Charles Laughton’s only film as a director, from 1955, is the dark tale of a criminal (Robert Mitchum) pretending to be a preacher, who marries an unsuspecting woman (Shelley Winters) in order to find money that her deceased husband had hidden, and in the process terrorizes her and her two children.
Charles Laughton was a renowned British actor who made it big in Hollywood, but someday wanted to direct a movie. In 1953, Paul Gregory, a producer and long-time friend, sent him a book by a new writer, Davis Grubb, called “The Night of the Hunter.” Laughton was captivated, and decided he wanted to direct the film. Gregory would produce it. James Agee would write the screenplay. In 1955, United Artists released the finished film, The Night of the Hunter.
Robert Mitchum plays Harry Powell, an itinerant preacher, dressed in black, in early 1930s West Virginia, whom we first hear in his booming baritone voice talking to the Lord about his plans to despoil widows of their wealth. He’s a criminal who uses religion to con gullible Christians. Mitchum’s powerful and terrifying performance dominates the film.
Powell gets sent to prison for theft and meets Ben Harper, who killed two men in a bank robbery. The ten thousand dollars from the robbery was never recovered. Powell tries to get Harper to tell him where it is, but he won’t say. Powell does manage to find out where his family lives.
Harper is eventually executed, while Harry Powell is released and travels to the little town where the widow, Willa Harper, played by Shelley Winters, lives. Powell’s fire and brimstone preaching style impresses the townsfolk. On the knuckles of his left is written HATE, and on the right hand, LOVE. He illustrates the struggle between the two by pantomiming a hand wrestle between them, in which LOVE of course wins. He then insinuates himself into Willa’s heart, as she is struggling to support her kids now that her husband is dead. The courtship is brief, and she agrees to marry him. She and her four-year-old daughter trust him. But the nine-year-old son, John, does not.
Powell realizes that Willa doesn’t know anything about the money. He then uses all of his wiles to try to find its hiding place, but neither child will talk. Mitchum and Winters are fantastic, but we mustn’t overlook the performance of Billy Chapin as John. His character is one of the most heroic children in all of film, and he portrays this very difficult role with skill.
Laughton wanted to bring back expressionist style from the great silent era films. The Night of the Hunter, shot in black & white by the brilliant Stanley Cortez, is a film of intense high contrast light and shadow. The design is often abstract—bright light, for instance, illuminating certain details while surrounded by a threatening darkness. The images don’t just advance the story. They’re weighted with symbolic meaning. Laughton saw this as a fairy tale, the kind of dark and frightening one you’d find in Grimm’s fairy tales. The underlying conflict is indeed between love and hate, the hate personified by Powell, and the love personified by a character we meet later played by Lillian Gish. It’s a film of horror and grief, but also much beauty and compassion.
The critics panned it. The audience stayed away. The film was a massive flop, losing a lot of money and ending Laughton’s career as a director. Maybe it was just too weird for 1955. But its gradual rediscovery by movie lovers in the decades since have brought it back to the status it deserves: The Night of the Hunter is one of the greatest films of all time, a classic for the ages.
