Night of the Hunter (1955, Charles Laughton)

Rating: 5/5

 

 

 

Remember the first time you tried to walk on your own? No? Yeah, nobody really does, but there were a slew of things that were a first that came after those pivotal steps that were most likely draining in varying respect and trying of every aspect of your persona; take most of these experiences and measure them up to having to make your major studio feature length directorial debut. Very few directors really genuinely get it right the first time; Lynch did with Eraserhead, Huston hit the nail on the head with his adaptation of Hammett's Maltese Falcon, and most notably Orson Welles did relatively well with what's now his best known, if, unfairly, his only really well known effort as director: Citizen Kane.

Then there's this Laughton guy. An actor who decides to give directing an adaptation of a book by the same name a shot. In the studio system of 1955 Hollywood you had to have quite a pair of balls to willfully make a film about a psychopath who dresses as a preacher with no reservations about hunting down two children with the intention of murdering them to get to the decent chunk of change their recently deceased father left them as a safety net.

 

 

 

 

 Then there's the tattoos; HATE on the knuckles of one hand and LOVE on the other, he has no hesitation to divulge listeners to the epic struggle between the two base human emotions; but this is a man wholly without one and an ample amount of the other, how many other blatantly sociopath characters, dressed as preachers, can you name from an American film from the same time? 

What? 

None? 

Yeah, I didn't think so. Mitchum's portrayal of Harry Powell, one of the most despicable human beings in the history of cinema, is so pitch perfect that if you were to have seen him walking towards you on the street chances are you'dve run for your life or just jumped in front of a speeding car.

The film, more or less, tanked on initial release; leading Laughton to proclaim his lifelong resignation from the director's chair: thanks general film going public and useless critics of 1955. Not only does the film contain one of the best performances of the 1950's,  not that everyone else is lackluster it's just that this is Mitchum's film; everyone else is background music, it's also home to some of the most stunningly gorgeous black and white cinematography since somebody decided to film a garden scene in 1888. Dually influenced by Film Noir and the German Expressionist, which gives the film its feeling of a Grimm fairy tale, films there are more memorable scenes in this one film than in the vast majority of a lot of other directors entire filmographies.

Of all films to compare this now established American classic (ain't that the way it always goes; film gets released, no one cares, 20-40 years later it's hailed as a work of art.) it, in a sense, resembles Tobe Hooper's Texas Chain Saw Massacre because, without really spoiling Hunter there is a happy ending but the two children have gone through so much hell that it was most likely a concrete impossibility for them to grow up into mentally stable adults, sort of like Harry.