I have been looking for an excuse tho watch Night of the Hunter for a while now. It’s got a great reputation, and who hasn’t heard about the criminal with the words “LOVE” and “HATE” tattooed on his knuckles? But there are a lot of movies I’ve always wanted to see and just need an excuse to get to.
But then I found it was included with Amazon Prime. Well, that seems to be enough of an excuse, and if I needed an excuse, well, now I have one.
Night of the Hunter is a bit of an odd duck. Everyone remembers Robert Mitchum’s turn as Reverend Harry Powell, a criminal who hides his activities under the cover of being a holy man of God. It’s a fantastic performance, alternately frightening and charismatic. It’s easy to see how people could fall for his act, even as he outright tells the audience how much he wants to punish sinful women.
What women are sinful? In his mind, all of them obviously.
Powell’s technique is to marry widows and then murder them for their money. In the beginning of the movie, he’s arrested and sentenced for a month in prison for driving a stolen car. The fact that’s arrested in a burlesque hall, watching a woman doing a strip tease, all while wearing his reverend’s collar, tells you as much as you need to know about how much of a hypocrite is actually is. The fact that he’s also the only man in the crowd sitting up straight and without his face hidden in shadows further highlights how much he sticks out from most people in this story.
That can be credited to the director, Charles Laughton. Laughton is known better as a actor today (if anything), but he directed one and only one movie, and this is it. True, he did direct a number of stage shows, but seeing his one and only movie, the way lighting and shadow works, the outright artistic looks at things ranging from a woman’s underwater corpse to just the shots of nature as two children drift down a river, looking for a way to escape Powell.
And everything about this movie is just fantastic. Powell, with his love and hate sermon, makes an impression as a believable man of God, but he doesn’t seem out of place constantly following two young children in the form of John and Pearl Harper. Their father (Peter Graves) was a criminal who hid $10,000 from the police just before his arrest. He swore the two, particularly son John (Billy Chapin), the older and more responsible child. John and Pearl both swear to tell no one, not even their mother Willa (Shelley Winters), but Graves’s Ben Harper tends to talk in his sleep, and Powell is his cellmate. Powell hears there’s money, Ben is executed, and Powell, on release, goes on to romance a lonely widow who needs help raising two kids.
And that’s how the movie starts off, going from there, and as much as Mitchum is fantastic in this movie, there are no bad performances. Winters goes from a weary widow to one who, thanks to her new husband’s demands about piety and sex (and why she shouldn’t want it), looks the other way as Powell’s behavior with her kids get more and more extreme. The child actors also give good performances, and Lillian Gish, showing up late in the movie as a genuinely pious woman who takes in lost children and raises them as her own, showcases good acting all around.
Additionally, Gish’s character Rachel Cooper, illustrates the nature of a true follower of the Christian faith. Stern but loving, she may issue a threat here and there to keep her kids in line, but it quickly becomes apparent that she won’t actually lay a hand on anyone, mostly because she doesn’t have to. She makes the perfect foil for Powell, and she is the first to see through his act and react accordingly.
But really, this is Mitchum’s show. He comes across as a Bible-quoting Terminator, someone who won’t quit until he’s finally stopped, picking up followers along the way and never stopping. The script respects him, and the children can only run from him. He’s clearly smarter and stronger than they are, and only dumb luck and quick thinking helps the pair get away from him at all. It makes for a more frightening villain whose ultimate downfall is earned when he bites off more than he can chew.
Really, this was the sort of movie I watched thinking I should have checked it out years ago, and I’m glad I have now.
Grade: A
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