Night Of the Hunter: “Chiiiiiiiiildren…”

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

There is such violence beneath the surface – but, in reality, the most overtly 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. 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.

Roger Ebert writes:

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)….

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?”