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Directed by Charles Laughton
Written by James Agee, from the Davis Grubb novel
Starring Robert Mitchum, Billy Chapin, Sally Jane Bruce, Lillian Gish, Shelley Winters
USA, 1955
Not Rated (mature children; PG-13 equivalent content)
PLASTIC INTENSITY
The villain in The Night of the Hunter is one of the most memorable ever- a preacher whose perversions have taken over. Played by Robert Mitchum (in arguably the greatest performance in a remarkable career), Reverend Harry Powell is tall, dark, and quite magnetic. He often enters a scene with his luminous shadow, and his deep voice can sing a sweet hymn, and bark aggressive threats at the son and daughter of his new wife, Willa Harper (Shelley Winters). Willa has given in to this preacher man’s smile and his commanding presence, nudged by her employer, Mrs. Spoon, who has also fallen head-over-heels with his charm. Willa’s husband was sentenced to death for murder and the robbery of $10,000, and she is unaware that Reverend Powell knows the money is hidden somewhere in the house, and that his intention is to drag its whereabouts out of the kids.
The children in the film, the trustworthy John (Billy Chapin) and the little sister Pearl (Sally Jane Bruce), are forced to grow up as they watch their household being taken over by this evil self-professed man of God. The cash is stuffed in Pearl’s doll, and the two vowed to their father to keep the hiding place of the stolen money a secret as he was being taken away by the police. Soon, their mother is killed by Reverend Powell (we see her in an ghoulish shot at the bottom of a river, in her nightgown with her hair waving with the seaweed), and they are in great danger as their murderous stepdad becomes more and more desperate to find the money. They escape by boat and are discovered by a religious farm woman, Miss Cooper (Lillian Gish), who gives them shelter, food, and Bible lessons. Reverend Powell chases after them by horse, preaching in every town about the evils of insubordinate young ‘uns.
Based on a very popular novel and adapted by James Agee, one of the greatest American film critics, The Night of the Hunter’s Reverend Powell is almost like an extreme exaggeration of Agee himself, who was a fervent Christian but, by 1955, was nearly dead from alcoholism. However, Laughton and others claimed that Agee’s script was quite awful, and many assume that it was Laughton who did most of the great writing in the movie. The screenplay is gloriously intelligent; not only is the film grandly creepy, but, on a second viewing when some of the suspense has lessened, there’s a cackling humor about it.
There are gender-related undercurrents, sometimes classifiable as sexism, in a number of The Night of the Hunter’s characters. Of course, Reverend Powell is the ugliest misogynist here, believing God too is a woman-hater ("there are things you do hate, Lord: perfume-smellin’ things, lacy things, things with curly hair"), and using religion as a way to absolve himself of his own sins, like his enjoyment of strip shows. Mrs. Spoon has the obsolete notion that a woman can’t make it in the world without a man (she’s quite an extreme, bewildered, and ridiculous character; she is immediately intoxicated by Reverend Powell, and then, when he is found guilty of a string of wicked crimes, she yells, "Lynch him! Lynch him!") Willa, treated in awfully demeaning ways by her new husband, begins to hate herself, thinking she was the one who drove her husband to murder. Miss Cooper, who feeds and shelters other homeless children, naturally fears allowing a grown girl named Ruby to have anything to do with the opposite sex. The film has a little sexism of its own; the women (Mrs. Spoon, Mrs. Harper, Pearl, Ruby) are the naïve ones, while the men (Mr. Spoon, Mr. Harper, John, Uncle Birdie) are more astute. Miss Cooper, though, is the most perceptive character in the whole story.
The Night of the Hunter is the only film Charles Laughton ever directed, but it is a debut of such skill and promise, and impresses even today. The film is pungently spooky and magical, an expressionistic and horrific twist on a pretty standard good-versus-evil fable. The sets, masterfully designed by Hilyard Brown, are never real to us and are right out of childhood nightmares. The Night of the Hunter is to American Christian values what It’s a Wonderful Life is to American family values; good defeats evil in the former, and the love of family defeats self-destruction in the latter. Laughton’s film is the nightmare of the false prophet, and the dream of the triumphant good Christian.
As the two children travel down the river, even the nighttime lullabies sound sinister, and the sets are alarmingly surrealistic, with fake turtles, rabbits, spiderwebs, and frogs on the riverside. There’s a great, artificial atmosphere in the film, created by Brown and cinematographer Stanley Cortez, and a lovely homage to D.W. Griffith with the use of the antiquated technique of an iris-in. The children’s, especially John’s, strange, increasing maturity through the film, and the excellent performances by Billy Chapin and Sally Jane Bruce, add to this crazy mood.
Shelley Winters has always played sad, not-quite-with-it characters (A Place in the Sun, The Diary of Anne Frank, Lolita). In The Night of the Hunter, she’s incredibly gullible, almost juvenile. Reverend Powell leads her into believing the $10,000 is at the bottom of a river, and she smiles with that dismal/happy-Shelley-Winters smile and says, "My body’s just a-quiverin’ with cleanness." Reverend Powell refuses to have sex with her on their wedding night ("That body was meant for begettin’ children!"), and she crumbles in the belief that she’s a dirty sex fiend.
Like with many Shelley Winters roles, there’s a lot of pent-up sexual hysteria, and she becomes determined to be clean for her new man. There’s even sexual hysteria in Mrs. Spoon, who confides she just thinks about canning during intercourse, and in Ruby, who falls in love with the reverend when he tells her she’s pretty, and divulges information about John and Pearl. In the most frightening, squeamish scene, Willa sermonizes to a cultic group of listeners with a chilling self-hatred that Reverend Powell has created in her, yelling, "Which one of you can say, as I can say, that you drove a good man to murder because I kept a-houndin' him for perfume, clothes, and face paint?" When she finds her new husband threatening Pearl for the $10,000, she still has that strange, sullen smile on her face, full of confusion, as if she’s been run over too many times.
Robert Mitchum has the handsome face of evil here, and the nescience of the people who believe his bad, flimsy lying is simply infuriating. He’s a daring actor playing an ogre who actually sounds and looks righteous in some scenes. His character is a hilarious cry baby, howling and screaming and weeping when he doesn’t get what he wants. People fear questioning religion and religious people because piety is seen as untouchable, and The Night of the Hunter is an outlandish example of a consequence. Reverend Powell, infinitely hypocritical, is probably the scariest villain ever put in a movie because he so easily takes what is sacred and uses it to mask evil intentions, and he seems to believe he’s a good, holy man, too. Two dimensional monstrosities may be able to startle an audience temporarily, but Reverend Powell is a fright that endures in the mind because he is a relevant character even in modern times. Evil is not just evil, but evil masquerading successfully as goodness.
Lillian Gish’s Miss Cooper is an angel, a faithful, God-fearing woman who’s not afraid to use a gun- the ideal Christian. As she guards her children, she walks back and forth, clutching her weapon, telling them stories of the attempted murder of baby Jesus (which points out to us the biblical elements of John and Pearl’s story). Lillian Gish is a marvel with the most warm, inviting face and demeanor in the whole film, and her motherly, nurturing holiness is a magnificent pleasure to watch. She leads her children around town like a mother duck with a line of ducklings, and protects them with unyielding courage and an angelic and earthy intensity.
But it is this shift of gears from clammy Satanism to inspirational purity that loses me, not because it is inappropriate or a cop-out, but because I feel an unnecessary trade-off was made that diluted the lasting horror of the Reverend Powell character. The film first plunges us into a cold, damp fear, but the fear isn’t allowed to live on past the movie because the wondrous Gish is there to soothe us, and when the reverend is captured by the police, he is so easily, pathetically defeated and no longer seems to matter in the film. There are no evident reverberations of his evil after he’s carried away handcuffed. Then again, I’ve always too easily responded to tragedy, and this is not really a judgment of the film, but an analysis of why my response to the film’s ending was a bit less than enthusiastic. The Night of the Hunter, an American classic of morals, lets the power of the Gish character prevail, and it’s heart-warming.
By Andrew Chan
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