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Charles in charge
The Night of the Hunter is a one-hit wonder
BY GERALD PEARY

Here’s prime movie trivia: what’s the greatest film ever from a director who made just one? Perhaps I’m overlooking something obvious (e-mail me an alternative), but my vote goes to The Night of the Hunter (1955), which plays at the Brattle January this weekend, January 18-20, in a newly restored 35mm print. This wondrous cinematic tour de force (Martin Scorsese is among its vocal fans) represents the total behind-the-camera œuvre of actor Charles Laughton (1892-1962), the pudgy, versatile star of such abiding screen classics as Les Misérables, Mutiny on the Bounty, and The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

In fact, Laughton did more than brilliantly direct. The gorgeous, fanciful screenplay, which is credited to novelist/critic James Agee, was, according to Agee biographer Laurence Bergreen, almost completely a Laughton rewrite, after the neophyte director became impatient with Agee’s unshaped adaptation of the Davis Grubb novel.

Why only one picture? I actually have a tentative answer to one of the great mysteries of American cinema. I once asked Norman Mailer about the Raoul Walsh–directed adaptation of his novel The Naked and the Dead, an adaptation that Mailer loathed. He told me, "Charles Laughton was to do it, and we spent a week together in New York at Laughton’s St. Moritz Hotel penthouse. He had a great dedication to the novel, and he was coming off . . . The Night of the Hunter, which he thought would do extraordinarily. It didn’t. Laughton was not a young man, and it took everything out of him. He never directed again."

It’s easy to see how the movie bombed the first time: here in the cherry-pie Eisenhower years comes this decadent, ghoulish story of a fruitcake villain, a serial killer of his newlywed wives, who between murders has intimate on-screen talks with God. He thoroughly believes the Lord walks at his side, this bogey-man bogus pastor, Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum), who shivers in disgust at women’s carnality before he cuts female throats. We get to see one tragic courtship from beginning to quick end when he goes after Willa (Shelley Winters), a vulnerable young widow with two kids and some hidden money. He marries her and then quickly sends her to the bottom of a river.

Can a masterly film be campy in places? You’d expect from Mitchum a sleepy-eyed laid-back Satan, not the double-barreled over-the-top Grand Guignol performance that dominates the film. There are moments when his eye-rolling lunatic act feels like a male audition for Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?

But Mitchum’s acting is consistent with Laughton’s stylized conception: from Hollywood in the 1950s comes the most expressionistic film since German Expressionism of the ’20s. Mitchum’s juicy acting is in the showy, expressionist style. Several of the angular, paranoia-inducing sets splotched with triangles of harsh light (the honeymoon/murder locale, for example) might have come right out of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

Laughton collaborated here with one the finest of cinematographers: Stanley Cortez, who was honored for his deep-focus photography in The Magnificent Ambersons. Some of the most famous adult-fairy-tale shots in The Night of the Hunter also are deep-focus — for instance, the poetically pantheistic sequence in which cobwebs, frogs, and shivery rabbits dominate the front of the frames while far off in the background (but in sharp focus) the two diminutive orphaned children (Billy Chapin and Sally Jane Bruce) sail down the river to escape the demented preacher man.

This scene feels likes Disney’s Snow White, when the heroine flees into the forest from the evil queen before she meets her protectors, the Seven Dwarfs. In The Night of the Hunter, the protector is elderly fairy godmother Miss Cooper (Lillian Gish). She takes in lost children who become part of her "coop"; they strut through the streets in a row like the five little Peppers. Gish was, of course, D.W. Griffith’s silent star (The Birth of a Nation, Orphans of the Storm, etc.), and her appearance in The Night of the Hunter is total enchantment. Posited as the antidote to Powell’s devilish religiosity, Miss Cooper is pure Christian charity, and the scene in which she and that minister of hate clash with dueling hymns to God is a thrilling Manichæan battle of wills.

The Night of the Hunter opens with Miss Cooper suspended in the heavens among stars warning of "false prophets who come to you in sheep’s clothing." Lillian in the sky with diamonds! Awesome!

Gerald Peary can be reached at gpeary@world.std.com

Issue Date: January 17 - 24, 2002
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