THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER (1955) Starring: Robert Mitchum, Shelly Winters, Lillian Gish, Billy Chapin, Sally Jane Bruce. Screenplay: James Agee, based on the novel by Davis Grubb. Director: Charles Laughton. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
Because I have been privy to the forty years of screen history which followed it -- particularly the past fifteen or twenty years -- I watched almost 90 minutes of THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER with a combination of technical admiration and vague consternation. The problem was Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum), the sinister minister who drives the narrative. Dressed in a preacher's garb, Harry arrives in a small town to do as he has done many times before: rob a widow of her wealth before robbing her of her life. His target is Willa Harper (Shelly Winters), whose husband shared a jail cell with Harry before his execution for killing two men during a bank robbery. The loot was never recovered, and only Willa's two young children John (Billy Chapin) and Pearl (Sally Jane Bruce) seem to know the whereabouts of the $10,000, though neither one is talking. Spouting scripture and impressing the gullible townsfolk, Harry insinuates himself into the Harper family to begin a greed-driven reign of terror.
You can't blame me for fearing that THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER would turn out to be the prototype for more recent films depicting Christians as either a) homicidal zealots, b) unctuous hypocrites or c) simple-minded buffoons, if not all three. With his "love/hate" finger tattoos and his creepy repetition of a single old spiritual, Harry is a nightmare vision of perverted religiosity.
But THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER takes a surprising turn late in the film. Pursued relentlessly down the river by Harry, John and Pearl come into the care of an elderly woman named Rachel (Lillian Gish) who has taken to caring for orphans. In a moment of chillingly perfect clarity, Harry hovers menacingly at the garden gate, crooning that same solitary spiritual: "Leaning, leaning, leaning on the everlasting arm." Rachel recognizes the tune and begins to sing along, at which point it becomes clear that Harry is omitting a fairly significant word from his version. The word is "Jesus."
THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER has earned much of its praise over the years for director Charles Laughton's stark visual style, praise it certainly deserves. Some of Laughton's compositions are remarkably assured for a first-time (and, sadly, only-time) film-maker, haunting images of Harry as a dark horseman on the horizon, and of a dead woman's hair streaming underwater. There are also unexpected flashes of wicked humor, including a woman's can't-believe-they-said-it-in-1955 reference to her sex life as "ly(ing) back and thinking of my canning."
It is the canny set-up of Harry and Rachel as the "love" and "hate" on Harry's fingers, however, which will linger longest in my memory. Many conservative critics have railed against the movies as a haven for Christian-bashing, charges which only bear the whiff of truth because the films criticized don't do what THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER does. Harry Powell may be a horrible human being, but he's not horrible because he's a Christian. Screenwriter James Agee makes Harry's fire-and-brimstone faith a pathology justifying his selfishness and misogyny; Rachel interprets her faith as a call to selflessness and defense of the defenseless. The narrative depth and cinematic richness of THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER both end up coming from the same place: a juxtaposition of light and dark which can be as satisfying and inspirational as it is bleak and disturbing.
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