Life During Wartime #2: THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER (Patreon exclusive)

The Night of the Hunter (1955)
U.S. & Canada: rental only

by Walter Chaw

The kids loved this one. The Night of the Hunter is already an indelible part of our pop culture. My children recognized the hand tattoos on star Robert Mitchum from an episode of the “The Simpsons” where Sideshow Bob has “LUV” and “HAT” (with an umlaut over the “A”) written on his three-fingered mitts. What I got to explain to them was that the venerable show was aping not only this Mitchum role, but also Mitchum’s baddie from the original Cape Fear. I doubt we’ll do Cape Fear as part of this series–it’s a little too prosaic, I fear–but you never know. If we’re trapped together for a year, we’ll get to it.

I think what so appeals to my kids about The Night of the Hunter is that it’s relentlessly weird. It’s not ‘weird for a film from 1955,’ it’s weird for a film from Earth. The whole thing plays like a shadow-puppet play you’d see off the back of a travelling minstrel wagon in some backwater gold settlement of the late 19th century. All the scenes are shot in bizarre, posed perspectives, and its characters are arranged like cut-outs in a pop-up book. When the kid’s picture-book appeared in The Babadook, my first thought was of this film. I think they love The Night of the Hunter, too, because it’s the headwaters for many a modern nightmare. It’ll be fun to show them what the headwaters for this headwater are as we move into German Expressionism.

Last, I think they dig it because they see contemporary parallels in its depiction of hyper-religiosity and the culling of the simple-minded. 

• What is the cost of being duped for the shopkeeper’s wife?
• What is her role at the end outside the courthouse?
• What corollaries might you draw to our modern situation w/super-churches and corporations like Chick-Fil-A and Hobby Lobby that are owned by the very, and very speciously, religious?

There are four great resources for diving into Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter: the Criterion release is a lovely introduction, of course, but also there’s Simon Callow’s BFI monograph, Jeffrey Couchman’s The Night of the Hunter: A Biography of the Film, and Preston Neil Jones’s Heaven & Hell To Play With: The Filming of The Night of the Hunter. (Jones recorded commentary for the Criterion disc.) Points of immediate interest before the screening should include mention that this is the only film for its director, celebrated actor Laughton. It’s good to mention the name so that when we circle back to him with The Old Dark House (1932) and The Ruggles of Red Gap (1935) and likely The Big Clock (1948), we’ll have this as a frame of reference.

If your kids have seen The Bride of Frankenstein, it might be worth mentioning that Laughton was married for over thirty years to the Bride herself, Elsa Lanchester. There is a wealth of stories there we’ll probably save until we visit some of her pictures. 

The Night of the Hunter is a singular film in so many ways: very few movies have ever looked and acted like this one. Of all the things it is, it’s also a strong evocation of Flannery O’Connor and the idea of the Southern Gothic. This leads to our first group of discussion questions:

• Besides other movies, what does The Night of the Hunter remind you of in music, art, literature, architecture?
• This is an adaptation of a book. It’s common and easy to say the book is always better than the film–why do you think this is so widely-held a belief?
• How are movies and books comparable? How are they incomparable?

Mitchum plays a roadshow preacher with “LOVE” and “HATE” written across the fingers of both hands. On his wedding night to a young widow (Shelley Winters), he rebuffs her attentions and, later, we see her standing at his side, preaching fire and brimstone in a revival tent. Mitchum’s Preacher shared a jail cell with the widow’s husband before his execution, where he learned that $10,000 is hidden somewhere on the husband’s farm. Mitchum figures out the only people who might know where the money is are the widow or her two kids: a little boy and girl, left behind.

Mitchum is a colourful character in cinematic history. It may be worth mentioning that he was arrested for possession of marijuana in 1948 and spent 60 days in jail for it. It altered the course of his career, pushing him into bad-boy roles and winning him what he described as a bunch of new fans. We’ll encounter Mitchum again immediately in our next film, Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past.

Mitchum’s Preacher is eventually pit against screen legend Lillian Gish. My kids being mixed-race, we’ll be watching Broken Blossoms, and we’ll see her again in the 78-minute cut of The Wind as well.

• Religion is a central theme in this film: what does it have to say about religion?
• What does the film have to say about hypocrisy, not of the Preacher, but of the people who admire him?
• Can you draw parallels to this phenomenon in our world today?
• What does Gish’s character represent?

It’s fun and, in the digital era, important to note that the stunning shot of the widow in her car at the bottom of the river is a practical effect. (That’s a mannequin wearing a Shelley Winters mask.)

• What do the flowing of the seaweed and the hair remind you of?
• The film is full of “holy” images and framing–where is the eye drawn in the bedrooms of the film?
• How does Laughton use light and dark in his pictures? To what effect and why?

Laughton uses nature a great deal in this film as well. As the children take flight from the demonic stepfather, we (and they) see all sorts of wildlife on their journey.

• The settings in the film seem artificial, almost two-dimensional. How does that make you feel when you’re watching it? What does it remind you of?
• What happens when a film is boiled down to this level of visual boldness and simplicity?

A few days from now, we’re going to compare this film to Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, which boasts a similar level of simplicity and striking composition.

How does Laughton use Nature in this film? Why does he have all those shots of animals?

Some of the discussion may revolve around how the Gish character comments late in the film about the death of a rabbit–this is setting the stage for later screenings of Terrence Malick and even Aguirre: The Wrath of God and Song of the South. My hope with my kids was that they would be able to place the children in nature as no more or less set upon by predators than the animals surrounding them. A broader dialogue could potentially arise around the idea of Romanticism and how Nature was for the romanticists the first testament of God’s presence on Earth, not the Bible.

Stanley Cortez was the cinematographer on the film (I like to touch on the DP’s role in the lighting and “look” of a picture). Cortez also shot Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons, which will definitely find its way into this series. He declared that aside from shooting for Welles, this was his best experience on a picture. Laughton and Cortez had worked together before, most notably on a film directed by another actor, Burgess Meredith, called The Man on the Eiffel Tower. As Cortez remembers it, the direction of that picture was fluid, shifting from crew member to crew member and actor to actor, with Laughton directing his own scenes and Cortez helping him to solve any problems that arose, in addition to taking turns in the director’s chair himself. Laughton and Cortez’s collaboration peaked six years later on The Night of the Hunter. 

Cortez says he went to Laughton’s home with a collection of camera lenses to teach the actor the basics of shooting a movie. In return, Laughton taught Cortez various philosophies on performance and staging. As a first-time director, Laughton was very nervous, so Cortez took it upon himself to protect him with a crew of like-minded, sympathetic, and dedicated craftsmen. When it came time to shoot, Laughton encouraged Cortez to try new things: different lenses and lights, improvised devices like a retracting iris used for lighting that Cortez would employ to create an in-camera iris effect. I encourage you to brush up on the making of this film in any of the resources listed above; this partnership between Cortez and Laughton is a fascinating one for its creative intimacy, and gives insight into the alchemy that created The Night of the Hunter‘s nightmare dreamscapes. 

Last anecdote: For that indelible sequence featuring Winters underwater, Laughton asked what Cortez was thinking about. Cortez told him it was a piece of music, Sibelius’s “Valse Triste,” a six-minute waltz Cortez felt captured the ebbs and flow of the scene as he saw them. (“Valse triste” literally means “sad waltz.”) Laughton, inspired, sent for a composer to create a piece of music to accompany the discovery of Winters’s corpse in the film–a waltz, of course. This bit of music, by Walter Schumann, reminds me a lot of the love theme from North by Northwest.

The aesthetics of this film, with its direct callouts to Robert Wiene and Fritz Lang, lend comparison to the fantastical worlds of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and a favourite of the kids, Edward Scissorhands. As I wrote earlier, we’ll be exploring German Expressionism in the future.

Finally:

• Why was this film embraced by neither audiences nor critics?
• Why is it embraced now?

Next up? Out of the Past.