Pinocchio spinning and twirling through a world trying its best to break into bleakness and horror tropes, his naivete his immune system. To this, Benjamin Evan Ainsworth’s exuberant voice-work for our wooden protagonist seemed appropriate and good, although I have a friend who couldn’t stand it. And therein perhaps lies the issue: you do have to go with all the “magical-ness” and the vergence on the twee at times, depending upon your taste, as that is what seems popular. And it’s easy to be impressed by the award-winning stop-motion – because that’s always awe-inspiring work (even in its shabbiest form). The model work, the tangible quality, the knowledge of the painstaking skill and patience it takes means stop-motion has the edge as a visual medium.

 

The changes to Collodi’s original tale are interesting – no donkeys; Del Toro’s sensibility dominates – takes a little time to settle, seems to lose interest in its musical agenda, pleasingly dark anti-fascist fairy tale, thematically heavy, but if the sentiment and a tone of neediness (after all, it is "Del Toro's Pinocchio') isn’t to your taste, then you may find it lacking.

Men

Men

Writer & Director – Alex Garland

2022, UK

Stars – Jessie Buckley, Rory Kinnear, Paapa Essiedu

 

 

(You should not read this if you haven’t seen the film.)

 

The first thing noted is the issue of a man writing with this focus on the female experience of misogyny. A theme of Garland’s ‘Ex Machina’ was male objectification of a woman and the object turning the tables, so there’s precedent for this writer-director’s interest in gender issues. In the pro camp, ‘Men’ is a good film that carries its premise to the end, where its symbolism, eccentricities and outrageousness have meaning. In the con camp, he’s taking up valuable space that should be taken by women filmmakers; does he have the right? So Garland’s privilege as male filmmaker goes to mitigate ‘Men’s status as a successful provocation on behalf of female issues.

 

Attending horror film festivals, I have noted a welcome and inventive rise in films that centre unapologetically on the female experience: Bea Grant is one to watch (‘12 Hour Shift’, and especially ‘Lucky’), and Emerald Fennel’s ‘Promising Young Woman’, Natalie Erika Jones’ ‘Relic’, and of course Julia Ducournau’s ‘Raw’ and Emerald Fennel’s ‘Promising Young Woman’; and I was also mildy entertained but not convinced by Coralie Fargeat’s ‘Revenge’. So these voices are out there, but underheard and not quite in the mainstream. (I’m thinking of Kitty Green’s ‘The Assistant’ too.)

 

But it seems that even detractors are inclined to credit the atmosphere and the aesthetic of ‘Men’. The set piece where Harper’s (Jessie Buckley) innocuous walk the woods gets creepier and creepier, where she seemingly summons something when singing down a tunnel, is just one early highpoint. And then there’s the excellent performances of Rory Kinear, covering a wide spectrum of men. Kinear steps one step back from the caricature – broad but subtle – so the point about male modes doesn’t stumble into reductive stereotypes. It’s all coached in a near fairy-tale aesthetic (forbidden fruit and all that; but dandelion blowing verges on the trite), turning a small corner of an English village into an area where reality can’t be trusted.

 

This is the tale of a woman who thinks she is coping with the traumatic end to an abusive relationship, but when she gets away to a country cottage as a part of her recovery, the memory of her partner influences and infects every male she meets (men: they’re all the same). This memory makes all her interactions with men increasingly toxic and violent, culminating in excessive body-horror. It’s all there in the tagline: “What haunts you will find you.” If the outré ending baffles those that aren’t used to the language of genre extremes – ‘The Thing’, ‘Society’, ‘The Special’, early Cronenberg – it is a provocative body-horror metaphor of regurgitating/rebirthing misogyny across the ages and types of masculinity. It’s the kind of WTF moment that amuses the hell out of my inner horror fan, visceral and cathartic, unsettling, brutal. (I went in with no idea of where it would be going, or exactly what it would be intending, and I credit the trailer for being that rare example of fuelling my curiosity whilst keeping the mystery. Hence, I was fully and pleasingly surprised.)

But what I liked, in the middle of the rebirthing set-piece, is how Harper eventually just looked and walked away, as if to say, “I have no time for your showing-off, guy.” All the way through, it’s evident that she is no fool for the passive-aggressive abuse of men. She wastes no time in rejecting it or calling it out, even if she got herself into a bad situation in the first place. Nevertheless, this whole fantasia reveals that she isn’t coping as well as she thinks, and Harper is ultimately left on the sofa with the aggressive haunting of her ex-boyfriend asking if he she still loves him, after everything. It’s a tale of working through trauma.

 

It is then arguably not so much that Garland is stepping on the toes of the experience of female artists, but that he is using his platform to criticise his own gender. ‘Men’ doesn’t stop the film to explain, as does the otherwise wonderful ‘Get Out’, but neither is it as ambiguous as some credit it. Yet, for all its conclusive meaning, ‘Men’ echoed in me the broader satisfaction with confronting gender issues that I got from ‘The Special’, rather than the troubling aftertaste of sorrow from Bea Grant’s ‘Lucky’ or ‘Promising Young Female’, or even ‘The Beta Test’. As ‘The Special’ and ‘The Beta Test’ are evidently critical of the misogyny from male artists, from the inside as it were, these are surely more appropriate peers. And I count ‘Ex machina’ in this camp too. The difference is that ‘Men’ has a female avatar. That is to say that for all its dreamy veneer of trickery and profundity, it works best as a slow-burn visceral portrayal of one woman’s trauma, and in that sense it’s more akin to the broad end of b-movie expressions of the genre. And that can possess a cathartic and horror-hilarious quality that succeeds where other genres can’t. 

Koko-di Koko-da

Koko-di Koko-da

Writer & director: Johannes Nyholm

2019, Sweden-Denmark

Johannes Nyholm ‘Koko-di Koko-da’ put the ‘Groundhog Day’ time-loop premise in a horror context, but it couldn’t be more different from ‘Happy Death Day’.  It has the colourful veneer of a children’s picture book and a blend of fairy-tale and the horror scenario where a couple are subjected to the sadism of a gang of wandering folklore-carnival psychopaths. And it's the kind of film happily to throw in an animated sequence too. What most intrigues is that the repetition of the scenario does not inherently instigate personal growth but an exploration and exposition of human fallibilities in this extreme situation, in this failure of reality. For example, the slasher scenario not only triumphs the Final Girl, but also surely exposes the anxieties of failing for the Male Protectors. 

The title is from a children's rhyme. ‘Koko-Di Koko-da’ mercilessly subjects its couple Tobias (Leif Edlund Johansson) and Elin (Ylva Gallon) to the worst trauma – the death of a child- but then continues to mercilessly expose how they haven’t dealt with it well, three years later. The repetition of their persecution when camping exposes as much selfishness and incompetence as moments of bravery. Whether pure analogy for their relentless grief, ruthlessly persecuted by the proxies of their daughter’s imagined revenge, or actual supernatural ambush, it doesn’t matter. It’s a pattern that puts its victims in recurring states of humiliation and awkwardness. The not knowing is part of the existential horror. Glenn Kenny may object to its nihilism, but the scenario portrayed here is also weirdly sympathetic to a self-persecution that the characters cannot get out of.

Surreal, mean, darkly funny, it’s abstractness might put some off, but it’s the unconventionality, using the genre to depict states of feeling and mind, constantly testing the mettle of the victims, are exactly what makes it unforgettable.