Night of the Hunter, a Southern Gothic Grotesquerie
- Chris Millton
- Jan 24, 2024
- 9 min read
Updated: Apr 18
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 enough and identical in the film and David Grubb's Pulitzer Prize winning source novel. Ben Harper (Peter Yates) robs a bank, shooting one of the tellers dead. He returns home and has just enough time to hide the bankroll of $10, 000 in the belly of his daughter Pearl’s (Sally Jane Bruce) doll, ‘Miss Jenny’, swearing her and her older brother John (Billy Chapin) to secrecy before he's arrested.
As he awaits execution, he is joined in his cell by Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum) who's been sentenced to 30 days for driving a stolen car, although he is in reality an undetected serial killer of widows (who he met through lonely hearts columns). Despite being a serial killer, Powell is a figure of contempt and fun: physically unprepossessing, and a woman-hating, probably impotent pervert. He's a bogus preacher, but a genuine religious maniac and psychopath who has ‘love ‘and ‘hate’ tattooed across his fingers. A celebrated scene shows him get an erstazt switchblade erection, the blade of his flick-knife cutting through his trouser leg, as he disgustedly watches a burlesque show.
Powell tries to wheedle the whereabouts of the money from Harper before his execution, but to no avail. On his release, he goes to Harper’s small West Virginia hometown, Cresap’s Landing, to preach, and seduce Harper's widow, Willa (Shelley Winters). They marry, but on the wedding night, instead of dancing the newlyweds' bed spring jig she was expecting, Willa is subjected to a dementedly misogynist, flesh-hating sermon, and the union remains unconsummated. John blurts out that the children know the whereabouts of the money, and one night Willa returns home from her work at a café and overhears Powell aggressively trying to get the information out of Pearl. That night, he slits Willa’s throat and dumps the body at the wheel of her his Model T in the river, telling the townsfolk that she has run away.
The children flee downriver on their father’s skiff and wash up at the riverside smallholding of Rachel Cooper (Lillian Gish), a widow who takes in orphans and runaways, bringing them up as her own. Powell tracks them down but is chased off by ‘Miz Cooper’ with a shotgun. He returns that night, and she shoots him in the shoulder. He retreats to the barn, is arrested, and narrowly escapes being lynched whilst in custody.
Both book and film have been taken as condemnations of the church and religious hypocrisy, but as the preacher is both bogus and insane, neither work as a critique of religion. The story is an allegory about the battle between good and evil, a story of sexual mania and misogyny, told through the binaries of innocence and experience, love and hate, fantasy and reality. If Willa represents the realm of illusion, credulity, and dream, Powell represents the irruption of a bladed and butchering reality principle into life.
The book and Gruub's novel diverge in significant ways, although Laughton kept most of the dialogue. Laughton and Grubb got on well, but Laughton wanted someone with more film experience, and Grubb in any case was too strange and uncommunicative a man to work with. He hired James Agee (The African Queen, 1951), a supposedly ‘functioning’ alcoholic at the time. Agee submitted a bizarre, bloated and unfilmable 300-page script, that Laughton radically cut down, without, however, taking any writing credit.
The realities of poverty and grim exigencies of the depression are more pronounced in the novel and Grubb sharply depicts the effects and the look of rural indigence, whereas in the film nothing looks particularly ugly or squalid or dirty or poor. In the novel everyone is obsessed with the $10, 000 dollars, including Willa, and Grubb repeatedly calls our attention to it. In Laughton’s movie the doll is merely a MacGuffin serving a similarly suspense and tension creating function as Stevie’s package containing a bomb in Hitchcock’s Sabotage (1936).
Night of the Hunter opens with the binaries-announcing blast of the preacher’s discordant, angrily stabbing, staccato theme-tune followed by a lullaby, Dream, Little One, Dream, then, startlingly, with the face of Lillian Gish and those of ‘her’ children constellated like stars in the sky as she reads to them, to us, from the bible, cautioning them, and us, to “beware of false prophets who come to you sheep’s clothing”.
A similar homily from Gish closes the film, when she tells us that “… children are man at his strongest, They abide. They endure”, but it is saved from sentimentality by the strength of Gish’s performance, her character's stern goodness, and the faint intrusion of the preacher’s menacing theme tune, which doesn't, however, ruin its bedtimestory sense of closure. We are then magic-carpeted through time and space to a child finding one of Powell’s victims dead in a cellar, to Mitchum pootling along a country road in his Model T wondering aloud to himself a how many “whores and bitches” he’s murdered so far, then to the court where he’s been arraigned for driving a stolen a car.
In The Night of the Hunter there's a constant moving back and forth between darkness and light, idyll and menace, both thematically and visually. Laughton regularly screened silent films by Pabst, Murnau and Griffiths for cast and crew before production, and Laughton’s cinematographer Stanley Cortez (The Magnificent Ambersons, 1942; Shock Corridor, 1963) was influenced by D W Griffiths, with his slow tracking shots and crisp, highly defined photography. The influence of silent film is also there in the set design, its narrative propelling and expository mis en scene, and in its acting style.
Griffiths is there, too, in those more brightly lit scenes of a bucolic America, a pastoral idyll in which the children appear alone, and in the close-ups of Gish, in which she looks straight into the camera. There is even a silent-era iris fade that closes down on a boy on a basement window, though like some other quirks of the film it was a makeshift necessitated by a tiny budget, as they had no zoom lens. The influence of German Expressionist set design and lighting is most obvious in the pantomimic scene of Willa’s murder that takes place in a stylised hotel room that is part-coffin, part-chapel, a halo of light around her pillowed head as she awaits the blade.
The film’s modernist, abrupt shifts from register to register, style to style, is what makes it so unique, so ahead of its time, and contributes to its overall feeling of artificiality, something stemming perhaps from Laughton’s long association with Berthold Brecht. Cortez and the set designer Hilyard Brown set out to achieve a child’s perspective in scenes of looming, towering and outsize scale, scenes which often have the look of a child’s picture book come to life, particularly in the use of silhouettes, redolent of moving paper cut-outs. Mitchum performs the film’s allegory in little with the celebrated scene in which he has his two tattooed hands fight to the death, with good hypocritically triumphant (though predictive of his fate).
The most artificial-looking scene, shot completely on a sound stage, is that of the children’s voyage downriver on the skiff, which has an dreamlike, surrealistic feel, with screen-filling close ups of spiderwebs, birds, rabbits and owls, a child’s benign story book familiars, implying child-animal complicity, and that the creatures are somehow watching over them. The water glitters sidereally, and the preacher is seen in silhouette astride a horse in the distance, all to Pearl’s otherworldly, cracked and quavering singing of a sinister lullaby. However original, this odd scene grates on some, but I suspect the antipathy to this scene affects only adults, and its artificiality contributes to the film's timeless, folkloric feel.
Cortez had just finished work on the morally brutal Black Tuesday (1954) where he’d experimented with Kodak’s new Tri-Ex film. Black Tuesday is perhaps visually the darkest film ever made, barely lit, it looks as if Franz Kline might have been artistic director. On Night of the Hunter, it helped Cortez achieve opaline, glowing whites and contrastingly deep, rich and velvety blacks, sometimes lighting a scene with just a single candle (something Kubrick later experimented with on Barry Lyndon, 1975). Despite its expressionistic black and white lighting and the centrality of a crime, Night of the Hunter isn’t really a film noir because of its lack of moral ambiguity and fatalism, its closure and hope, its stylistic heterogeneity, the centrality of children to the narrative, and its element of black humour, courtesy mostly of Robert Mitchum’s mannered performance.
Harry Powell in the novel is scrawny, physically pathetic, unappealing, weasel-faced, characterisation that highlights Willa’s desperation and gullibility. Mitchum on the other hand was one of Hollywood’s most desirable men, a pin-up, and beard-splitter of no small repute. His honeyed drawl and somnolent flesh-appraising eyes here become unctuous and minatory, more killer than lover. He clearly takes a wicked pleasure in the part, one that he jumped at and thought was made for him. It is not a naturalistic performance and its mannered emphaticness was no doubt influenced by the regular diet of silent movies Laughton fed the cast, and was a departure from Mitchum's usual laconic nonchalance.
Mitchum compensated for his brawn and good looks, bringing him as close as he could to the physical wretchedness of the novel's Powell, by contorting his body to make it more awkward looking, and by playing the buffoon in some scenes, loping away whooping when threatened with the shotgun, pratfalling on a jar whilst looking for the children in the cellar, or flailing helplessly and squealing childishly when John traps his finger in the cellar door. His clownishness, his defeat by children and an old lady, also undermine the sexual allure he normally brought to his roles.
Mitchum had a long filmography, over a 100 films stretching back to 1943 and reaching right up to the 1990s, and few actors have given so many stellar performances in so many classic films, including the greatest of all noirs, Jacques Tournier’s Out of the Past, (1947). Highlights are his later performances in Peter Yates’s half-forgotten and underrated masterpiece The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973), and Paul Schrader’s half-forgotten and underrated masterpiece The Yakuza (1974). He was always self-deprecating about his acting, commenting that he came from the ‘Smirnoff School’ of acting, but in fact he initiated a whole new ‘cool’, understated style of acting in the 40s, which was hugely influential.
Lillian Gish, DW Griffiths’ muse, the ‘Queen of the close-up’, helped develop the gestuary of silent film out of its theatricality, just as Griffiths, in the same films, invented the grammar of the cinema with which we’re now so familiar. She also had a long filmography, and, starting in 1912, made dozens of films with Griffiths, including the epochal Broken Blossoms (1919), Birth of a Nation (1915), and Intolerance (1916). Her performance in Night of the Hunter is a masterclass in subtlety and nuance, and the emotional power of eye and face. Both Grubb and Laughton convincingly and touchingly depict the growing love between Miz Cooper and the traumatised and withdrawn John, and the latter's coming back alive emotionally.
Shelley Winters too, as Willa, landed a role perfect for her. She had a quality of incipient hysteria and seductive vulgarity that made her perfect for this role, as she was for Lolita’s pretentious and manstarved mother in Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 adaptation of Nabokov’s novel, Lolita. She also had a long filmography going back to 1943, highlights being two outstanding noirs, Cry of the City (1948), with Richard Conte, and the unforgettably bleak but poetic Odds Against Tomorrow (1959), the only film noir starring a black actor, Harry Belafonte. The most celebrated, iconic image from Night of the Hunter is Winters dead at the wheel of the Model T with her long hair being pulled along, dancing with the current alongside the reeds (although the body was a wax model). Brash and gobby in real life, she had been Marilyn Monroe’s flatmate in the 40s: a self-confessed ‘party girl’, it was Winters who coined the phrase ‘FMN pumps’. It’s a shame that she’ll probably remain best known for her comically maudlin demise in The Poseidon Adventure (1972), because she was really a very good, nuanced actress, .
Despite it getting an adult rating on its release in the UK, Night of the Hunter is perfect pre and young-teen viewing. Imperiled-children narratives will be perennially popular with kids because they have all at some point felt themselves imperiled by adults, wished to escape them, and see them punished (if not killed). It is a complex and intricate artwork, partly due to composer Walter Schumann’s refined and variegated use of music, an integral and considered element of the narrative, and it contains images and scenes of such arresting power and insinuating beauty that they remain with you for a lifetime.
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