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October 1, 2019 (XXXIX: 6) : NIGHT OF THE HUNTER (1955, 92m) The version of this Goldenrod Handout sent out in our Monday mailing, and the one online, has hot links. Spelling and Style—use of italics, quotation marks or nothing at all for titles, e.g.—follows the form of the sources.

DIRECTOR Charles Laughton WRITING wrote the screenplay with contributions from Charles Laughton from a novel by . PRODUCER Paul Gregory MUSIC Walter Schumann CINEMATOGRAPHY Stanley Cortez EDITING Robert Golden

The National Film Preservation Board, USA, selected the film...an entry into the National Film Registry in 1992.

CAST ...Harry Powell Shelley Winters...Willa Harper ...Rachel Cooper generosity as an actor, he fed himself into that work. As an James Gleason ...Uncle Birdie Steptoe actor, you cannot take your eyes off him." Having Evelyn Varden...Icey Spoon cultivated a lauded acting career on stage and screen, Peter Graves...Ben Harper Laughton still “wanted to direct a film, and producer Paul Don Beddoe...Walt Spoon Gregory thought David Grubb’s bestselling novel ‘The ...John Harper Night of the Hunter’ was a perfect opportunity for ...Pearl Harper Laughton to make his filmmaking debut. When Robert Gloria Castillo ...Ruby (as Gloria Castilo) Mitchum agreed to play the most important role of the film, a budget was quickly secured and Laughton’s CHARLES LAUGHTON (b. July 1, 1899 in Victoria adventure was ready to begin. However, the film’s poor Hotel, Scarborough, Yorkshire, England, UK—d. Died: box office results really hit Laughton pretty hard, making December 15, 1962 (age 63) in Hollywood, Los Angeles, him give up on the idea of returning to the director’s ) was an English stage and film actor (65 chair” (Cinephilia & Beyond). Still, “As years and decades credits). Laughton was trained in London at the Royal went by, Laughton’s movie garnered more and more Academy of Dramatic Art and first appeared professionally respect. Today, sixty years upon that fateful box office on the stage in 1926. His film career took him to disappointment, Laughton’s name is written in permanent Broadway and then Hollywood, but he also collaborated marker in the book of greatest filmmakers that ever lived, with Alexander Korda on notable British films of the era, as the movie is often cited as one of the most important including The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), for which and influential films in the history of American cinema” he won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his (Cinephilia & Beyond). These are some of the other films portrayal of the title character. He was also nominated for he acted in: Piccadilly (1929), Down River (1931), Payment Oscars for roles in Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) and Deferred (1932), The Sign of the Cross (1932), Island of Lost Witness for the Prosecution (1957). Daniel Day-Lewis cited Souls (1932), The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934), Ruggles Laughton as one of his inspirations, saying: "He was of Red Gap (1935), Les Misérables (1935), Rembrandt probably the greatest film actor who came from that period (1936), I, Claudius (1937), The Beachcomber (1938), of time. He had something quite remarkable. His Sidewalks of London (1938), Jamaica Inn (1939), The Laughton—NIGHT OF THE HUNTER—2

Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), They Knew What They criticism in Time and The Nation. In 1934, he published Wanted (1940), It Started with Eve (1941), Tales of his only volume of poetry, Permit Me Voyage, with a (1942), This Land Is Mine (1943), The Man foreword by Archibald MacLeish. In the summer of 1936, from Down Under (1943), Passport to Destiny (1944), The during the Great Depression, Agee spent eight weeks on Canterville Ghost (1944), The Suspect (1944), Captain Kidd assignment for Fortune with photographer Walker Evans, (1945), Because of Him (1946), The Paradine Case (1947), living among sharecroppers in Alabama. While Fortune did Leben des Galilei (Short) (1947), On Our Merry Way not publish his article, Agee turned the material into a (1948), Arch of Triumph (1948), The Big Clock (1948), book titled Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). It sold The Girl from Manhattan (1948), The Bribe (1949), The only 600 copies before being remaindered. Agee left Man on the Eiffel Tower (1949), The Strange Door (1951), Fortune in 1937, and, in 1941, he became Time's film O. Henry's Full House (1952), Abbott and Costello Meet critic. From 1942-1948, he worked as a film critic for The Captain Kidd (1952), This Is Charles Laughton (TV Series) Nation. Agee on Film (1958) collected his writings of this (1953), Salome (1953), Young Bess (1953), Hobson's Choice period. Three writers listed it as one of the best film-related (1954), Under Ten Flags (1960), Spartacus (1960), Wagon books ever written in a 2010 poll by the British Film Train (TV Series) (1960), and Advise & Consent (1962). Institute. In 1948, Agee quit his job to become a freelance writer. One of his assignments was a well-received article for Life Magazine about the silent movie comedians Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd and Harry Langdon. The article has been credited for reviving Keaton's career. As a freelancer in the 1950s, Agee continued to write magazine articles while working on movie scripts. Going beyond film criticism, he was nominated for an Oscar for the screenplay for The African Queen (1951). From 1952-1953, he wrote for the television series Omnibus. His autobiographical novel, A Death in the Family (1957), won the author a posthumous 1958 Pulitzer Prize and was adapted three times for television with the title All the Way Home in 1963, 1971, and 1981.

DAVIS GRUBB (b. July 23, 1919—d. July 24, 1980) was an American novelist and short story writer. Influenced by accounts of economic hardship by depression-era Americans that his mother had seen firsthand as a social worker, Grubb produced a dark tale that mixed the plight of poor children and adults with that of the evil inflicted JAMES AGEE (b. November 27, 1909 in Knoxville, by others. The Night of the Hunter became an instant Tennessee—d. May 16, 1955 (age 45) in , bestseller and was voted a finalist for the 1955 National New York) was an American novelist, journalist, poet, Book Award. It was famously filmed as a psychological screenwriter and film critic. In the 1940s, he was one of thriller by Charles Laughton with a screen adaptation the most influential film critics in the U.S., and, as Bruce written by James Agee. His 1969 novel Fools' Parade would Jackson has said during the Buffalo Film Seminars, Agee also be made into a motion picture starring . established serious film criticism in the U.S. Despite barely Some of Grubb's short stories were adapted for television passing many of his high school courses, Agee was by Alfred Hitchcock and by Rod Sterling for his Night admitted to Harvard College's class of 1932, and, while Gallery series. there, Agee took classes taught by famous New Criticism critic I. A. Richards, and his classmate was the future poet, STANLEY CORTEZ (b. November 4, 1908 in New translator and critic Robert Fitzgerald, with whom he York City, New York—d. December 23, 1997 (age 89) in would eventually work at Time. After graduation, Agee was Hollywood, California) was an American cinematographer hired by the Time Inc. as a reporter, and moved to New (86 credits) who was twice nominated for Oscars. These York City, where he wrote for Fortune magazine in 1932- are some of the films he worked on: Four Days Wonder 1937, although he is better known for his later film (1936), Armored Car (1937), The Wildcatter (1937), I Laughton—NIGHT OF THE HUNTER—3

Cover the War! (1937), The Lady in the Morgue (1938), Carlson's Makin Island Raiders (1943), Johnny Doesn't Live Personal Secretary (1938), Exposed (1938), Risky Business Here Anymore (1944), Girl Rush (1944), Thirty Seconds (1939), They Asked for It (1939), The Forgotten Woman Over Tokyo (1944), Nevada (1944), Undercurrent (1946), (1939), Laugh It Off (1939), Margie (1940), The Black Cat Crossfire (1947), (1948), Blood on (1941), San Antonio Rose (1941), A Dangerous Game the Moon (1948), The Red Pony (1949), The Big Steal (1941), Badlands of Dakota (1941), Moonlight in Hawaii (1949), My Forbidden Past (1951), His Kind of Woman (1941), Sealed Lips (1942), Eagle Squadron (1942), The (1951), Macao (1952), One Minute to Zero (1952), 1952 Magnificent Ambersons (1942), The Powers Girl (1943), The Lusty Men (1952), Angel Face (1953), She Couldn't Say (1944), Let There Be Light No (1953), Second Chance (1953), River of No Return (Documentary) (1946), Smart Woman (1948), The Man (1954), Track of the Cat (1954), Not as a Stranger (1955), on the Eiffel Tower (1949), The Admiral Was a Lady Man with the Gun (1955), Foreign Intrigue (1956), (1950), Abbott and Costello Meet Captain Kidd (1952), Bandido! (1956), Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957), Fire Shark River (1953), The Diamond Queen (1953), Yesterday Down Below (1957), The Enemy Below (1957), Thunder and Today (1953), Dragon's Gold (1954), Black Tuesday Road (1958), The Angry Hills (1959), The Wonderful (1954), The Night of the Hunter (1955), Man from Del Rio Country (1959), Home from the Hill (1960), The (1956), The Three Faces of Eve (1957), Thunder in the Sun Sundowners (1960), The Grass Is Greener (1960), The (1959), Dinosaurus! (1960), Back Street (1961), Shock Longest Day (1962), Two for the Seesaw (1962), Rampage Corridor (1963), The Naked Kiss (1964), The Candidate (1963), The Way West (1967), Villa Rides (1968), Anzio (1964), Nightmare in the Sun (1965), Young Dillinger (1968), Secret Ceremony (1968), The Good Guys and the (1965), The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini (1966), Blue Bad Guys (1969), Ryan's Daughter (1970), The Friends of (1968), The Bridge at Remagen (1969), Doomsday Machine Eddie Coyle (1973), (1974), Farewell, My (1972), and Another Man, Another Chance (1977). Lovely (1975), Midway (1976), The Last Tycoon (1976), The Big Sleep (1978), Matilda (1978), Breakthrough (1979), That Championship Season (1982), The Hearst and Davies Affair (1985), North and South, Book I (1985), Mr. North (1988), Scrooged (1988), Midnight Ride (1990), Cape Fear (1991), Tombstone (1993), Woman of Desire (1994), Backfire! (1995), Dead Man (1995), The Sunset Boys (1995), and The Marshal (TV Series) (1995).

SHELLY WINTERS (b. August 18, 1920 in St. Louis, Missouri—d. January 14, 2006 (age 85) in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, California) appeared in numerous films (160 ROBERT MITCHUM (b. August 6, 1917 in Bridgeport, credits) and won for The Diary of Anne Connecticut—d. July 1, 1997 (age 79) in Santa Barbara, Frank (1959) and A Patch of Blue (1965), and received California) was an American film actor (133 credits) who nominations for A Place in the Sun (1951) and The rose to prominence starring roles in several classic noir Poseidon Adventure (1972). These are some of the other films. He is generally considered a forerunner of the films she appeared in: There's Something About a Soldier antiheroes prevalent in film during the 1950s and 1960s. (1943), What a Woman! (1943), Sailor's Holiday (1944), His best-known films include (1947), The Knickerbocker Holiday (1944), She's a Soldier Too (1944), A Night of the Hunter (1955), Cape Fear (1962), and El Thousand and One Nights (1945), Abie's Irish Rose (1946), Dorado (1966). Mitchum was nominated for the Academy A Double Life (1947), Red River (1948), The Great Gatsby Award for Best Supporting Actor for The Story of G.I. Joe (1949), Winchester '73 (1950), Phone Call from a Stranger (1945). He is also known for his role as U.S. Navy Captain (1952), Meet Danny Wilson (1952), O'Rourke of the Royal Victor “Pug” Henry in the epic two-part television Mounted (1954), Playgirl (1954), Mambo (1954), I Am a miniseries The Winds of War (1983) and War and Camera (1955), The Night of the Hunter (1955), The Big Remembrance (1988). These are some of his other film Knife (1955), (1959), Lolita appearances: The Human Comedy (1943), Hoppy Serves a (1962), The Balcony (1963), Thirty-Minute Theatre (TV Writ (1943), Aerial Gunner (1943), Border Patrol (1943), Series) (1965), Harper (1966), Alfie (1966), The Follow the Band (1943), Leather Burners (1943), The Lone Scalphunters (1968), Wild in the Streets (1968), Arthur? Star Trail (1943), Beyond the Last Frontier (1943), Corvette Arthur! (1969), Bloody Mama (1970), Flap (1970), Blume K-225 (1943), Cry 'Havoc' (1943), 'Gung Ho!': The Story of in Love (1973), Cleopatra Jones (1973), The Tenant (1976), Laughton—NIGHT OF THE HUNTER—4

King of the Gypsies (1978), The Magician of Lublin (1979), The Left-Handed Man (Short) (1913), The Rebellion of S.O.B. (1981), The Delta Force (1986), Purple People Eater Kitty Belle (Short) (1914), Lord Chumley (Short) (1914), (1988), The Silence of the Hams (1994), Backfire! (1995), The Angel of Contention (Short) (1914), Man's Enemy Raging Angels (1995), The Portrait of a Lady (1996), and (Short) (1914), The Tear That Burned (Short) (1914), The La bomba (1999). Folly of Anne (Short) (1914), The Sisters (Short) (1914), A Duel for Love (Short) (1914), His Lesson (Short) (1915), (Short) (1915), Enoch Arden (Short) (1915), Captain Macklin (Short) (1915), The Lily and the Rose (1915), Daphne and the Pirate (1916), Sold for Marriage (1916), An Innocent Magdalene (1916), Intolerance: Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages (1916), Diane of the Follies (1916), (1916), The House Built Upon Sand (1916), Souls Triumphant (1917), (1918), The Great Love (1918), (1919), (1919), (1920), (1921), The White Sister (1923), Romola (1924), Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925), La Bohème (1926), The Scarlet Letter (1926), Annie Laurie (1927), The Enemy (1927), The Wind (1928), One Romantic Night (1930), Top Man (1943), Miss Susie Slagle's (1946), Portrait of Jennie (1948), Robert Montgomery Presents (TV Series) (1951-1954), Campbell LILLIAN GISH (b. October 14, 1893 in Springfield, Summer Soundstage (TV Series) (1954), The Cobweb Ohio—d. February 27, 1993 in New York City, New (1955), Kraft Theatre (TV Series) (1955), Playwrights '56 York) was a pioneering American actress of the screen (119 (TV Series) (1955), The Alcoa Hour (TV Series) (1956), credits) and stage, as well as a director and writer. Her film Orders to Kill (1958), The Unforgiven (1960), The Ed acting career spanned 75 years, from 1912, in Sullivan Show (TV Series) (1961), The Spiral Staircase (TV shorts, to 1987. Gish was called the First Lady of American Movie) (1961), Theatre '62 (TV Series) (1961), Mr. Novak Cinema, and is credited with pioneering fundamental film (TV Series) (1963), Follow Me, Boys! (1966), Warning Shot performing techniques. Gish was a prominent film star (1967), The Comedians (1967), A Wedding (1978), The from 1912 into the 1920s, particularly associated with the Love Boat (TV Series) (1981), and Sweet Liberty (1986). films of director D. W. Griffith, including her leading role in the highest-grossing film of the silent era, Griffith's The JAMES GLEASON (b. May 23, 1882 in New York City, Birth of a Nation (1915). At the dawn of the sound era, she New York—d. April 12, 1959 (age 76) in Woodland Hills, returned to the stage and appeared in film infrequently, Los Angeles, California) was an American film actor (164 including well-known roles in the controversial credits) who was also a playwright and screenwriter (28 Duel in the Sun (1946) and the offbeat thriller The Night of credits). Gleason was nominated for an Academy Award the Hunter (1955). She also did considerable television for Best Supporting Actor for his performance as boxing work from the early 1950s into the 1980s and closed her manager Max "Pop" Corkle in the 1941 film Here Comes career playing opposite Bette Davis in the 1987 film The Mr. Jordan. These are some of his film appearances: Polly Whales of August. In her later years, Gish became a of the Follies (1922), The Count of Ten (1928), The dedicated advocate for the appreciation and preservation of Broadway Melody (1929), Puttin' on the Ritz (1930), Her silent film. These are some of the other films and television Man (1930), The Big Gamble (1931), Rule 'Em and Weep series she appeared in: (Short) (1912), (Short) (1932), (1932), Penguin Pool (Short) (1912), So Near, Yet So Far Murder (1932), Clear All Wires! (1933), Orders Is Orders (Short) (1912), In the Aisles of the Wild (Short) (1912), The (1934), West Point of the Air (1935), Don't Turn 'em Loose Painted Lady (Short) (1912), The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1936), The Big Game (1936), Manhattan Merry-Go- (Short) (1912), (Short) (1912), Brutality Round (1937), On Your Toes (1939), Meet John Doe (Short) (1912), (Short) (1912), The (1941), Babes on Broadway (1941), A Date with the Falcon Burglar's Dilemma (Short) (1912), A Cry for Help (Short) (1942), My Gal Sal (1942), The Falcon Takes Over (1942), (1912), Oil and Water (Short) (1913), The Unwelcome Tales of Manhattan (1942), Manila Calling (1942), Crash Guest (Short) (1913), (Short) (1913), Dive (1943), A Guy Named Joe (1943), Once Upon a Time Laughton—NIGHT OF THE HUNTER—5

(1944), Arsenic and Old Lace (1944), The Keys of the The only film directed by legendary actor and Kingdom (1944), A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945), The one-time collaborator with Bertolt Brecht (on Galileo), Clock (1945), Home, Sweet Homicide (1946), The Bishop's Charles Laughton, The Night of the Hunter is probably the Wife (1947), Smart Woman (1948), The Dude Goes West most successful attempt to ‘translate’ the ideas of Brecht (1948), Incident (1948), When My Baby Smiles at Me into the realms of commercial narrative cinema (though it (1948), The Life of Riley (1949), The Yellow Cab Man is very different to what is conventionally called Brechtian (1950), Riding High (1950), The Jackpot (1950), Joe in cinema and draws heavily on James Agee’s pungent Palooka in The Squared Circle (1950), Two Gals and a Guy script, Davis Grubb’s evocative source novel and Stanley (1951), Joe Palooka in Triple Cross (1951), I'll See You in Cortez’s eye-popping cinematography). In the central role, My Dreams (1951), The Story of Will Rogers (1952), What Mitchum’s wife-serial-killing Harry Powell comes on like Price Glory (1952), The Life of Riley (TV Series) (1953- Mack the Knife let loose in a magical kingdom of 1955), The Night of the Hunter (1955), The Girl Rush expressionist lighting, shadow plays and gorgeously set- (1955), The Female Animal (1958), Rock-a-Bye Baby designed ’30s backwoods Americana. Despite focusing (1958), Once Upon a Horse... (1958), The Last Hurrah upon its two very affective child-leads, it is the (1958), and Money, Women and Guns (1958). extraordinary, almost-possessed Mitchum who holds centre stage, commanding the screen both aurally and pictorially. Lesley Stern has called Mitchum’s performance “histrionic”, but more accurately he is a miasmic body upon which the film’s mix of styles, histories and registers can be played out.1 The Night of the Hunter is essentially the allegorical tale of two innocents (John and Pearl) who are cut adrift from the familiar underpinnings of a stable family life. They are chased by Powell across a luminous, almost cut-out cinematic landscape before coming to rest in the nurturing Mother Goose-like world of Rachel Cooper (Lillian Gish). One of the film’s most striking aspects is its continual reference, in a variety of guises, to the acts and purposes of storytelling. This obsession stretches from the incredibly stylised images that open the film to the closing direct-to-camera aphorisms delivered by Gish’s character. The film starts with a curiously non- diegetic flourish. Cooper appears in a field of stars reading short pithy maxims from the Bible. There is a dissolve to Adrian Danks: “The Man in Black: The Night of the the heads of five children floating in the same starry Hunter” substance, listening intently to the lessons that Cooper The Night of the Hunter is a film that I am little reads to them from the “good book”. This cuts to a series frightened to write about; scared that the act of writing of helicopter shots that gradually draw us towards Powell. might irrevocably change what is, for me and many others, The register then shifts as “realistic” establishing shots are a remarkable, magical and elusive movie. I worry and followed by wildly rear-projected images of Powell flailing wonder whether what I see and experience time and again over the wheel of a car while talking aloud to some sort of might only be, to quote one of the film’s characters, “all Old Testament God: “Your book’s full of killin’s”. This just a fake and a pipe dream”. This feeling is mired in the disorientating opening provides a model for how the film film’s almost hallucinatory imagery, its complex rendering works: a clash of the anachronistic and the modern; a of time, its delicacy and its astonishing creation of an delirious mix of cinematic styles; a rigorous foregrounding ‘artificial’ and dream-like universe. The film performs one of stories and their interpretations; a juxtaposition of of the most difficult tasks in cinema, being both dramatic modes and registers. The act of storytelling is idiosyncratically self-conscious and emotionally engaging. used as a means to fix and make sense of an elusive world It is a film that should not work – bursting with a of signification where everything becomes contingent and conflation of styles, tones and registers. It is also one of the embodied in character, spectator and teller. For example, most deliriously synthetic fugues the cinema has to offer. Powell’s over-the-top performance of the tale of love and hate, left-hand right-hand, Cain and Abel, is for some a Laughton—NIGHT OF THE HUNTER—6 compelling interpretative allegory and for others a sign of nature of the medium itself. As François Truffaut said, “It his Pentecostal-fuelled fakery. makes us fall in love again with an experimental cinema The Night of the Hunter is also a fascinating film in that truly experiments, and a cinema of discovery that, in terms of its treatment of time. At various points the film fact, discovers”.2 refers to domestic, pastoral, linear, gendered, narratological Terrence Raferty: “The Night of and generational conceptions of the Hunter: Holy Terror” time and ranges across the varied (Criterion) experiences of “being in time” The Night of the Hunter (1955)— available to the cinema. This the first film directed by Charles obsession with heterogeneous Laughton and also, sadly, the time, a time that also darts last—is among the greatest horror backwards and forwards across movies ever made, and perhaps, of cinema history and memory, is that select company, the most visualised by Pearl and John’s irreducibly American in spirit. It’s dreamy, timeless, ebbing-and- about those venerable American flowing free-fall journey subjects fear, sex, money, and downriver. The long scenes of religion, and for the beleaguered the children’s flight have a gentle and archaic rhythm and children who are its heroes, salvation comes at the end of a tempo, furthering the film’s extraordinarily dynamic and long, drifting journey down a river: our old native idea of poetic use of visual and aural motifs. But this is also a film finding the way to someplace better. that is out of time. It is both anachronistic and visionary; These Depression-era West Virginia kids, John while fitting into neither the broader context of the mid- Harper (Billy Chapin) and his little sister, Pearl (Sally Jane ’50s or an earlier epoch it also doesn’t quite work as a film Bruce), orphaned by the recent death of both their parents, ahead of its time and was a box-office failure. It reaches light out on the river in a tiny boat to escape the grasping back into cinema history, to the irises, wipes, mise en hands of their stepfather, one Harry Powell (Robert scène and performance styles of silent cinema, to the Mitchum). In flight, John and Pearl just go where the traditions of expressionism, stage melodrama, primitivism gentle current takes them, sleeping when they can and and a kind of American Gothic. It makes one glance back meandering past other small creatures, who seem to be to the cinema of Griffith (most particularly through the watching over them anxiously from the riverbank: owls, figure of Gish) and Murnau but also plants itself ‘firmly’ rabbits, frogs, even spiders. Toward the end of the film, the within the shifting co-ordinates of ’50s American cinema children’s savior, an old woman (Lillian Gish) who gathers through its use of sweeping helicopter shots, the in the many orphans the river washes up, looks into the dominating presence of one of the great stars of the era, camera and says, “It’s a hard world for little things.” In The Robert Mitchum, and a strikingly modern sexual Night of the Hunter, all the little things, human and pathology. otherwise, know too well and too soon how hard the world The Night of the Hunter is a film to haunt the is. When John and Pearl are sleeping, in their fragile craft mind. Its greatness lies in its ability to seem to belong to on the river and with the night animals keeping vigil, you another cinema, another time, one that has ‘never’ existed feel as if you were inside their heads, dreaming a child’s in Hollywood. For example, the beautiful images of a dreams, part blind terror and part sweet hope. submerged Willa (Shelley Winters) with throat slit and The river sequence is the centerpiece of The Night hair gently waving in the silent water are both horrible and of the Hunter, and the clearest indication of Laughton’s extraordinarily gentle. They are like nothing else I have extraordinary visual gifts, but the film is stuffed with seen and felt in cinema. The Night of the Hunter is both an beauties: a superb ghostly image of the children’s murdered idyll and a cul-de-sac; a desert-island movie that bares close mother (Shelley Winters), her body lifeless under the water relation to the body of cinema, to the deeply American of that same indifferent river and her blonde hair trailing work of writers like Mark Twain, but that is also outside of upward toward the light; an extreme long shot of the it. It is subsequently, in almost every way, one of the great preacher on horseback, silhouetted against the first faint solitary works of cinema: magical, lyrical, theatrical, light of dawn as John watches from a hayloft and whispers gloriously filmic and haunted by its own traditions. It is, to himself, “Don’t he never sleep?”; a wonderful scary- perhaps, the greatest first and last work the cinema has comic scene, expressionistically lit, of Powell scrambling up known – an epic cinema alive to the fantastic and magical cellar stairs in pursuit of the escaping children. Laughton—NIGHT OF THE HUNTER—7

Laughton, in his midfifties at the time of filming, his just, providential reward; he’s convinced (rightly) that had been a very famous actor on the stage and screen in his the kids know where the loot is hidden. And after the new native England for nearly three decades, and a prominent Mrs. Powell comes to her untimely and unnatural end, and (usually flamboyant) character actor in Hollywood since the children flee, the story becomes a simple chase, the the thirties. His best-known starring roles were in black-clad demon harrowing the innocents, pursuing them Alexander Korda’s The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), with all his unholy ardor. Leo McCarey’s Ruggles of Red Gap(1935), Frank In approaching this unusual material, Laughton Lloyd’s Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), and William made several remarkably canny decisions right at the start, Dieterle’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939); he had beginning with his choice of screenwriter: James Agee, the also acted in films directed by Jean Renoir (This Land Is Tennessee-bred journalist, fiction writer, and film critic Mine, 1943), Alfred who had a few years before Hitchcock (The Paradine supplied with the Case, 1947), and David Lean elegant script for The African (Hobson’s Choice, 1954), and Queen (1951). Agee was steeped in the theater had worked not only in the right kind of with Bertolt Brecht (on a southern sensibility but also in 1947 Los Angeles production the work of the silent-film ofGalileo, for which he was pioneer D. W. Griffith, which also credited as codirector). Laughton, with near miraculous Even for someone as intuition, believed should be the experienced in the theatrical touchstone for the telling of the arts as Laughton, though, The story; Griffith was the master of Night of the Hunter presented heightened, poetic melodrama, some pretty formidable challenges. The 1953 novel, and that’s what Laughton wanted for The Night of the written by the West Virginian Davis Grubb, tells a strong, Hunter. He screened as many of Griffith’s movies as he uncomplicated story, but in an idiom with which readers could dig up at the Museum of Modern Art, and hired the and filmgoers were still not entirely familiar: what we now terrific cinematographer Stanley Cortez, who had done call southern gothic. William Faulkner had been brilliantly imaginative work in black and white on Orson introducing elements of the grotesque into his fiction for a Welles’s second film, The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). while (see especially the ingenious use of a corncob in his The black-and-white imagery of The Night of the Hunter is self-described 1931 “potboiler” Sanctuary), and powerful in a different, more deliberately archaic style from that of whiffs of the outré had recently been wafting from the the Welles film, keyed to the basic emotions of love and humid dramas of Tennessee Williams and the melancholy fear, just as the great silent movies were. stories of Carson McCullers. But in 1955, the southern It’s as if Laughton had resolved to recover style, redolent of strange sex, bad booze, old-time religion, something the movies had lost, some secret, long-forgotten and the collective regional memory of defeat, was for the cache of letters from ancestors—the scripture of the art’s general public fairly exotic stuff. (Flannery O’Connor, who early magic. Perhaps as an aid to invoking the mighty was second only to Faulkner in her understanding of the spirits of the elders of cinema, he cast the sixty-one-year- South’s tortured consciousness, brought out her first old Gish, the most piercing of Griffith’s actors, in the role collection of stories that year.) It’s a style that, at its best, of the Harper children’s ultimate protector, Miz Rachel makes horrors lyrical, that gives the darker, damper aspects Cooper. The sequences she appears in, near the end of the of the human condition a weird kind of shine. picture, have a tone that borders on reverence. Laughton Grubb’s novel, which is no longer in print, is a frames her with the unfussy eloquence Griffith favored, good middle-range exemplar of the style, written in the often shooting her still-lovely face straight on as she tells rolling, replete, mock-biblical prose typical of southern the children stories or addresses the audience directly; gothic, and plotted with a keen sense of the sensational. when she speaks, he confers on her the air of authority The story revolves around the preacher’s attempts to get Griffith gave her in the old days, in movies like Broken his hands—LOVE tattooed on one, HATE on the other— Blossoms(1919) and Way Down East (1920), in that time on a stash of money stolen by the Harper children’s father, when movies didn’t need to speak at all. who was Powell’s cell mate in the penitentiary. After Harper’s execution, Powell, oozing piety, marries the widow and begins sniffing around for what he considers Laughton—NIGHT OF THE HUNTER—8

The other female star of The Night of : “Night of the the Hunter, Shelley Winters, is cast Hunter” ideally to type, as a gullible sexual Charles Laughton's "The Night optimist doomed to perish early; of the Hunter” (1955) is one of the she’d already played a variation on greatest of all American films, but that theme in ’s A has never received the attention it Place in the Sun (1951), and would deserves because of its lack of the do so again in Stanley proper trappings. Many “great Kubrick’s Lolita in 1962. (There’s movies” are by great directors, but something about her—an unseemly Laughton directed only this one eagerness—that appears to bring out film, which was a critical and the worst in men.) But Mitchum as commercial failure long the alarming preacher is a really overshadowed by his acting career. daring bit of counterintuitive casting. Many great movies use actors who For the previous ten years or so, he come draped in respectability and had been perhaps the coolest and prestige, but Robert Mitchum has toughest of heroes. With his loose, lazy walk, his always been a raffish outsider. And many great movies are somnolent eyes, and his deep, buttery drawl, he always realistic, but “Night of the Hunter” is an expressionistic gave the impression of a man who could not be fazed, even oddity, telling its chilling story through visual fantasy. in the direst circumstances. Harry Powell is not that sort of People don't know how to categorize it, so they leave it off character. It isn’t just that Mitchum is playing a villain, or their lists. even that he’s using his indolent manner to convey a Yet what a compelling, frightening and beautiful profoundly sinister kind of unctuousness. What’s truly film it is! And how well it has survived its period. Many startling about his performance is how buffoonish he films from the mid-1950s, even the good ones, seem allows himself to be, in between bouts of menace. His somewhat dated now, but by setting his story in an Harry Powell is a man whose composure masks the most invented movie world outside conventional realism, unruly impulses—imperfectly capped wells of lust and Laughton gave it a timelessness. Yes, the movie takes place greed and violence that tend to leak in moments of crisis, in a small town on the banks of a river. But the town looks and not in attractive ways. When Miz Cooper threatens as artificial as a Christmas card scene, the family's house him with a shotgun, he hops away, whooping like a big with its strange angles inside and out looks too small to live skittish animal. Small things have to run; the larger beasts in, and the river becomes a set so obviously artificial it are expected to stand their ground. Maybe the most radical could have been built for a completely stylized studio film aspect of The Night of the Hunter, and its least appreciated like "Kwaidan" (1964). virtue, is its sense of humor. More conventional horror Everybody knows the Mitchum character, the movies overdo the solemnity of evil. The monster in The sinister “Reverend” Harry Powell. Even those who haven't Night of the Hunter is so bad he’s funny. Laughton and seen the movie have heard about the knuckles of his two Mitchum treat evil with the indignity it deserves. hands, and how one has the letters H-A-T-E tattooed on And that, perhaps, is the reason this one-of-a-kind them, and the other the letters L-O-V-E. Bruce movie didn’t catch on with audiences on its initial release. Springsteen drew on those images in his song "Cautious It was an abject flop at the box office, and Laughton never Man”: directed another film. He died seven years later. The "On his right hand Billy'd tattooed the word failure of The Night of the Hunter was not, forty-five years "love” and on his left hand was the word "fear” And in ago, much remarked upon: it was a modestly budgeted which hand he held his fate was never clear” picture, a little thing in Hollywood terms. But it has Many movie lovers know by heart the Reverend's drifted slowly, steadily down the river of the years between famous explanation to the wide-eyed boy ("Ah, little lad, then and now, and the long flow of time has brought it to you're staring at my fingers. Would you like me to tell you a better place, where critics and filmmakers and the little story of right-hand/left-hand?”) And the scene moviegoers honor it and even feel protective toward it. where the Reverend stands at the top of the stairs and calls The world seems harder than ever, and we all feel, down to the boy and his sister has become the model for individually, smaller and more vulnerable. Laughing at evil hundred other horror scenes. may be an idea whose time has come. But does this familiarity give "The Night of the Hunter” the recognition it deserves? I don't think so Laughton—NIGHT OF THE HUNTER—9 because those famous trademarks distract from its real alcoholism. Laughton's widow, Elsa Lanchester, is adamant accomplishment. It is one of the most frightening of in her autobiography: “Charles finally had very little movies, with one of the most unforgettable of villains, and respect for Agee. And he hated the script, but he was on both of those scores it holds up as well after four inspired by his hatred.” She quotes the film’s decades as I expect "The Silence of the Lambs" to do many producer, Paul Gregory: “. . . the script that was produced years from now. on the screen is no more James Agee's . . . than The story, somewhat rearranged: In a prison cell, I'm Marlene Dietrich.” Harry Powell discovers the secret of a condemned man Who wrote the final draft? Perhaps Laughton had (Peter Graves), who has hidden $10,000somewhere a hand. Lanchester and Laughton both remembered that around his house. After being released from prison, Powell Mitchum was invaluable as a help in working with the two seeks out the man's widow,Willa Harper (Shelley Winters), children, whom Laughton could not stand. But the final and two children, John (Billy Chapin) and the owl-faced film is all Laughton's, especially the dreamy, Bible-evoking Pearl (Sally Jane Bruce). They know final sequence, with Lillian Gish where the money is, but don't trust the presiding over events like an “preacher.” But their mother buys his avenging elderly angel. con game and marries him, leading to a Robert Mitchum is one of the tortured wedding night inside a high- great icons of the second half- gabled bedroom that looks a cross century of cinema. Despite his between a chapel and a crypt. sometimes scandalous off-screen Soon Willa Harper is dead, seen reputation, despite his genial in an incredible shot at the wheel of a car willingness to sign on to half- at the bottom of the river, her hair baked projects, he made a group drifting with the seaweed. And soon the of films that led David Thomson, children are fleeing down the dream- in his Biographical Dictionary of river in a small boat, while the Preacher Film, to ask, “How can I offer follows them implacably on the shore; this hunk as one of the best actors this beautifully stylized sequence uses the in the movies?” And answer: logic of nightmares, in which no matter “Since the war, no American how fast one runs, the slow step of the actor has made more first-class pursuer keeps the pace. The children are films, in so many different finally taken in by a Bible-fearing old moods.” “The Night of the lady (Lillian Gish), who would seem to Hunter,” he observes, represents be helpless to defend them against the single-minded “the only time in his career that Mitchum acted outside murderer, but is as unyielding as her faith. himself,” by which he means there is little of the Mitchum The shot of Winters at the bottom of the river is persona in the Preacher. one of several remarkable images in the movie, which was Mitchum is uncannily right for the role, with his photographed in black and white by Stanley Cortez, who long face, his gravel voice, and the silky tones of a snake-oil shot Welles' "The Magnificent Ambersons," and once salesman. And Shelly Winters, all jitters and repressed observed he was "always chosen to shoot weird things.” He sexual hysteria, is somehow convincing as she falls so shot few weirder than here, where one frightening prematurely into, and out of, his arms. The supporting composition shows a street lamp casting Mitchum's actors are like a chattering gallery of Norman Rockwell terrifying shadow on the walls of the children's bedroom. archetypes, their lives centered on bake sales, soda The basement sequence combines terror and humor, as fountains and gossip. The children, especially the little girl, when the Preacher tries to chase the children up the stairs, look more odd than lovable, which helps the film move only to trip, fall, recover, lunge and catch his fingers in the away from realism and into stylized nightmare. And Lillian door. And the masterful nighttime river sequence uses Gish and Stanley Cortez quite deliberately, I think, giant foregrounds of natural details, like frogs and spider composed that great shot of her which looks like nothing webs, to underline a kind of biblical progression as the so much as Whistler's mother holding a shotgun. children drift to eventual safety. The screenplay, based on a novel by Davis Grubb, is credited to James Agee, one of the icons of American film writing and criticism, then in the final throes of Laughton—NIGHT OF THE HUNTER—10

Charles Laughton to promote instead. But nobody who has showed here that he had an seen "The Night of the Hunter” has original eye, and a taste for forgotten it, or Mitchum's voice coiling material that stretched the down those basement stairs: "Chillll . . . conventions of the movies. It is dren?” risky to combine horror and humor, and foolhardy to The Cinemaphilia & Beyond page on approach them through Night of the Hunter includes Agee’s expressionism. For his first film, script, a video interview with Laughton made a film like no cinematographer Stanley Cortez, a 34- other before or since, and with minute audio of Laughton telling the such confidence it seemed to story of the film, and much more: draw on a lifetime of work. Critics were baffled by it, the https://cinephiliabeyond.org/the-night-of-the-hunter- public rejected it, and the studio had a much more the-extraordinary-single-directorial-entry-in-charles- expensive Mitchum picture (“Not as a Stranger”) it wanted laughtons-career/

COMING UP IN THE FALL 2019 BUFFALO FILM SEMINARS (SERIES 39) Oct 8 Masaki Kobayashi Harakiri 1962 Oct 15 Nicholas Roeg Don’t Look Now 1973 Oct 22 Mel Brooks Blazing Saddles 1974 Oct 29 Larisa Shepitko The Ascent 1977 Nov 5 Louis Malle Au revoir les enfants 1987 Nov 12 Charles Burnett To Sleep With Anger 1990 Nov 19 Steve James, Frederick Marks & Peter Gilbert Hoop Dreams 1994 Nov 26 Alfonso Cuarón Roma 2018 Dec 3 Baz Luhrmann Moulin Rouge 2001

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