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February 9, 2010 (XX:5) , NIGHT OF THE HUNTER (1955, 92 min)

Directed by Charles Laughton Based on the novel by Screenplay by James Agee and Charles Laughton Produced by Paul Gregory Original Music by Walter Schumann Cinematography by Stanley Cortez Film Editing by Robert Golden

Robert Mitchum...Harry Powell ...Willa Harper ...Rachel Cooper James Gleason...Birdie Steptoe Evelyn Varden...Icey Spoon Peter Graves...Ben Harper Don Beddoe...Walt Spoon ...John Harper ...Pearl Harper Gloria Castillo...Ruby

A Dream of Kings (1955), The Watchman (1961), The Voices of CHARLES LAUGHTON (July 1, 1899, Scarborough, Yorkshire, Glory (1962), A Tree Full of Stars (1965), Shadow of My Brother England - December 15, 1962, Hollywood, , cancer of the (1966), The Golden Sickle (1968), Fools' Parade (1969), The gall bladder) appeared in 65 films and tv series, some of which were Barefoot Man (1971), and Ancient Lights (1982). Advise & Consent (1962), Spartacus (1960), "General Electric Theater" (3 episodes, 1957-1959), "Studio 57" (1 episode, 1958), JAMES AGEE (November 27, 1909, Knoxville, Tennessee - May 16, Witness for the Prosecution (1957), Hobson's Choice (1954), Young 1955, New York City, New York, of a heart attack) wrote books, Bess (1953), Abbott and Costello Meet Captain Kidd (1952), The screenplays, poems—and he is often credited with inventing Man on the Eiffel Tower (1949), The Big Clock (1948), Arch of modern film criticism (he was film critic for both Time and The Triumph (1948), The Paradine Case (1947), Captain Kidd (1945), Nation). He wrote screenplays for Night of the Hunter (1955), The The Canterville Ghost (1944), Forever and a Day (1943), The African Queen (1951), and The Quiet One (1948). His best known Tuttles of Tahiti (1942), It Started with Eve (1941), They Knew book is the posthumously-published A Death in the Family (1957), What They Wanted (1940), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. He is co-author, with Jamaica Inn (1939), I, Claudius (1937), Rembrandt (1936), Mutiny photographer Walker Evans, of one of the prose masterpieces of on the Bounty (1935), Les misérables (1935), Ruggles of Red Gap 20th century American literature, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1935), The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934), The Private Life of (1941). Much of work has recently been made available in three Henry VIII. (1933), Wolves (1930), and Blue Bottles (1928). volumes in the the Library of America Series.

DAVIS GRUBB (July 23, 1919 - July 24, 1980) also wrote Twelve STANLEY CORTEZ (November 4, 1908, New York City, New York Tales of Suspense and the Supernatural/One Foot in the Grave (UK - December 23, 1997, Hollywood, California, of heart attack) was title) (1964), The Siege of 318: Thirteen Mystical Stories (1978), the cinematographer for 78 films and tv series, some of which were You Never Believe Me and Other Stories (1989), The Night of the Un autre homme, une autre chance/ Another Man, Another Chance Hunter (1953) (1977), Doomsday Machine (1972), The Bridge at Remagen (1969), Blue (1968), The Navy vs. the Night Monsters (1966), The Laughton—NIGHT OF THE HUNTER—2

Ghost in the Invisible Bikini (1966), Young Dillinger (1965), The (1978), Mimì Bluette ... fiore del mio giardino (1977), Le locataire/ Naked Kiss (1964), The Candidate (1964), The Madmen of The Tenant (1976), Next Stop, Greenwich Village (1976), Diamonds Mandoras (1963), Shock Corridor (1963), Back Street (1961), Vice (1975), Journey Into Fear (1975), "McCloud" (1 episode, 1974), Raid (1960), Thunder in the Sun (1959), The Three Faces of Eve Cleopatra Jones (1973), Blume in Love (1973), The Poseidon (1957), Man from Del Rio (1956), The Night of the Hunter (1955) Adventure (1972), Bloody Mama (1970), Arthur! Arthur! (1969), The Diamond Queen (1953), Shark River (1953), Abbott and Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell (1968), "Batman" (2 episodes, 1966), Costello Meet Captain Kidd (1952), Fort Defiance (1951), The Alfie (1966), Harper (1966), A Patch of Blue (1965), A House Is Admiral Was a Lady (1950), The Man on the Eiffel Tower (1949), Not a Home (1964), Wives and Lovers (1963), The Balcony (1963), Let There Be Light (1946), Since You Went Away (1944), The Lolita (1962), Let No Man Write My Epitaph (1960), Odds Against Powers Girl (1943), The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), Badlands Tomorrow (1959), The Diary of Anne Frank (1959), "Schlitz of Dakota (1941), San Antonio Rose (1941), The Black Cat (1941), Playhouse of Stars" (1 episode, 1957), "Climax!" (3 episodes, 1954- Margie (1940), They Asked for It (1939), Exposed (1938), Personal 1957), "The United States Steel Hour" (1 episode, 1957), "The Secretary (1938), I Cover the War (1937), and Four Days' Wonder Alcoa Hour" (1 episode, 1957), I Died a Thousand Times (1955), (1936) The Big Knife (1955), I Am a Camera (1955), The Night of the Hunter (1955), Executive Suite (1954), Untamed Frontier (1952), Meet Danny Wilson (1951), A Place in the Sun (1951), Winchester (August 6, 1917, '73 (1950), Johnny Stool Pigeon (1949), The Great Gatsby (1949), Bridgeport, Connecticut Red River (1948), A Double Life (1947), Abie's Irish Rose (1946), A - July 1, 1997, Santa Thousand and One Nights (1945), Sailor's Holiday (1944), and Barbara, California, of There's Something About a Soldier (1943). lung cancer and emphysema) appeared in LILLIAN GISH (October 14, 1893, Springfield, Ohio - February 27, 136 films and tv series, 1993, New York City, New York, of heart failure) appeared in 119 some of which were films and tv series, some of which were The Whales of August James Dean: Race with Destiny (1997) (TV), Pakten (1995), Dead (1987), Sweet Liberty (1986), Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Man (1995), Les sept péchés capitaux (1992), "African Skies" (17 (1985) (TV), Hobson's Choice (1983) (TV), Hambone and Hillie episodes, 1992), Cape Fear (1991), Waiting for the Wind (1990), (1983), "The Love Boat" (1 episode, 1981), Arsenic and Old Lace "War and Remembrance" (12 episodes, 1988-1989), Scrooged (1969) (TV), The Comedians (1967), "The Alfred Hitchcock Hour" (1988), Thompson's Last Run (1986) (TV), "North and South" (6 (1 episode, 1964), "Mr. Novak" (1 episode, 1963), The Unforgiven episodes, 1985), Promises to Keep (1985) (TV), The Hearst and (1960), "The Alcoa Hour" (1 episode, 1956), The Night of the Davies Affair (1985) (TV), "The Winds of War" (7 episodes, 1983), Hunter (1955), "Robert Montgomery Presents" (2 episodes, 1951- That Championship Season (1982), The Big Sleep (1978), The Last 1954), The Trip to Bountiful (1953) (TV), Portrait of Jennie (1948), Tycoon (1976), Midway (1976), Farewell, My Lovely (1975), The Duel in the Sun (1946), Commandos Strike at Dawn (1942), (1974) , The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973), Ryan's Scarlet Letter (1926), La boheme (1926), Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Daughter (1970), Secret Ceremony (1968), Villa Rides (1968), Man Christ (1925), Romola (1924), The White Sister (1923), Orphans of in the Middle (1963), The List of Adrian Messenger (1963), Two for the Storm (1921), (1920), or The the Seesaw (1962), The Longest Day (1962), Cape Fear (1962), The Yellow Man and the Girl (1919), The House Built Upon Sand Sundowners (1960), The Wonderful Country (1959), Thunder Road (1916), Intolerance: Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages (1916), (1958), The Enemy Below (1957), Fire Down Below (1957), Daphne and the Pirate (1916), Enoch Arden (1915), The Birth of a Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957), Foreign Intrigue (1956), The Nation (1915), Lord Chumley (1914), The Green-Eyed Devil Night of the Hunter (1955), Track of the Cat (1954), River of No (1914), The Battle at Elderbush Gulch (1913), Madonna of the Return (1954), White Witch Doctor (1953), Angel Face (1952), The Storm (1913), So Runs the Way (1913), A Modest Hero (1913), A Lusty Men (1952), One Minute to Zero (1952), Macao (1952), His Woman in the Ultimate (1913), An Indian's Loyalty (1913), During Kind of Woman (1951), Holiday Affair (1949), The Red Pony the Round-Up (1913), The Mothering Heart (1913), A Timely (1949), Blood on the Moon (1948), Rachel and the Stranger (1948), Interception (1913), (1913), Out of the Past (1947), Crossfire (1947), Pursued (1947), Till the (1913), The Lady and the Mouse (1913), The Left-Handed Man End of Time (1946), Story of G.I. Joe (1945), Nevada (1944), Thirty (1913), A Misunderstood Boy (1913), Seconds Over Tokyo (1944), Johnny Doesn't Live Here Any More (1913), Oil and Water (1913), The Informer (1912), The Musketeers (1944), 'Gung Ho!': The Story of Carlson's Makin Island Raiders of Pig Alley (1912), (1912), and An Unseen (1943), Cry 'Havoc' (1943), Beyond the Last Frontier (1943), The Enemy (1912). Lone Star Trail (1943), Colt Comrades (1943), Leather Burners (1943), Action in the North Atlantic (1943), Hoppy Serves a Writ JAMES GLEASON (May 23, 1882, New York City, New York - (1943), and Saboteur (1942). April 12, 1959, Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, California, of asthma) appeared in 162 films and tv series, some of which were SHELLEY WINTERS (August 18, 1920, St. Louis, Missouri - Money, Women and Guns (1959), The Last Hurrah (1958), Once January 14, 2006, Beverly Hills, California, of heart failure) Upon a Horse... (1958), The Female Animal (1958), "Leave It to appeared in 159 films and tv series, some of which were La bomba Beaver" (1 episode, 1957), "The Ford Television Theatre" (2 (1999), Gideon (1999), "Roseanne" (10 episodes, 1991-1996), The episodes, 1953-1956), "Cheyenne" (1 episode, 1956), "Damon Portrait of a Lady (1996), Backfire! (1995), (1993), Runyon Theater" (2 episodes, 1955), The Night of the Hunter Purple People Eater (1988), The Delta Force (1986), Déjà Vu (1955), "The Eddie Cantor Comedy Theater" (1 episode, 1955), (1985), Fanny Hill (1983), "The Love Boat" (2 episodes, 1982), Suddenly (1954), What Price Glory (1952), I'll See You in My S.O.B. (1981), The Magician of Lublin (1979), King of the Gypsies Dreams (1951), Two Gals and a Guy (1951), Key to the City Laughton—NIGHT OF THE HUNTER—3

(1950), The Life of Riley (1949), Tycoon (1947), The Bishop's Wife “The Night of the Hunter, a novel by Davis Grubb, had (1947), The Hoodlum Saint (1946), The Clock (1945), A Tree been on the best-seller lists early in ’54, and Gregory snapped it up, Grows in Brooklyn (1945), The Keys of the Kingdom (1944), seeing the whole project, as usual, in one. They would make a film Arsenic and Old Lace (1944), A Guy Named Joe (1943), Crash of it, Charles would direct, and the leading character, the murderous Dive (1943), Footlight Serenade (1942), The Falcon Takes Over Preacher, would be played by Robert Mitchum. The book was, in (1942), My Gal Sal (1942), Nine Lives Are Not Enough (1941), fact, right up Laughton’s street, rather self-consciously cadenced Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941), Meet John Doe (1941), On Your prose, evoking a Southern world of oppressive communities, simple Toes (1939), The Plot Thickens/The Swinging Pearl Mystery emotions, hymns, picnics, decency and destruction. He later made a (1936), The Big Game (1936), West Point of the Air (1935), Murder recording of excerpts from the book, in which, backed by the film’s on a Honeymoon (1935), Alias the Professor (1933), Off His Base soundtrack, he makes a very persuasive case for its virtues, though (1932), Battle Royal (1932), Beyond Victory (1931), Puttin' on the it has not, according to those who know, ‘ worn well’. It certainly Ritz (1930), The Shannons of Broadway (1929), The Garden of tells its tale powerfully and hauntingly; ‘American Gothic’ as Carrie Eatin' (1929), The Broadway Melody (1929), and Polly of the Rickey calls it, in which the deadpan, hypnotic voice of the story- Follies (1922). teller is always present. So Laughton was definitely on; and the moment he offered it to Mitchum, so was he. The extraordinary PETER GRAVES (March 18, 1926, Minneapolis, Minnesota - ) combination of these two men was a success from the start: ‘this appeared in 130 films and tv series, some of which were "7th character I want you to play is a diabolical shit,’ said Laughton. Heaven" (11 episodes, 1997-2007), These Old Broads (2001) (TV), ‘Present,’ replied Mitchum. He was their banker: United Artists put "Burke's Law" (1 episode, 1995), Addams Family Values (1993), up the relatively meager sum involved ($700,000) on the strength of "The Golden Girls" (1 episode, 1991),"Mission: Impossible" (35 his name. Laughton then cast Shelley Winters, his sometime pupil episodes, 1988-1990), "War and Remembrance" (2 episodes, 1988, and recent Oscar nominee (for A Place in the Sun), to play opposite If It's Tuesday, It Still Must Be Belgium (1987) (TV), "The Love Mitchum, to Mitchum’s considerable disgust; but in Boat" (4 episodes, 1978-1987), Number One with a Bullet (1987), Laughton seems to have been absolute. "Murder, She Wrote" (1 episode, 1984), "Fantasy Island" (5 “Laughton had a strong hunch that the appropriate visual episodes, 1978-1983), "The Winds of War" (7 episodes, 1983), world for Night of the Hunter was D.W. Griffith’s, and accordingly Airplane II: The Sequel (1982), The Guns and the Fury (1981), re-ran all his movies. Quite apart from the power of the films Airplane! (1980), "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century" (1 episode, themselves, he was overwhelmed by the work of Lillian Gish, who 1979), Survival Run (1979), The Gift of the Magi (1978) (TV), The in her unassailable virginity, delicate but indestructible, touched President's Plane Is Missing (1973) (TV), "Mission: Impossible" some deep place in him. Charles Higham perceptively describes her (143 episodes, 1967-1973), Sergeant Ryker (1968), "The F.B.I." (1 as Kabuki-like, and there’s something of the onnegata about her; episode, 1967), The Ballad of Josie (1967), "12 O'Clock High" (1 but Laughton’s response was more than merely aesthetic—one of episode, 1967), "Court Martial" (23 episodes, 1965-1966), A Rage the indelible memories of his life was having seen her in Broken to Live (1965), "The Alfred Hitchcock Hour" (1 episode, 1963), Blossoms in France, just after the Armistice had been declared. He "Route 66" (2 episodes, 1962), "Whiplash" (34 episodes, 1961), said he had fallen in love with her then. Her grace, her girlishness, "Fury" (116 episodes, 1955-1960), A Stranger in My Arms (1959), her lack of sexual threat may have combined to form an image of Beginning of the End (1957), Hold Back the Night (1956), It the eternal feminine, an anima, almost, some idealised version of Conquered the World (1956), The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell his own feminine self, perhaps. Anyway, he cast her, and when, in (1955), Fort Yuma (1955), The Naked Street (1955), The Night of her infinitely courteous way, she asked him why he wanted her in the Hunter (1955), Wichita (1955), Robbers' Roost the film. His reply would have pleased Brecht: ‘When I first went to (1955),"Hallmark Hall of Fame" (2 episodes, 1954-1955), The Long the movies they sat in their seats straight and leaned forward. Now Gray Line (1955), Black Tuesday (1954),"Studio 57" (1 episode, they slump down, with their heads back or eat candy and popcorn. I 1954), Killers from Space (1954), Beneath the 12-Mile Reef (1953), want them to sit up straight again.’ Their meeting was only slightly East of Sumatra (1953), Stalag 17 (1953), Fort Defiance (1951), marred by the presence of the film’s screenwriter, James Agee, in a and Rogue River (1951). state of charmless inebriation; but he soon left them. He remained with the film a little longer, just long enough, according to Paul from Charles Laughton A Difficult Actor. Simon Callow, Grove Gregory, for Charles ‘to have a vision and some inspiration to write Press, NY, 1987. his own script. . .out of the terrible disagreements with Agee’. On [epigraph] “I’m not a the face of it, the author of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was the genius. There’s no room for ideal man to adapt Grubb’s novel. His skills as a screenwriter were genius in the theatre, it’s too not to be sniffed at, either, on the strength of The African Queen; much trouble. The only actor I but everyone in Hollywood except, apparently, Laughton and Paul ever knew who was a genius was Gregory knew that he was drinking himself, in short order, into the Charles Laughton. That’s maybe grave. The script he handed Laughton after a summer working by why he was so difficult.” the pool at the house on Curson Avenue was 350-pages long, and, Sir Laurence according to his biographer, not an adaptation at all: ‘he had re- Olivier on his 80th birthday created a cinematic version of it in extraordinary detail. He specified use of newsreel footage to document the story’s setting [George Bernard Shaw, and added any number of elaborate, impractical montages.’ a trustee of the Royal Academy, Shooting was only weeks away, so Laughton took on the after observing young Laughton do scenes from Pygmalion] “You screenwriting himself. Thus manoeuvred into a position of sole were perfectly dreadful as Higgins but I predict a brilliant career for creative responsibility, he proved himself a master. The script is you within the year.” good enough to have been passed off for years (in Five Film Scripts Laughton—NIGHT OF THE HUNTER—4 by James Agee) as the work of a seasoned genius. As a first care if you know, but there is a strong streak of homosexuality in screenplay it’s a triumph both of structure and sustained tone. To me,’ he told Mitchum as they bowled along the freeway. ‘No shit!’ put it mildly, he knew what he was doing. cried Mitchum. ‘Stop the car!’ Who knows what Mitchum’s “Stanley Cortez was his chosen cinematographer. Famous for his skeletons are–that is to say, what the original skeletons are; there dandyish ways (‘the Baron,’ he was nicknamed) and his advanced are plenty of acquired ones which have been all too well publicised. technical experiments, he was happy to share his knowledge with The interesting thing is that Laughton, normally ill at ease with Laughton. . . . Cortez was something of a poet; something of a wild uniformly masculine men was very comfortable with Mitchum, and man too:’To hell with all this caution! To hell with this academic that Mitchum’s performance in Night of the Hunter is to a striking approach!’ he exclaims in Sources of Light. ‘There are times when degree delicate, seductive, soft-eyed. Even in the scenes of greatest nature is dull: change it.’ Like Laughton, he got his inspiration from menace, there remains a sinuousness most unlike the monolithically outside his own discipline. ‘I often will revert to music as a key for machistic performances which form the bulk of his work. The photographic effect.’ They spurred each other on. ‘Apart from The laconic, smiling, almost humorous quality he brings to Preacher in Ambersons, the most exciting experience I have had in the cinema no wise distracts from the menace; it only enhances it. was with Charles Laughton on Night of the Hunter. . .every day I Interestingly, Lilian Gish was anxious during filming that consider something new about light, that incredible thing that can’t Laughton might have undercut Preacher’s evil, and told him so. be described. Of the directors I’ve worked with, only two have Laughton’s reply, ‘For Mitchum to play this all evil might be bad understood it: Orson Welles and Charles Laughton.’ for his future. . .I’m not going to ruin that young man’s career,’ though humorously meant (and an echo of what he’d said on two Laughton was fortunate, too, in his choice of second-unit previous stage shows), indicates a certain protective, fatherly directors, Terry and Denis Sanders, whose documentary film A feeling, confirmed by Elsa Lanchester’s remark: ‘Charles was Time out of War eventually won an Oscar. ‘Brother Sanders!’ he patient with him because Mitchum was going to be one of his greeted the twenty-year-old Terry, fresh out of UCLA; ‘Brother children.’ Laughton!’ the young man cried back. He sat them, down and drew precise, is Miss Gish herself brings to her rôle spindly, line drawings of every shot he everything Laughton wanted: her scrubbed, wanted–the relation of everything to sturdy radiance and power of nurture are the everything else in the frame, and that is perfect polarity to Mitchum’s greasiness. She what they shot, on location in Ohio: the is the spirit of absolution and healing in the ravishing overhead shots of the children as film, and discharges her function as no one they drift down the river. All the rest, the else could have done, with a kind of secular haunting nature scenes on the riverbank, sanctity which cannot be forged. As for the owls, frogs, rabbits and all, were shot in children, they too are perfect; which is the Studio; the tank on Stage Fifteen in the something of a mystery, because Laughton case of the riverbank. ‘When I tell people kept as far away from them as possible. His that, they turn white,’ writes Cortez. His special loathing was reserved for the little technical inventions on the film are numberless, and give rise to girl, Sally Bruce, but he didn’t have much time either for Billy scenes the like of which barely exist in the American cinema. The Chapin as John after Mitchum had given Billy a note: ‘Do you think results, however, are invariable simple and poetic in feeling; John’s frightened of the Preacher?’ ‘Nope’ said Billy Chapin. ‘Then nowhere a trace of conscious virtuosity. The legendary sequence in you don’t know the Preacher and you don’t know John.’ ‘Oh which Shelley Winters drowns in her car was achieved with really?’ said Billy. That’s probably why I just won the New York extreme ingenuity and much hardware; the effect is simple, lyrical, Critics’ Circle Prize.’ ‘Get that child away from me,’ roared and haunting. Laughton. Thereafter Mitchum directed the boy–with the most remarkable results. Odd paradox, that Laughton should have failed As for Mitchum, he has frequently maintained that its his to create any rapport with the children, when it was his vision that best performance, and that Laughton was his best director. the entire film should be a child’s nightmare. Laughton’s belief in him, his conviction that ‘Bob is one of the best actors in the world’ is unlikely to have made much difference to this man whose inability to accept praise is notorious; what probably did These sections, the opening and closing shots, are perhaps the trick was Laughton’s discovery in him of a private self different the least successful; they are what the film never is elsewhere: from the public one.‘All this tough talk is a blind, you know,’ he sentimental. The stars are partly the cause of that, but the main tole Esquire magazine. ‘He’s a literate, gracious, kind man, with culprit is the music, elevated and replete with angelic voices of wonderful manners, and he speaks beautifully–when he wants to. children. It serves a valuable function, in taking the film out of the He’s a very tender man and a very great gentleman. You know, he’s realistic groove from the very beginning, but the effect is syrupy, really terribly shy.’ They had recognised in each other a man at war not sublime. with himself. When Mitchum, incensed by Paul Gregory, had urinated in the radiator of Gregory’s car. Laughton phones him: The visual aspect of the film is of course paramount, as it could ‘My boy, there are skeletons in all our closets. And most of us try to hardly fail to be, the outcome of a collaboration between two. cover up these skeletons. . .my dear Bob. . .you drag forth the Supremely visually-oriented artists, Laughton contributed skeletons, you swing them in the air, in fact you brandish your everything he knew by way of pictorial composition; Cortez skeletons. Now, Bob, you must stop brandishing your skeletons!’ ensured the intensification of every image. There isn’t an But Laughton brandished his own favorite skeleton to Mitchum. ‘I undistinguished frame in the picture; as in Welles’ work, every don’t know if you know, and I don’t know if you care, and I don’t picture tells a story. The famous A-frame of the roof in Willa’s Laughton—NIGHT OF THE HUNTER—5 death room, the image of Preacher hanging upside down in his bunk Both Billy Wilder and Truffaut drew attention to the in the jailhouse, the strange light which plays on Preacher’s face inadvisability of starting one’s career as a director with such a film: while he tries to ingratiate himself with John, the boat carrying the ‘The film runs counter to the rules of commercialism; it will children gently downstream; this is visual poetry of the most probably be Laughton’s single experience as a director,’ wrote the sensuous kind. The abiding impression of the film is its physicality. Frenchman. Another man, however, might have risen above the Sex and nature loom through the film at all points; nature a kind of disappointment; Laughton was neither of the age nor the all-permeating presence, now in the background, now in the temperament to do so. It broke his heart. He was, in the words of foreground, but always palpable, always there. Sex, from the first more than one witness, destroyed by it. glimpse of Preacher in a strip-club. His eyes clouded with homicidal rage, as the flick-knife in his pocket tears phallically The Night of the Hunter: A Biography of a Film. Jeffrey through the cloth, to the intimations of Willa Harper’s nubile Couchman. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Illinois, longings, the dry and brutal talk of Icey (‘I’ve been married to my 2009. Walt for forty years and I swear in all that time I’d just lie there In the autumn of 1953, Harper and Brothers published The Night of thinking about my canning’) and the all-bursting, uncontainable the Hunter, a first novel by a West Virginian named Davis Grubb. sexuality of Ruby, one of Lillian Gish’s wards, face painted, lips Set in the Depression, the book was about a man claiming to be a pouting, irresistibly drawn to the Preacher. All this sex is somehow preacher who murders a widow and pursues her two children down threatening, perverted or disgusting; except, that is, to Gish. Ruby the Ohio River to rob them of $10,000. Atmospheric, lyrical and can confess to her: ‘I’ve been bad’. ‘You was looking for love, suspenseful, the novel was a hit with critics and readers; it remained child, the only foolish way you knowed how’ Gish tells Ruby, ‘we four months on the New York Times best-seller list. Hollywood, of all need love.’ course, noticed. In conventional hands, a film based on he novel would no doubt have been a straight-forward thriller. But it was independent producer Paul Reviewing the film on its first appearance Gregory who bought the book, convinced in France, François Truffaut wrote: ‘it United Artists to produce the film (because makes us fall in love again with an Robert Mitchum agreed to star), and gave experimental cinema that truly Charles Laughton the chance to direct his first experiments, and a cinema of discovery motion picture. The result was nothing like the that, in fact, discovers.’ Another way of usual Hollywood product. Laughton’s Night of putting this is that the creative moment the Hunter is at once a fairy tale, a horror film. remains present in the finished result, what an allegory, a thriller—a mixture of realism Brecht had called ‘the active creative and stylization that even now is hard to define. element, the making of art’. That is what Released in the autumn of 1955, the film was a had frequently distinguished Laughton’s flop with critics and audiences. performances in the past; it is supremely true of this film. ‘Every Today, the novel is known mainly as the source for day,’ wrote Cortez, ‘the marvelous team that made that picture Laughton’s film, which has achieved the status of a classic. As one would meet and discuss the next day’s work. It was designed from of Laughton’s biographers puts it, “Despite its flaws, The Night of day to day in fullest detail, so that the details seemed fresh, fresher the Hunter remains one of the few uncompromised masterpieces of than if we had done the whole thing in advance.’ the American cinema.”… Laughton had found, it would seem , his metier. Everything in his experience contributed to it: his love and Laughton wanted to film the book that Grubb wrote. To knowledge of art, his gifts in shaping a script, his ability with that end, he established a close working relationship with the actors, his deep immersion in all the process of movie-making. The author. He asked Grubb, who had studied art at the Carnegie man who loved words but could not write, the man who loved Institute of Technology, to supply drawings that would help him to painting but could not paint, the man who had authority but visualize scenes and characters from the novel. Ultimately, Grubb preferred to work with collaborators, had found his brush, his pen, drew more than one hundred pictures for Laughton. In 1973, 119 his team. He had been brought to it, but once he connected with the Night of the Hunter drawings, along with an explanatory letter from process, all he needed was encouragement and enthusiasm, and he Grubb, were assembled and put up for sale to collectors. By 1986, a would surely wreak wonders. Philadelphia dealer in rare books and prints had the collection on “Alas, it was a flop. Critically, it did moderately well– the market for $3,000. Martin Scorsese eventually purchased the misunderstood, treated as a thriller which wasn’t quite thrilling drawings, then donated them to the Margaret Herrick Library of the enough, or a parable of which the moral was none too clear–but Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. … commercially it was a disaster. As far as the box office is concerned. Paul Gregory was inclined to attribute its failure to “Beyond acting,” Elsa Lanchester observes, “Charles’ United Artists’ favouring of the next Mitchum, Not as a Stranger chief talent, I think, was construction. You might call it editing. He (which in fact he had started filming even before Night of the was never a creative playwright, but he was a master cutter. He Hunter was completed), a much bigger production altogether, five would have like to have been a writer, because, in fact, he knew million dollars against Night of the Hunter’s $700,000. It is easy to how to build a dramatic house.”… see, however, that Night of the Hunter would never be a popular hit. Not only is the subject-matter complex, the movie itself has a poetic Laughton’s indirect method of conveying ideas would and imagistic density which makes it somewhat indigestible on first become familiar to the crew on The Night of the Hunter. At viewing. production meetings, he would read from Davis Grubb or the Bible Laughton—NIGHT OF THE HUNTER—6 to help convey what he was after on screen...He naturally thought in and Gregory met frequently throughout the shoot, the producer terms of images, even when constructing the script for a play.... rarely visited the set. Brown remembered a United Artists executive asking Gregory if he was keeping close watch on Laughton, to Laughton’s peripatetic career as a reader did inform his which Gregory replied, “Look, if that fat son-of-a-bitch doesn’t direction of the film. In his anthology Tell Me a Story, Laughton know what he’s doing, I’m dead anyway.” Gregory, in combination writes “I have traveled all over the United States on reading tours. with Laughton, acknowledged the creative contributions of Cortez, Once I traveled 23,000 miles in thirteen weeks and played eighty- Brown, Golden, and Carter by giving each a 1 percent share of the seven engagements. I suppose I have been at more places in the profits. “Never happened to me before,” marveled Brown. United States than any other actor before me.” His experiences on “Probably never will again.” ...In an already collaborative medium, the road gave the transplanted Britisher an understanding of the Laughton created a distinctly collegial atmosphere. To Cortez, country that would help him in transferring Grubb’s American “there was a feeling of comaraderie there that seldom exists in the landscape to the screen. As Lanchester puts it, “Charles’ love and motion picture world….There’s always a feeling of friendship, but respect for America grew as he toured the little towns and cities not as it was on The Night of the Hunter.”…Mitchum’s own across the country.” In The Night of the Hunter, expressionistic memories are of a harmonious set that centered on Laughton, “the sequences, as well as the film’s overall sense of experimentation, only director I have ever encountered...who was really brilliant.”… have what one might call a European sensibility. But the Movie’s The film may be the only example in American cinema of feel for the countryside and the small towns of West Virginia comes a pastoral noir…. from someone with a profound affection for the regions of “the fabulous country,” as Laughton calls it in the title of his second Although Cortez felt that Griffith’s influence on The Night anthology of readings…. of the Hunter was purely structural, Terry Sanders pointed out that Laughton wanted to duplicate an important aspect of Griffith’s If, as Leslie A. Fiedler puts it, “the primary meaning of the cinematography—its sharpness of detail.” Sanders remembers gothic romance...lies in its substitution of terror for love as a central seeing one of the films that the Museum of Modern Art had sent out theme of fiction,” then Grubb’s novel has both main themes; it is a to Los Angeles: a 35mm, hand-colored print of Intolerance (1916). synthesis of terror and love. For his film adaptation, Laughton Having watched only bad 16mm dupes at UCLA film school, he seizes on this literary split and gives it visual form. He draws on was astonished by what he saw. “It was the sharpest, clearest, most cinematic traditions to tell his version of the story in two distinct beautiful photography I’d ever seen in my life, much sharper than styles—expressionistic and realistic…. anything you see today. The nitrate film and those lenses were just really incredible. Griffith’s chief cameraman, , recalled, The script that Agee delivered, identified as “First Draft” “We got the best photographic results in early morning, without on the title page, turns out to be 293 pages. That is, to be sure, much shadows. It is then that the light sharpens the distant hills and longer than an average Hollywood screenplay-and twice as long as accentuates the blackness of objects in the foreground.” Laughton The Night of the Hunter’s 147-page shooting script. Still, the reinforced the Griffith look he wanted with words that Sanders screenplay is not quite the “monstrosity” that it became in latter-day copied into his script: “Always accounts….Agee’s expansions and additions are never arbitrary. sunshine—crisp and light nursery They exist to illuminate the novel’s characters or to develop its feeling—clear, see everything.” conflicts….Despite Agee’s good intentions, his long sequences Laughton himself, in the tradition of undermine his work by slowing down the story and diffusing the his mentor, “didn’t shoot on cloudy overall dramatic effect. Elsa Lanchester, who acknowledges that days, he shot when the sun was high Agee “was an experienced screenwriter,” suggests that he “could and things were really bright.” Sanders have been carried away working with Charles, or perhaps he just had been hired because his lost a practical approach.” Rather than straying from the book, as so cinematography in A Time out of War many reports accuse him of doing, Agee took to heart Laughton’s was “exactly what [Laughton] desire for a “fanatically accurate adaptation.” Every big scene, and wanted.” The young man saw his job most of the smaller ones, are in the script. Dialogue is often taken as “essentially to somehow capture verbatim from Grubb or used with minor alterations and D.W. Griffith’s spirit and...make sure trims….With few exceptions, even scenes that Agee invents arise that all the scenes along the river with straight our of lines or situations in the novel…. the children and the scenes with The admiration for Laughton that Agee expressed in his Mitchum’s double evoked that D.w. letter about screen credit was universal among the crew with which Griffith sensibility.”... Laughton surrounded himself.”I think he impressed me more than any director I’ve ever worked with,” said art director Hilyard Laughton chose to emulate an older type of filmmaking Brown. He had a marvelous way of enthusing people and getting because he felt it would have the paradoxical effect of refreshing past the malarkey.” For Robert Golden, “The Night of the Hunter the cinema of his day. “When I first went to the movies,” Laughton was the most exhilarating experience of my career.” What was most told Gish, “they sat in their seats straight and leaned forward. Now exhilarating for Golden and the other artists on the team was that they slump down, with their heads back or eat candy and popcorn. I Laughton did indeed treat them like artists. Brown felt that “I want them to sit up straight again.” In the letter that Agee wrote to contributed more to The Night of the Hunter than I have to 90 Gregory, he mentioned “many things” that Laughton had learned percent of the other pictures I’ve done. I had a lot of freedom to do from the Griffith films they watched together, and he said, “If they the work. I could be as creative as I wanted to be.” For Stanley do work, and I think they will, they’re going to make movie story- Cortez, too, the production “was a field day for me in terms of telling faster, and more genuinely movie, than they’ve been in many extreme creativity that Charles appreciated.”...Although Laughton years.”… Laughton—NIGHT OF THE HUNTER—7

The logical conclusion of Laughton’s silent technique is to the performance that was immediately hailed as the climax of his convey a dramatic moment in a single shot without words…. career: Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. For many reasons, it proved to be the last of his overwhelming creations. The film [music] contains many themes associated with Thereafter, his work as an actor was craftsmanlike rather than goodness: the two lullabies and their variations, “The Hen and the inspired; he tended to lend his personality to ventures rather than Chicks” theme, Uncle Birdie’s music—even Willa’s theme, for her aspire to creating the sort of iconic, archetypal figures of his earlier allusions are pathetic rather than wicked. But apart from some years. minor brass figures, there is only one main theme of evil. I do not His passion was turned in a different direction. In his include “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms,” because the preacher personal life, he began to find satisfaction with a series of male has perverted a religious melody and because Miz Cooper lovers; professionally, he started to direct and to tell stories— ultimately reclaims the hymn. The musical imbalance is a testament though he would not have made a distinction between the two to the power of hate: it has a strength that requires an array of forces activities. His public readings—from the Bible and the miscellany to bring it down. The fact that the Preacher’s he presented in Charles Laughton, The theme, disguised though it may be, returns to Storyteller—gave him another lease of life; conclude the film, is a telling reminder that and the décorless, costume-less reading of evil, too, abides and endures. This is not to Don Juan in Hell, which he directed and in say that the music track obliterates the victory which he also appeared, caused a sensation within the narrative. Rather, it offers a on Broadway. Stephen Vincent Benet’s worldview as realistic as that of Miz Cooper, epic poem, John Brown’s Body, an unlikely who knows that “it’s a hard world for little candidate for dramatisation, was woven by things.” The music offers a sense of triumph Laughton into a tapestry of speech and in its harmonic resolution, even as it reminds music that made a revolutionary us of the hunters who roam by night and day. contribution to the art of theatre. This new lease of life was largely due to Paul from The Night of the Hunter. Simon Gregory who, seeing Laughton read from Callow. bfi publishing, London, 2000. the Bible on The Ed Sullivan Show, had Grubb insists on the profundity of guilt in all sexual instantly spotted the financial potential, and arranged and managed relations. Laughton was hardly a stranger to this idea, but wanted the extensive tours across the country that Laughton now embarked perhaps to counter it in his fable—to say that there is such a thing as on. It was Gregory who suggested the idea of a Shavian reading guilt-free sensuality. ‘No,’ says Grubb ‘The bud of guilt was there (though his ideas was the preface to Back to Methuselah, not Don from the beginning for Preacher to bring so quickly into flower.’ He Juan), and who decided that Laughton should direct a film. After a then has a resonant phrase which must have stirred Laughton’s old reading tour, said Gregory, ‘he would just fade. I wanted to bring Catholic soul: Charlie into focus as a top director and have him eventually quit Ecstasy slips so quickly from the loins to the performing. The performances were what was killing him.’ praying hands...the whole Christian ethic is woven thusly—the Laughton put it differently. ‘Acting in movies only used a tenth of godly thread of the spirit and the scarlet thread of the flesh...I my energy. The unused energy, as it always does, was churning simply do not think we can show Willa and Ben as pre-snake Adam inside me and turning me bad.’ His career as a stage actor had been and Eve without leaving unanswered the question: ‘How could she brilliant but unsustained: apart from anything else, he lacked vocal endure such a man as Preacher is she had been so happy with a man and physical stamina. His career as a movie actor had been blighted like Ben?’ Preacher you see brought Willa the punishment she had by the circumstances in which commercial film are made. He began felt (perhaps since childhood) that she had deserved. to discover himself and the public again with the reading tours; and Whatever Laughton’s view of sex without guilt, and the he began to find fulfilment as an artist with the stage productions. presence of this view in the film, the thread of poisoned sex which But the film had been his first passion, from his earliest years, and runs through the story is particularly well realised in the film…. now everything was pointing towards this new departure. By 1931, at the age of thirty-two, he [Laughton] was a dominant figure on the English stage. He had been acting professionally for The Cast exactly five years. He was greeting with equal acclaim on Who would play Preacher? In a sense, the spell-binding evil man Broadway when he appeared there, and was swiftly swept up by might, twenty years earlier, have been a Laughton part. His first Hollywood , where again, he created a sensation with some quite instinct was a curious one: . Laughton hugely admired extreme characterisations, among them his Nero in The Sign of the Cooper, whose naturalness and ease eluded him, in life and art. It is Cross and Dr Moreau in The Island of Lost Souls. He returned to hard to imagine Cooper bringing genuine terror to the role; in any England to make The Private Lives of Henry VIII and then again to event, he turned it down, feeling—no doubt rightly—that it would try his hand at the classical theatre in a season at the Old Vic which destroy his public image. Instead, at his prompting, Gregory claims. as not accounted a great success for him personally. He returned to Laughton approached Robert Mitchum. ‘Mitchum,’ he told him, Hollywood, where, after a series of complex and flamboyant ‘I’m directing this film and there’s a character in it who’s performances—Captain Bligh, Javert in Les Misérables and diabolical shit.’ ‘Present,’ replied Mitchum. Ruggles the butler—he was routinely described as the greatest actor Mitchum was thirty-five at the time, veteran of an in the world. He went back again to Britain, founding a production enormous number of films, for one of which—GI Joe in 1945—he company of his own, Mayflower Films, with the German producer, had received an Academy nomination as Best Supporting Actor (his Erich Pommer, formerly head of Ufa in Berlin. Nothing they first part had been in Hoppy Serves a Writ in 1943). Over the years produced (including Jamaica Inn and St. Martin’s Lane) was he had evolved a distinctive persona compounded of laconic entirely satisfactory, and in 1939 he returned to Hollywood to give fatalism and a certain sexual mystery. Agee described it as ‘a Laughton—NIGHT OF THE HUNTER—8 projection of pessimistic intelligence.’ Mitchum and Laughton had battle of good and evil. I thought I could help him, so I told Charles met each other on and off in Hollywood, and from the beginning I certainly was interested in the part…. there was a surprising rapport between them….Elsa Schumann was unusually present for a film composer. He Lanchester...notes their rapport: ‘they were kindred spirits, both was rarely away from the set, conceiving the musical sequences as what you call rebels, with no formal respect for formal religion or he watched the scenes being filmed, constantly discussing them Hollywood society.’...The second crucial piece of casting was with the director. Laughton made clear to him the scenes where his Rachel Cooper, the benevolent antipode to Preacher’s evil. The music would be of paramount importance. ‘In these scenes,’ description in the book is crystal clear: ‘She was old, and yet she Laughton told him, ‘you are the right hand and I am the left.’ In was ageless—in the manner of such staunch country widows.’...The shooting then Laughton purposely shot much more than the usual answer came to Laughton when he was rerunning the Griffith films. footage. ‘This of course,’ says Schumann, ‘is a composer’s dream; The perfect incarnation of threatened innocence in so many of them, to have flexibility and not be tied to exact timing.’ Laughton also Lillian Gish had matured into an actress of power and authority. For drew Schumann’s attention to a crucial principle: ‘if the actors and I Laughton, she had a special, personal significance: at the end of the have stated it properly on the screen, then you don’t have to restate First World War, in France, he had watched Broken Blossoms over it with music.’ … and over again, and when, in 1962, he lay dying in a coma, he roused himself to say, as if it were the key to his existence: ‘I fell in The achievement of Laughton and his team is exceptional love with Lillian Gish.’ She conveyed some essence for him of and enduring, the imagery original and haunting, tapping into the profound, unsentimental goodness, which is exactly what he needed subconscious and a world of fears and longings; the story-telling is for the part of Rachel Cooper. Gish—fifty-eight at the time—had assured and compelling. It was one of the first, pioneering worked somewhat fitfully since the coming of sound and after Duel independent productions, and it remains a fine example of a film in the Sun, that mad David Selznick farrago directed by, among which defies all formulas, as well as a supreme example of the others, Sternberg, Dieterle, and Selznick himself, had vowed that integrated work of a team. Laughton’s failure to make another film she would never do it again. But Laughton proved persuasive. ‘It is a serious loss to the history of the movies, but his one was a very fine story of the basic human equation, a story of the masterpiece continues to inspire those who share his sense of the expressive possibilities of the medium.

We’ll be hosting screenings on U.B.’s north campus of two powerful films about the Rwandan tragedy: Hotel Rwanda at 4:00 p.m. in the Student Union Theater, Friday, February 12, Sometimes in April at 5:00 p.m., Student Union Theater, Saturday, February 13. After the Hotel Rwanda screening, we’ll be joined by Paul Rusesabina, the real-life hero Don Cheadle portrayed in the film. The screenings are part of a three-day event at U.B. honoring the late human rights activist Alison Des Forges. The centerpiece of the event is the one-woman show Miracle in Rwanda, created and performed by Leslie Lewis Sword. For further information visit http://www.sa.buffalo.edu/rwanda/ .

COMING UP IN THE SPRING 2010 BUFFALO FILM SEMINARS XX: Feb 16 Kon Ichikawa, The Burmese Harp 1956 Feb 23 Sam Peckinpah, Ride the High Country 1962 Mar 2 Costa-Gavras Z 1969 Mar 16 Peter Yates, The Friends of Eddie Coyle 1973 Mar 23 John Cassavetes, A Woman Under the Influence 1974 Mar 30 , The Shining 1980 Apr 6 Wolfgang Petersen, Das Boot 1981 Apr 13 Federico Fellini, Ginger & Fred, 1985 Apr 20 Michael Mann, Collateral 2004

CONTACTS: ...email Diane Christian: [email protected]…email Bruce Jackson [email protected] the series schedule, annotations, links and updates: http://buffalofilmseminars.com...to subscribe to the weekly email informational notes, send an email to addto [email protected] cast and crew info on any film: http://imdb.com/ James Agee

The Buffalo Film Seminars are presented by the Market Arcade Film & Arts Center and State University of New York at Buffalo with support from the Robert and Patricia Colby Foundation and the Buffalo News