In 1955, Charles Laughton directed a movie. There was perhaps no great surprise in this. By that time, Laughton had been one of the English-speaking world’s preeminent actors for three decades, a familiar figure both onstage and on the screen. Latterly he had shown considerable skill as a stage director, and his penchant for giving solo readings of Shakespeare and other great poets had made him a notable presence on the American lecture circuit. He had acted opposite countless eminent colleagues, and had worked with every artist of note from Hitchcock to Bertolt Brecht. It was well within reason for him to try his hand at filmmaking.
But the film he chose to start with was, for many observers, a head-scratcher. Davis Grubb’s then brand-new novel, The Night of the Hunter, was a thriller set in the poverty-ridden Appalachia of the Great Depression, a story of murder and menace set among down-home folk who pick at country banjos and espouse Baptist or evangelical splinter groups. It was hard to see what in it might interest the actor the world had seen as Inspector Javert, Captain Bligh, and the Hunchback of Notre Dame and the director of a Broadway production of Shaw’s Don Juan in Hell. And the world greeted the result of Laughton’s venture, initially, with blank puzzlement.
Watching The Night of the Hunter today, you may find that last sentence very hard to comprehend. How could anyone have a blankly puzzled reaction to this rich, extraordinary, deeply disturbing film, now widely acclaimed as a masterpiece? The answer, of course, is that it was rich, extraordinary, and deeply disturbing—too much to take in at a first viewing, too unlike other films of its time in both style and content, too skillful at promoting disquiet to be swallowed with the same ease as the standard-pattern works around it. I’ve screened The Night of the Hunter several times for classes of young acting students in their late teens and early 20s. When I tell them, in the discussion afterward, that this movie was such a gigantic box-office flop that Laughton could never arrange financing for another film, the groan of mingled horror and disbelief that rises from the group regularly gets me upset all over again at the foolish way the world wastes talent. I groan in silent sympathy with the students.
Two audiences kept The Night of the Hunter alive after its dismal first release: kids who saw it by chance in the days when old movies were a staple of late-night TV, and revival-house film buffs. For kids it is a kind of snare: If you see it before you are, say, 15 or so, some of its images will stick in your brain, and you will find them very, very hard to dislodge. And if you went to it at an indie cinema in the days when such institutions functioned, and you went expecting the usual tickle or tear provoked by the era’s conventional Hollywood product, you might well come away chastened and unnerved. As the kids grew up, some of them became the revival-house audience. And that audience was never shy about sharing its favorites with not-yet-enlightened friends, students, colleagues. Like a snowball rolling downhill, The Night of the Hunter has accrued admirers over the decades. Even so, I am constantly finding myself in the company of people who’ve never seen it, or never even heard of it. In our country it takes a long time for the stigma of an initial box-office failure to wear off. Money is the American criterion of value.
And that fact is particularly ironic in this context because The Night of the Hunter is, in a sense, all about money—though this is rather like saying that Hamlet is a play all about kingship; it sort of omits the substance of what you see. The money is real, and you do see it; almost everyone in the film, including those who declare piously that they’re glad it’s been lost forever, would like to get their hands on it. The money in question was stolen in a bank robbery by Ben Harper (Peter Graves), a young, unemployed father of two, for whom we are meant to feel a certain sympathy, even though we learn that he killed two men in the course of the robbery and will shortly be executed for it. The film’s daring games with moral confusion start early: Ben Harper’s death sentence fills even his executioner with regret. (And come to think of it, I believe this is the only American film involving the death penalty that pauses to show us the executioner’s home life.)
No one knows where the money is except Ben’s two small children, John (Billy Chapin) and his little sister, Pearl (Sally Jane Bruce), who have watched him hide it—we don’t learn where until much later. He has made them swear not to tell even their mother, Willa (Shelley Winters). In jail awaiting execution, Ben even muzzles his mouth to avoid talking in his sleep, because his cellmate, a car thief named Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum), displays a mite too much interest in the whereabouts of the loot.
Though doing a mere 30 days for car theft, Powell is the movie’s central figure, a tall, black-clad, deeply disturbed creature, menacing to children and lethal to women; he oozes the sexual magnetism of the psychopath. We already know he is a monster well before he and Ben Harper wind up in the same cell: The film opens with Rachel Cooper (Lillian Gish), a character we will not meet till midway through the story, warning small children to “beware of false prophets” as the camera swoops down on a group of children playing hide-and-seek—until they discover a woman’s corpse in a barn. Cut to Powell, in his stolen jalopy, talking out loud to his god about all the widows he’s robbed and killed. (Grubb’s novel derived a few of the details of Powell’s bloody career from the actual story of Harm Drenth, aka Harry Powers, a serial killer hanged at Moundsville, W.Va., in 1932.) We learn that Powell carries a nasty-looking switchblade, that the knuckles of his hands are tattooed with L-O-V-E and H-A-T-E, and that he styles himself “Reverend.”
Mitchum’s performance is the film’s central act of daring, high and stylized. Critics have applied the word Brechtian to it, and Laughton knew Brecht well enough for the adjective to be justified. He had created the title role in Brecht’s Galileo on Broadway (staged by film director Joseph Losey), and had collaborated closely with Brecht on the translation. (His next project after The Night of the Hunter was a Broadway staging of Shaw’s Major Barbara, a favorite play of Brecht’s, starring Glynis Johns and Burgess Meredith, with Laughton himself playing Undershaft and directing, employing what critics again described as Brechtian techniques.)
“Reverend” Harry Powell is a brilliant poseur. He can put on humility, tragic helplessness, simple piety, or stern moral dignity at the flick of an eyebrow. The camera gives him away to us—and when he loses his temper because he has failed to get something he wants, he gives himself away with a startling animal fury—but he fools most of those he encounters, especially women. Poor people, desperately needing the reassurance religion provides in a troubled time, walk willingly into his net. The more we see Mitchum consciously heightening the performance, the more it resonates in the age of Trump’s blindly loyal base and the mealy-mouthed evangelical leaders who egg them on.
Powell, once out of jail, goes in search of Willa and her dead husband’s money, and the middle third of the movie is an extended game of cat and mouse that turns into a frightening chase as the two children try to outwit and then outrun their evil stepfather. (Laughton described the film as “a nightmarish Mother Goose story.”) Almost everything in this section of the film is distorted or stylized to provide maximum disquiet. Laughton and his screenwriter, James Agee, had immersed themselves in screenings of silent film, including German Expressionist films, from which they borrowed tactics and images. At one point as Powell walks into the house where the two children are hiding, Laughton even uses an iris shot—something that must have been a flabbergasting visual shock to the movie audiences of 1955.
Often, as befits the material, the distortions are from a child’s-eye perspective. When the bedraggled runaways, searching for a hideaway for the night, sleep in the hayloft of a barn, we see the lit windows of the adjacent farmhouse and hear a woman inside singing a lullaby, a moment that echoes Brecht’s use of a similar effect in the “Song of Shelter” in Mother Courage. Most of the children’s escape is by boat along a river, and Laughton inserts shots of riverbank creatures, including a spider catching a fly in its web, that appear magnified, as if the preying and preyed-upon creatures were human size. It’s a beautiful, magical, terrifyingly cruel world, full of eerie shadows and ever-present dangers.
But a beneficent goddess—or at least, a dea ex machina—rescues John and Pearl. Rachel Cooper, when she finally appears, proves to be one of those lonely older women who spent much of the Depression era rescuing the homeless children who wandered the roads. She teaches them rudimentary farming and homemaking, and gives moral instruction through Bible stories retold as fairy tales. Her Christianity has some dogmas in common with the fake pieties of Harry Powell; the difference is her sense of Christian obligation to others. And as we learn when Powell shows up, posing as John and Pearl’s grief-stricken father, she knows the difference between real piety and the fake kind, and is ready to enforce that difference—with her shotgun if need be. (She is the only woman in the film to see through Powell’s pose of piety.)
The difference between her Christianity and his is dramatized at one point through music: While we hear him singing the traditional hymn that is one of his leitmotifs, “Leaning on the everlasting arms,” we hear her sing “Leaning on Jesus” in counterpoint. The musical effect suggests chillingly that the two views of religion are simultaneously opposed and inextricably linked.
Miz Cooper has a backstory, of which we hear exactly one sentence, about her having lost the love of her son. Gish makes the line reverberate—she makes all her lines reverberate—but too much else is happening for us to ponder what the issue between her and her son might have been. Though the life inside it is fraught with tensions, her farmhouse with its white picket fence has the idyllic look of the country cottages in D.W. Griffith’s silent two-reelers, many of which also starred Gish. (Laughton’s research screenings paid a double dividend here. Apparently Gish heard that he and Agee had been viewing Griffith silents at MoMA, phoned to ask him why, and was rewarded by his inviting her to play the role.)
Two secondary characters who promise possible salvation but don’t deliver deserve mention here. John’s best buddy, in his father’s absence, is an elderly retired riverboat captain, “Uncle” Birdie Steptoe (James Gleason). Wise to the ways of the river and skilled at boating and fishing—he repairs the skiff in which John and Pearl escape Powell—Birdie is also a semi-alcoholic, haunted by the memory of his long-dead wife. It is Willa’s loss that finally drives him over the edge into full-blown drunken incoherence, just when John needs him most.
The maternal presence balancing Birdie’s gruffly avuncular mentorship is Icey Spoon (Evelyn Varden), who runs the local ice cream parlor with her mildly demurring husband, Walt (Don Beddoe). Domineering but generous, full of pious platitudes but clearly love-starved, Icey brings trouble at both ends of the narrative: She virtually pushes Willa into Powell’s arms when he first arrives in town, and at the end, when the full extent of his bloodstained past has been revealed, she becomes something like a lynch-mob leader. (The camera work in the mob scenes recalls the 1936 film Fury, directed by Fritz Lang, who had begun his career in German expressionist films of the sort Laughton screened, had known and worked with Brecht, and had later collaborated with Stanley Cortez, who became Laughton’s cinematographer and invaluable right hand on The Night of the Hunter.)
Both Varden and Gleason came with extensive theater and film experience on which Laughton could draw. Varden, who had a long stage career (she had played Mrs. Gibbs in the original 1940 production of Wilder’s Our Town) had come relatively late to film. Her wide range of stage roles, from haughty society dowagers to blowsy landladies, included Mrs. Hardcastle in She Stoops to Conquer and Nurse to Olivia de Havilland’s Juliet. This range enabled her to grasp instinctively what Laughton needed from her to balance the heightened performance he was getting from Mitchum. In contrast, Gleason—whose stage career had included not only acting but also playwriting, directing, and producing, and who had written for as well as acted in movies since the silent era—was brought in late, to replace an actor whose folksy style in early rushes Laughton found too predictable. Uncle Birdie’s scenes, played entirely with the child actor playing John, demanded a much more naturalistic approach, which Gleason’s sure hand readily applied.
The daring mix of styles that this suggests matches the film’s complicated and constantly fascinating mix of genres. Often categorized as a thriller or a film noir—it appears on many lists of the “scariest movies ever”—it is also a cinematic folk ballad or fairy tale, a social-realist picture of rural Appalachia during the Depression, a parable about religion and sexuality, and, at its core, a simple adventure story of children under siege in a dangerous and confusing adult world. Given the heady richness of the mixture, maybe we can forgive those 1955 reviewers and moviegoers who failed to see that they were witnessing a fully told story in a fully achieved style—a style unlike any other in the history of film.
Some later critics have denigrated Agee’s contribution on the grounds that he, notoriously, submitted a draft of the screenplay that was insanely over length, which Laughton was compelled to edit into feasibility. (Agee proposed that they share the screenwriting credit, which Laughton declined.) But Agee’s presence was significant for Laughton in several respects: He had grown up in Tennessee and knew the story’s region from childhood. He had written movingly about the hard lives of Southern sharecroppers in his collaboration with the photographer Walker Evans on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. His film criticism had revealed a cinematic sensibility both wide-ranging and daring, a fine match for Laughton’s. (He had been one of the few American critics to defend Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux, and had become friends with Chaplin as a result, even proposing a new project for him.) And, lastly, he was a poet: One of his major assignments after The Night of the Hunter, cut short by his sudden death from a heart attack, was to supply lyrics for the Bernstein-Hellman Candide; drafts of several appear in his Collected Poems.
Laughton was deeply dismayed by the film’s financial failure. He never attempted to direct another film—a prospect that, after The Night of the Hunter’s box office returns, would have been virtually unfinanceable. In later years, Paul Gregory, Laughton’s producing partner, blamed United Artists for failing to promote the film properly. Gregory had wanted them to market it first as a hard-ticket attraction, playing reserved-seat theaters in cities to which Laughton’s stage productions had toured. United Artists shied away from that, as they did from his suggestion that they bring a lawsuit when church groups or local censorship boards banned the film. (Surely one of the great ironies of American culture is that this film was banned in Memphis, a city then famous for its wide-open red-light district.)
UA’s executives, like the wider audience, seem to have been largely puzzled by the film; Gregory bitterly recalled one of them, when the final cut was first screened, calling it “arty.” The young people who sit transfixed by the film when I screen it for students do not see it as such. “God save little children,” as Gish says at the end of the film. “You’d think the world would be ashamed to name a holiday like Christmas for one of them and then go on in the same old way.” But the little children’s memories—memories of terror and of consoling truth—persist, and we have that persistence to thank for the survival, and enshrinement, of a film that is now universally called a classic.
Click here to read the introduction to Michael Feingold’s Old Movies for Theater Lovers column series.
