Revisiting The Night of the Hunter (Dir. Charles Laughton, 1955)
A fresh look at 20th Century Classics (Spoilers Ahead)
Charles Laughton’s The Night of The Hunter (1955) is an impressive film and full of interesting binaries: virtue vs. sin, the famous love vs. hate, childhood vs. adulthood and the warmth of domestic familial ties vs. the coldness of a life of crime. Walter Schumann’s score assists these themes, gracefully underpinning the delicacy of childhood innocence; starkly contradicting the cold-hearted nature of Robert Mitchum’s psychotic preacher. It is clear why Spike Lee loves to talk of this film as one of the greatest films ever made; taking creative influence from Mitchum’s Harry Powell for his larger-than-life character Radio Raheem in Do The Right Thing (1989).
Robert Mitchum’s portrayal of Harry Powell simultaneously chills your bones whilst also retaining relentless charm. Reluctantly, you feel yourself absorbed into the children’s nightmare every time his shadow hits the side of the room. Even though the plot intrigue centres around Harry Powell’s desire for the elusive monetary MacGuffin, it never really feels like it tarnishes the narrative in a significantly detrimental way. Another actor worthy of note is Lillian Gish, previously famous for her work as a silent movie star of the 1910s and ’20s including her arguable landmark role in D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915). In The Night of the Hunter she plays Rachel Cooper, a brilliant feminist role. The polar opposite to Harry Powell, Rachel Cooper religiously shelters orphaned children from the harm of crime and evil in the cruel 1930s Great Depression-era American landscape.
Admittedly, shedding any sort of light on The Night of the Hunter cannot be achieved without due appreciation of Laughton and Stanley Cortez’s cinematic lighting selection. Produced during the ‘50s before the advent of technicolour, this film shows eloquently how direly under-appreciated black & white lighting departments were and still are. Some of Cortez’s shots hark back to the haunting shadows cast in German expressionist films such as F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) or even the later noirish brilliance of Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949).
Noticeable too are bedroom shots containing chapel-like pointed ceilings, constructed so it appears as if even in domesticity the hand of God is able to reach down into American life. Willa Harper (Shelley Winters) appears supine, entombed in a coffin, foreshadowing her brutal fate at the malevolent inked hands of Harry Powell.
The shot of Willa Harper’s underwater dead body with her hair rippling synchronously with the lake’s fauna is bewitchingly haunting. This, along with the framing in Willa’s confessionary scene with the flames are two of my personal favourite shots, in a film containing an abundance of noteworthy imagery. Another creative decision, (and potentially auteur moment had we seen more of Laughton later), worthy of note is the near myriad of shots of West Virginian wildlife as we follow the two children down the river. The boat, seen through birds eye view shots, cuts to playful encounters with rabbits, tortoises and foxes to name a few, providing much needed escapism from the nightmare we are enduring (despite perhaps unnecessarily overemphasising the children’s youthful innocence).
An extremely admirable directorial debut, The Night of The Hunter is definitely deserving of being lauded a twentieth-century Hollywood classic. It went on to subsequent well-earned critical acclaim in light of its initial box-office flop; it is a shame that Laughton did not go on to direct as this is highly deserving of a 9/10 rating, a superb piece of American cinema.
