In Profile: Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter (1955)

Ahead of a Matinee Classics Season screening of the thriller, George Jepson looks again at Laughton’s timeless, “fairytale” reinvention of film noir…

From its birth as a commercial and critical embarrassment, to its position as Cahiers du Cinema’s 2nd greatest film in history and its preservation in the U.S National Film Registry, Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter (1955) has existed as a uniquely, fantastically bizarre piece of work. It is almost untouchable in its ability to simultaneously frighten and confuse.

Laughton’s single directorial effort is a twisted amalgam of Southern Gothic, a terrifying fairy-tale and vaudevillian slapstick comedy. Once marred by this pastiche approach, The Night of the Hunter has rightfully become recognised as a masterpiece; critic Robert Benayoun praising Laughton’s ability to “make only one film, but to make it a work of genius”.

As Film Noir proper was coming to the end of its golden years (approximately from 1940-1958), Laughton’s film contorted its mores so far that it is, even now, debated how far The Night of the Hunter truly fits into the admittedly slippery model of noir. Its narrative, however, seems to correspond most truly with the mould. Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum) is a convict and self-ordained preacher who, after meeting Ben Harper (Peter Graves) – a one time thief and murderer — in prison, decides to track down his ex-cellmate’s family in a bid to find and steal the money Harper stole to save them: wife Willa (Shelley Winters) and children John and Pearl (Billy Chapin and Sally Jane Bruce, respectively). Noir, if by anything, is defined by this collusion of money with murder in a mode of capitalist critique.

“The art direction, deliberately shot entirely on studio sets, creates a visual landscape that is somehow separate from the world; lending the film a nightmarish and otherworldly tone”

Most arresting is the film’s distinct visual aesthetic. Somewhere inbetween Depression era-drama, James Agee’s script (tonally concurrent with his portrait of Alabama sharecroppers Let us Now Praise Famous Men) and German Expressionism cinematographer Stanley Cortez creates an ephemeral dreamscape. The art direction, deliberately shot entirely on studio sets, creates a visual landscape that is somehow separate from the world; lending the film a nightmarish and otherworldly tone.

This allows Laughton to create two distinct tonal worlds within the film: a world of dreams and a world of nightmares. This dichotomy is best seen in the children’s escape from Powell after he has discovered that they are in possession of their father’s stolen money.

The Night of the Hunter (1955)

Escaping in a 10-foot paddleboat, the children float gracefully down the Ohio river; the banks populated by varying woodland animals. While sleeping in their boat, it is as if God’s creatures protect them, in a dream world that Powell cannot enter. Coupled with the biblical image of Moses travelling down river to safety, the tender beauty of Pearl’s childlike lullaby is a prayer which keeps Powell away. Walter Schumann’s score is at its most haunting here: Powell’s horseback pursuit accompanied by a short, aggressive orchestral piece while Pearl and John’s gradual approach to land is mimicked by a maternal lullaby imploring them to “Dream, little ones, dream.”

“By removing all other diegetic sound, the preacher’s haunting, mocking lament to his God overwhelms all else as, in the world of nightmare, evil is not simply tangible but inevitable”

This safety, however, is shattered when the children go ashore. While they hide in a barn, Powell appears to John on horseback, silhouetted on the horizon. His darkness contrasted with the luminous sky makes his form seem ghostly; an apparition of evil as opposed to anything human. It is too no accident that as Powell enters the frame, and Pearl’s Little Fly song had ended, he is bellowing a hymn. His rendition of Leaning on the Everlasting Arms sounds to John and Pearl as if, despite his distance, that he is mere feet away. By removing all other diegetic sound, the preacher’s haunting, mocking lament to his God overwhelms all else as, in the world of nightmare, evil is not simply tangible but inevitable.

Enabling this corruption is Mitchum’s performance as Powell. Powerfully sinister, Laughton uses Mitchum’s distinctive charisma to create layers within the preacher. On the surface, he appears to believe wholly in his own devotion to God, but lurking just under the skin is a dichotomous lust for wealth which knows no morality. This led critic Simon Callow to question whether or not we truly believe in Powell’s affinity to God. Is it not simply a façade under which he allows himself to be morally defunct?

Mitchum’s star persona too inevitably brings an element of the lackadaisical: as an actor he was known for his belief in the acting profession as less than serious (when asked about his craft he said: “I have two acting styles: with and without a horse”). This is where the vaudevillian slapstick enters, as the actor’s expressive face cannot appear at all times to be sinister: especially when moaning after being hit on the head by a shelf, or falling theatrically into the dirt while chasing frightened children around. These are scenes straight from Chaplin or Keaton, but given the children are attempting to escape murder, the stakes seem slightly more serious. This is Laughton professing Wittgenstein’s view that the most serious, most sinister, facets of life can only be truly addressed through jokes.

The Night of the Hunter then is most effective when its verisimilitude is at its loosest. Despite being an adaptation of Davis Grubb’s 1953 novel, a text painful in its collusion with the bleakness of the Depression-ridden Mid-West, Laughton’s strongest hand is the fantastical one. By being an almost modernist reinvention of the tropes of ’50s noir (complete with the chiaroscuro of Lang and Murnau) while adding slapstick comedic elements, all under a blanket of a fairy-tale or religious parable, the film is without a time. By existing in a fantasy world the film thus frightens, from a distance. This may go a way in explaining why its cultural importance only came to be recognised after the fact, some 20 years later.

George Jepson

Catch Night Of The Hunter at Cornerhouse, Manchester this Sunday 8 June 2014, 12 noon, or on Wednesday 11 June, 1.30pm (including a post screening discussion led by Maggie Hoffgen) — tickets £6/4.50. As part of their Matinee Classics Season

Read Adam Scovell’s take on the film from 2012 here 

See all of Cahiers du cinéma’s 100 Greatest Films here

Posted on 04/06/2014 by thedoublenegative