The Sheila Variations

Night of the Hunter

Watched Night of the Hunter this morning, this dark rainy morning.

I honestly cannot remember if I have ever seen the thing in its entirety. But certain scenes and images are so famous that I feel like I have seen the whole thing - I know the backstage stories - I know the characters, Robert Mitchum's crazy Love/Hate tattooes - it's such a famous film. Really, one of the high-water marks, in terms of collaborative achievement.

So I sat down to watch the whole thing this morning.

Is there a film more packed full of arrestingly beautiful and terrifying shots? The black silhouette of the farmhouse - against the white white sky ... with the two children walking up the hill ... and someone singing a hymn inside ... and you don't know WHY the scene fills you with dread, WHY you feel so much horror and fear ... but it is THERE.

This film is terrifying.

There is such violence beneath the surface - but, in reality, the most violent moment you see, on screen that is, is a jar of pickles crashing onto Robert Mitchum's head. That's it.

And yet ... I can't think of another film which quite captures the creepy-crawly eerie feeling of impending doom so well.

Charles Laughton, the great actor, directed this film. It's the only film he ever directed - which is incredible. The cinematography is a work of art.

There is one scene when Robert Mitchum (the traveling preacher, who has the letters L-O-V-E and H-A-T-E tattooed across the knuckles of each hand) is sitting out in the garden of a house, and two children who he has been chasing are inside the house.

Lillian Gish (one of America's first movie stars) is in this film - and oh God, she is so wonderful you want to reach into the screen and hug her. Now a woman in her 50s, she plays a farm-woman who, late in life, finds that she has a gift for picking up wayward children or runaways. Her house is filled with them.

Mitchum arrives to take away the two children he has been terrorizing and chasing, but Gish knows there is something not right about him. She can feel it, and she pays attention to the terrified responses of the little boy. "What's the matter, John? Aren't you happy to see your Pa?" But Gish is smarter than Mitchum realizes and she finally snaps: "You're not a preacher and you are NOT these childrens' daddy."

He rides off slowly on his white horse, declaring, "I'll be back. At dark."

And there he sits, in full view, in the dark garden, under a streetlamp, singing a hymn - long and slow. It is terrifying. You fear him. You fear him. And all he is doing is just sitting there. Waiting. Biding his time.

Lillian Gish, in stark black silhouette, sits calmly on her screened-in porch, holding an enormous shotgun, staring out at Mitchum, rocking in a rocking chair. She is waiting, too. It is night. The night of the hunter. She is protecting her flock from the monster in the garden. She will sit up all night, with the gun. He stands under the streetlamp, staring in at her, singing a hymn.

And oddly - frighteningly - she starts to sing with him.

It is a duet. Gish sitting on the porch, Mitchum waiting in the garden like a patient hunter ...

They are enemies. She is prepared to shoot him if he comes close. And so the duet becomes this odd battle of wills ... or something. I don't know. It is a tremendous scene - like a nightmare. It makes the ULTIMATE sense, and yet it is still a complete mystery.

This movie is one of the scariest movies I've ever seen. It makes modern-day "scary movies" with the thing that leaps out of the closet, or the knife that comes through the wall, like pallid stupid cardboard cut-outs.

Night of the Hunter is psychologically terrifying. Robert Mitchum never runs, never moves quickly, never races after people like the bogey-man. He strolls. He leans against trees. He is seen slowwwwwwwly riding his horse along the horizon.

And the scene of Shelley Winters' body submerged in the river is stunning, and I do not know how they did it. The whole thing is completely surreal, filled with images from out of a nightmare.

Roger Ebert has chosen Night of the Hunter as one of his "Great Movies of All Time", for obvious reasons. It was kind of ignored when it first came out ... People didn't "get it". They didn't know how to label it, or classify it - which file folder to put it in. They didn't realize that many times it is those unclassifiable films that deserve the term "genius". Genius doesn't fit in a file folder.

This movie is terrifying and brilliant. If you haven't seen it - do yourself a favor. It's in the "canon" of great American films now, for a reason.

Here's Ebert's review, if you're interested. Ebert can articulate what makes a movie great.

Roger Ebert's review of Night of the Hunter
Charles Laughton's ``The Night of the Hunter'' (1955) is one of the greatest of all American films, but has never received the attention it deserves because of its lack of the proper trappings. Many ``great movies'' are by great directors, but Laughton directed only this one film, which was a critical and commercial failure long overshadowed by his acting career. Many great movies use actors who come draped in respectability and prestige, but Robert Mitchum has always been a raffish outsider. And many great movies are realistic, but ``Night of the Hunter'' is an expressionistic oddity, telling its chilling story through visual fantasy. People don't know how to categorize it, so they leave it off their lists.

Yet what a compelling, frightening and beautiful film it is! And how well it has survived its period. Many films from the mid-1950s, even the good ones, seem somewhat dated now, but by setting his story in an invented movie world outside conventional realism, Laughton gave it a timelessness. Yes, the movie takes place in a small town on the banks of a river. But the town looks as artificial as a Christmas card scene, the family's house with its strange angles inside and out looks too small to live in, and the river becomes a set so obviously artificial it could have been built for a completely stylized studio film like ``Kwaidan'' (1964).

Everybody knows the Mitchum character, the sinister ``Reverend'' Harry Powell. Even those who haven't seen the movie have heard about the knuckles of his two hands, and how one has the letters H-A-T-E tattooed on them, and the other the letters L-O-V-E. Bruce Springsteen drew on those images in his song ``Cautious Man'':

``On his right hand Billy'd tattooed the word ``love''
and on his left hand was the word ``fear''
And in which hand he held his fate was never clear''

Many movie lovers know by heart the Reverend's famous explanation to the wide-eyed boy (``Ah, little lad, you're staring at my fingers. Would you like me to tell you the little story of right-hand/left-hand?'') And the scene where the Reverend stands at the top of the stairs and calls down to the boy and his sister has become the model for a hundred other horror scenes.

But does this familiarity give ``The Night of the Hunter'' the recognition it deserves? I don't think so because those famous trademarks distract from its real accomplishment. It is one of the most frightening of movies, with one of the most unforgettable of villains, and on both of those scores it holds up as well after four decades as I expect ``The Silence of the Lambs'' to do many years from now.

The story, somewhat rearranged: In a prison cell, Harry Powell discovers the secret of a condemned man (Peter Graves), who has hidden $10,000 somewhere around his house. After being released from prison, Powell seeks out the man's widow, Willa Harper (Shelley Winters), and two children, John (Billy Chapin) and the owl-faced Pearl (Sally Jane Bruce). They know where the money is, but don't trust the ``preacher.'' But their mother buys his con game and marries him, leading to a tortured wedding night inside a high-gabled bedroom that looks a cross between a chapel and a crypt.

Soon Willa Harper is dead, seen in an incredible shot at the wheel of a car at the bottom of the river, her hair drifting with the seaweed. And soon the children are fleeing down the dream-river in a small boat, while the Preacher follows them implacably on the shore; this beautifully stylized sequence uses the logic of nightmares, in which no matter how fast one runs, the slow step of the pursuer keeps the pace. The children are finally taken in by a Bible-fearing old lady (Lillian Gish), who would seem to be helpless to defend them against the single-minded murderer, but is as unyielding as her faith.

The shot of Winters at the bottom of the river is one of several remarkable images in the movie, which was photographed in black and white by Stanley Cortez, who shot Welles' ``The Magnificent Ambersons,'' and once observed he was ``always chosen to shoot weird things.'' He shot few weirder than here, where one frightening composition shows a street lamp casting Mitchum's terrifying shadow on the walls of the children's bedroom. The basement sequence combines terror and humor, as when the Preacher tries to chase the children up the stairs, only to trip, fall, recover, lunge and catch his fingers in the door. And the masterful nighttime river sequence uses giant foregrounds of natural details, like frogs and spider webs, to underline a kind of biblical progression as the children drift to eventual safety.

The screenplay, based on a novel by Davis Grubb, is credited to James Agee, one of the icons of American film writing and criticism, then in the final throes of alcoholism. Laughton's widow, Elsa Lanchester, is adamant in her autobiography: ``Charles finally had very little respect for Agee. And he hated the script, but he was inspired by his hatred.'' She quotes the film's producer, Paul Gregory: ``. . . the script that was produced on the screen is no more James Agee's . . . than I'm Marlene Dietrich.''

Who wrote the final draft? Perhaps Laughton had a hand. Lanchester and Laughton both remembered that Mitchum was invaluable as a help in working with the two children, whom Laughton could not stand. But the final film is all Laughton's, especially the dreamy, Bible-evoking final sequence, with Lillian Gish presiding over events like an avenging elderly angel.

Robert Mitchum is one of the great icons of the second half-century of cinema. Despite his sometimes scandalous off-screen reputation, despite his genial willingness to sign on to half-baked projects, he made a group of films that led David Thomson, in his Biographical Dictionary of Film, to ask, ``How can I offer this hunk as one of the best actors in the movies?'' And answer: ``Since the war, no American actor has made more first-class films, in so many different moods.'' ``The Night of the Hunter,'' he observes, represents ``the only time in his career that Mitchum acted outside himself,'' by which he means there is little of the Mitchum persona in the Preacher.

Mitchum is uncannily right for the role, with his long face, his gravel voice, and the silky tones of a snake-oil salesman. And Shelly Winters, all jitters and repressed sexual hysteria, is somehow convincing as she falls so prematurely into, and out of, his arms. The supporting actors are like a chattering gallery of Norman Rockwell archetypes, their lives centered on bake sales, soda fountains and gossip. The children, especially the little girl, look more odd than lovable, which helps the film move away from realism and into stylized nightmare. And Lillian Gish and Stanley Cortez quite deliberately, I think, composed that great shot of her which looks like nothing so much as Whistler's mother holding a shotgun.

Charles Laughton showed here that he had an original eye, and a taste for material that stretched the conventions of the movies. It is risky to combine horror and humor, and foolhardy to approach them through expressionism. For his first film, Laughton made a film like no other before or since, and with such confidence it seemed to draw on a lifetime of work. Critics were baffled by it, the public rejected it, and the studio had a much more expensive Mitchum picture (``Not as a Stranger'') it wanted to promote instead. But nobody who has seen ``The Night of the Hunter'' has forgotten it, or Mitchum's voice coiling down those basement stairs: ``Chillll . . . dren?''

Posted by sheila