The Night of the Hunter (Paul Gregory Productions, United Artists, 1955)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Out of the Past TCM followed it up with another Robert Mitchum vehicle, the 1955 film The Night of the Hunter, directed by Charles Laughton from a script by James Agee based on a novel by Davis Grubb. Like Out of the Past it’s a movie I wasn’t able to sit through the first time I tried to watch it – my mom had taken me to see it on a double bill with something else I can’t recall at the moment and I made her take us home right after the scene in which Willa Harper (Shelley Winters) is shown dead in a lake while still at the wheel of her car, her hair floating picturesquely amongst the seaweed in a flamboyantly unrealistic sequence. It’s become a legendary film; whole books have been written about its making and a lot of tall tales told about it, including the claim Robert Mitchum made in his autobiography that Agee’s script was so long and incoherent that director Laughton was forced to rewrite it start to finish. In 2004 Agee’s script was discovered and found that, while it was too long, each of the individual scenes in it ended up, in shortened form, in the film, so it’s been cited on both sides of the writer vs. director debate as to who’s the true auteur (“author”) of a film.

My sympathies are more with the director than the writer – indeed, ever since I read Joan Bernick’s 1983 article in The Opera Quarterly comparing Beaumarchais’ play The Marriage of Figaro to the libretto Lorenzo da Ponte wrote for Mozart’s opera, I’ve been convinced that libretto writers and screenwriters have the same issues, especially when doing adaptations instead of originals: they have to decide which parts of the original material will work in the new medium, which parts they’ll have to cut completely and which parts they’ll have to change – and like screenwriting, libretto writing is a dependent form waiting for a composer or director to breathe life into it: there’s a reason why the Met doesn’t advertise “da Ponte’s Don Giovanni,” “Piave’s La Traviata” or “Illica’s and Giacosa’s La Bohème,” even though those works wouldn’t exist without their contributions. Indeed, I’ve often been upset when people defending the screenwriter as the true “author” of a film neglect the contributions of the original author who wrote the novel, story or play in the first place; one writer credited Raymond Chandler with Double Indemnity and ignored the fact that Chandler didn’t create the plot, characters or situations of Double Indemnity: James M. Cain did.

Getting back to The Night of the Hunter, it’s a Southern-fried Gothic tale, set in the early 1930’s, which begins with a young man named Ben Harper (Peter Graves) being arrested for robbing a bank and getting $10,000. Before he’s arrested and ultimately convicted, sentenced to death and hanged (presumably he killed someone during the course of the robbery, though we’re never actually told that), he makes his children John (Billy Chapin) and Pearl (Sally Jane Bruce) swear that they’ll never reveal the hiding place where he stashed the money to anybody. Before he’s hanged he’s put in a cell with Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum), who’s either an itinerant preacher who’s “gone bad” or a villain simply posing as a minister (we’re not sure which, though it’s clear from how well he knows the Bible that he’s had some religious training, either formal or self-taught), who’s serving a 30-day sentence for stealing a car (and the fact that the cops arrested him while watching a strip-tease in a burlesque theatre is obviously supposed to make us suspicious of his religious pretensions – indeed, in one of the film’s best lines, the judge even references the low environment in which he was apprehended as a point against him).

Ben lets slip the story of the robbery but doesn’t mention where he hid the loot – but he gives Harry enough information so that when he’s released after Harry’s hanging he can trace his widow Willa (Shelley Winters), move to her small town and court her. They eventually get married, but he refuses to have sex with her in a line my late roommate and home-care client John was fond of quoting: “That body was made for begettin’ children, not for satisfying men’s lusts!” (It occurred to me that in this movie Shelley Winters was getting off relatively easily; seven years later she’d make the film Lolita, in which she plays a widow courted and ultimately married by a strange man who wanted not to torture her daughter to find a hidden fortune, but to fuck her – and in that film Winters also dies, run over by a car just as she’s figured out her husband’s terrible secret and is about to expose him.) Harry also has letters tattooed across his knuckles, ‘LOVE” across his left hand and “HATE” across his right, which is supposed to represent the duality of his character.

The Night of the Hunter actually begins with a prologue showing the disembodied head of a woman, later revealed as Rachel Cooper (Lillian Gish), reading Bible verses to five equally disembodied heads of children – and knowing director Laughton’s reputation for giving one-man shows in which he’d read from the Bible, I joked, “You know it’s a Charles Laughton movie! Someone’s reading from the Bible!” The main action of the film consists of Harry’s attempt to worm out of the Harper kids the secret of where their dad’s ill-gotten gains are hidden – something we find out well before he does when we see the kids extracting some of the cash from inside Pearl’s rag doll and cutting it up into paper dolls (and leaving a few scraps behind – I had thought there’d be a scene in which Harry would find the scraps of paper that had once been money and figure out what the kids had done with the loot, but no-o-o-o-o). Once Harry kills Willa after she’s been unable to tell him the whereabouts of the money and leaves her and her car in that lake in that beautiful but totally unbelievable scene, the kids realize that they will be his next victims and they escape in a skiff one of the local handymen had repaired for John.

They do so surprisingly easily – surely in reality Harry could easily have caught up with them, especially since he could have followed them down the river in a stolen car (from the opening we know Harry knows how to steal a car) – and they end up at the farmhouse of Rachel Cooper (Lillian Gish), who may or may not be their mother Willa’s sister (Willa had told her kids they had an aunt they could go to if they were in trouble and needed a place to stay, but we’re not sure whether Rachel is this person), who’s obviously intended in this film’s iconography to represent good religion as opposed to Harry’s bad, hypocritical and corrupt religion. Rachel shelters the kids, bathes them, feeds them, finds them chores to do around her house (and next to her farmhouse is a barn so stylized it looks like The Barn of Dr. Caligari) and ultimately gives them as good a life as she can given that this is the South in the middle of the Depression. She’s also got several other kids staying there, including a sexually rambunctious teenager named Ruby (Gloria Castillo) – in this sort of movie, in which a pencil is never merely a pencil, we’re obviously supposed to see a parallel between her and Pearl Harper since they’re both named after precious jewels – whom Harry runs to when she’s gone into town to cruise men (and it’s a visceral shock when after over an hour in a rural environment we finally see the accouterments of modern life, including electric lights, telephones and a newsstand selling a movie magazine Harry buys for Ruby) and worms out of her the secret of John and Pearl. Eventually Rachel finds out the secret and holds a gun on Harry, and while he’s able to keep her from killing him she summons the police and he’s arrested – we’ve expected for the whole movie to see Harry go out in a blaze of glory and when he doesn’t I couldn’t help but wonder whether Laughton, Agee and producer Paul Gregory were keeping him alive in hopes of a sequel.

The Night of the Hunter is a physically beautiful film – the cinematographer was Stanley Cortez and his lighting is absolutely stunning and contributes to the rich, febrile atmosphere – but, though I can see why other people acclaim this film as a classic, it leaves me pretty cold. Part of the problem is Laughton’s direction, which seemed to have been aimed at disproving once and for all my theory that actor-directors – even actor-directors with hammy reputations as actors, like Erich von Stroheim and Orson Welles – generally get quiet, understated, low-keyed performances out of their actors. Laughton originally wanted to play Harry Powell himself – which would probably have made the film even less watchable, though perhaps enjoyable as sheer camp – but was told by producer Gregory that he was no longer a bankable “name” in 1955 the way he had been 20 years earlier. When he found he would need a star with a current reputation, he first offered it to Gary Cooper, who turned it down, and then cast Mitchum – and tried his damnedest to get the usually quiet, taciturn Mitchum to overact in the Laughton manner. The result is a star performance that seems to be fighting itself; a characterization that’s supposed to be scary falls flat because Laughton didn’t allow Mitchum to act in a way comfortable for him, and which would have been even more frightening (as Mitchum was with a less egomaniacal director, J. Lee Thompson, playing a similar role in the 1962 Cape Fear).

The Night of the Hunter is a beautiful film to look at – Cortez even does an iris-out on one sequence (a common trick in the silent era in which the screen image shrinks to a small circle in one corner of the screen before fading out, but one almost never used in sound films; the last iris-out in a major U.S. feature for this one had been in Orson Welles’ 1942 The Magnificent Ambersons, also photographed by Stanley Cortez), and there are sequences, particularly when Harry is hunting the kids, that are marvelously Gothic in their use of light and shadow. The problem with this film is everyone and everything in it seems “off” – the characters are too remote to be believable as real people, and you end up marveling at the visual artistry when you should be identifying with the kids and hoping against hope that they’ll survive the mortal danger they’ve been put in by a madman.