Famously, Night of the Hunter , Charles Laughton's 1955 noir, was the only film that he directed. One of the great actors of his generation ( Mutiny on the Bounty ,1935; Jamaica Inn ,1939; The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1938), he didn’t intend the film to be his last. He’d planned to follow it with an adaptation of Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead , but was so dispirited by the negative reviews that he gave up on the idea. The plot of Night of the Hunter is simple en