Exquisite and frightening, hilarious and unforgettable, Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter is the kind of mysterious object that could have only been made in the 1950s. Laughton’s only film as a director remains a work that is impossible to pin down. It is a wonderful film, to be sure, but what is it exactly? Is it a fairy tale of the Hans Christian Andersen type? A Biblical account of God’s wrath as told from the perspective of two children? Or a character study of a depraved soul?
In reality, The Night of the Hunter is all of these things, but the spiritual forefather of Laughton’s vision is Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, the great German director whose Sunrise utilizes the obtuse angles, expressionistic framing, and high contrast lighting that are clearly the aesthetic inspiration for this film.
The film begins with Ben Harper (Peter Graves), husband to Willa (Shelley Winters) and father to John (Billy Chapin) and Pearl (Sally Jean Bruce), murdering two people and stealing $10,000. Shortly before being arrested, he makes his son swear that he will take care of his sister and that he won’t tell about the money, which he has hidden in little Pearl’s doll. Meanwhile, we also meet Harry Powell (the brilliant Robert Mitchum), a deranged and self-proclaimed “preacher” who interprets the Bible as a violent manifesto to justify his crimes (“You don’t mind the killings, Lord, your book is full of killings,” he explains.)
After being found at a strip club with a stolen car parked outside, Preacher Powell ends up in the same cell as soon-to-be-hung Ben Harper. In his sleep, Ben murmurs something about the money and Harry figures his kids must know where it is, so, without delay, he sets out to the nameless West Virginia town.
Harry tells the townspeople (including Willa) that he met Ben while he was working as a preacher for the jail. They all buy it, of course, and soon enough everyone succumbs to the infinite charm of the Preacher, whose tattooed hands ominously read “LOVE” and “HATE.” At the insistence of the town busybody, Willa weds Harry; Pearl loves his quirky stories, but John approaches him warily. Harry constantly hounds the kids about the money. One night, he takes Pearl down to the parlor and Willa overhears him threaten her daughter if she doesn’t tell him about the money. Lying in bed that night, she refuses to believe that he married her for the money. The next moment, however, he gets a switchblade out of his coat pocket and slashes her throat—this grisly incident makes for what is probably the most stunning shot in the entire movie: Willa tied to a car at the bottom of the river, swaying slowly to the flow of the water.
With the mom out of the way, Harry only has the kids to worry about. John and Pearl, infinitely sharper than their mother, run away on their father’s raft, and, in a lovely scene, we see them go down the river as Pearl mouths the words to a song playing in the soundtrack. In moments like these, as with the complete and stark artificiality of his sets, Laughton risks absurdity to achieve the sublime. The kids travel far enough down the Ohio River and end up with Mrs. Cooper (Lillian Gish), a Mother Goose of sorts that takes care of estranged children. The Preacher reappears, but Mrs. Cooper, equipped with faith and a shotgun, keeps him far away from John and Pearl.
As written by James Agee, author of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (an intricate portrait of life in the Depression era), the screenplay to The Night of the Hunter is as poetic in its use of dialect (phrases like “My whole body’s just a-quiverin’ with cleanness” and “Horse hair will pull up a lumpin’ whale” go a long way in establishing the setting of 1930s quaint, small-town America) as Laughton’s expressionistic imagery.
Though a film which certainly meets all the requirements of a horror story (menacing villain, check; frightened children, check; overbearing musical score, check), The Night of the Hunter is a lot more. There is as much to love about Laughton’s intricate set pieces and sophisticated use of black-and-white as of his charmingly-told narrative. Unlike most modern horror films, which are grounded in a nihilistic view of humanity, Laughton eschews that sort of negativity in place of something far more life-affirming: he accepts that horrible things do happen quite often (“It’s a hard world for little things,” Mrs. Cooper says near the end of the film, referring to her kids), but he also has the compassion and grace to imagine shelter from the storm. If nothing else, The Night of the Hunter is a testament to the wonderful world of children. “They abide and they endure,” Mrs. Cooper explains with tears in her eyes.
Instead of sitting through yet another mindless gory movie, watch Laughton’s endlessly enjoyable film and try to remember what it was like to be a kid, looking out to the world as a place filled with uncertainty, darkness, but also beauty.
