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The Night Of The Hunter [1955]
![The Night Of The Hunter [1955]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/412J3D2PZML._SL160_.jpg)
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Editorial
Amazon.co.uk Review
In the entire history of American movies, The Night of the Hunter stands out as the rarest and most exotic of specimens. It is, to say the least, a masterpiece--and not just because it was the only movie directed by flamboyant actor Charles Laughton or the only produced solo screenplay by the legendary critic James Agee (who also co-wrote The African Queen). The truth is, nobody has ever made anything approaching its phantasmagoric, overheated style in which German expressionism, religious hysteria, fairy-tale fantasy (of the Grimm-est variety), and stalker movie are brought together in a furious boil. Like a nightmarish premonition of stalker movies to come, Night of the Hunter tells the suspenseful tale of a demented preacher (Robert Mitchum, in a performance that prefigures his memorable villain in Cape Fear), who torments a boy and his little sister--even marries their mixed-up mother (Shelley Winters)--because he's certain the kids know where their late bank-robber father hid a stash of stolen money. So dramatic, primal, and unforgettable are its images--the preacher's shadow looming over the children in their bedroom, the magical boat ride down a river whose banks teem with fantastic wildlife, those tattoos of LOVE and HATE on the unholy man's knuckles, the golden locks of a drowned woman waving in the current along with the indigenous plant life in her watery grave--that they're still haunting audiences (and filmmakers) today. --Jim Emerson, Amazon.com
Deep symbolism under a dark fairy tale thriller
Review date: 2008-05-31 Rating: 10 out of 10
One of the most written and talked about films in history, as it seems to be telling a story in deeply symbolic images. That was its exact intention. I am amazed so many people still appear to take this film literally, as a story about a demented serial killer who will stop at nothing to get his hands on the money left to children by a condemned man he meets in prison. It was made so that it would work well as a conventional thriller, if that's how you want to view it, but Laughton so clearly wants his audience to look far deeper beyond the surface narrative and into the deeper meaning he has put in huge shovel loads just beneath the surface. Why else would a director embue a film with such heavily symbolic images, dreamy fairytale like photography, and that dreamlike music? If it was just to make the point about the children's pure innocence as a contrast to the dark perniciousness of an evil man, then of course it is way overdone and risks swamping the reality of the story. But there is hardly anything intended to be seen as real here, to be taken literally, as this is very plainly a film about the dark role religion plays in people's lives. An unsavoury character without an ounce of goodness in him cons people into taking him into their confidence by simply wearing the costume of a priest - The whole thing is a symbolic attack on the way all religion works: normal people wishing to have power over us and tell us what to do, simply by adopting the authority of the church. And Laughton goes much further than this - He makes this imposter in a dog collar evil incarnate, revealing what he really thinks of the church, any church: that it has a deeply negative, dark and inhumane effect on the lives of people it is purporting to support. The message very loudly, but in rich symbolism, is 'Do not trust any church or any religion, as all they bring is darkness and misery'. The force of pure goodness and our real salvation is represented by those very powerful images of nature, the many woodland animals scurrying around, the helpful river that seems to hold the hunted children in its protective hand, never letting the evil priest get to them, the moon which seems to be keeping its watchful eye on these innocent things. It is Nature that protects and saves these children, and the message is that Nature has always been our true guardian, not any corrupted notion of a god with a set of codes we must adhere to lest we go to hell when we die, as all that has done to man is cause misery and harm. It is a masterpiece of cinematic symbolism, and Laughton felt he didn't need to make another movie after this, as he had said all he had wanted to say in this great picture. It is a man's homage to Nature and to the Truth.
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Reviews
Genuine Magic
Review date: 2008-05-06 Rating: 10 out of 10
A compelling, deeply scary study in good and evil, love and hate, light and dark, truth and lies, innocence and experience, loss and re-discovery. Everything about this - the story, the acting, and look and feel of each scene makes this an elemental, magical fairy tale. The apparent triumph of pure evil, and genuine and total peril that we are powerless to help with. You are desperate to intervene but can't. Great story, great images, and shot with a genuine magic - like a story book come to life, and like a weird, nightmarish dream that you can't and don't want to wake from. There are great, totally unique scenes and images along the way -(I'll just say "Shelly Winters" and when you see the film you'll know exactly what I'm referring to - an extraordinary image that will genuinely haunt you), the journey down river fleeing by boat, brilliant brilliant brilliant. If you have any interest at all in cinema you should see this. This is a genuinely unique piece of work, shot through with Laughton's genius, ready to weedle its way into a little dark recess of your heart and stay there forever.
amazing!
Review date: 2008-01-17 Rating: 10 out of 10
i cannot rate this film high enough, it has all the ingredients of a fantastic film noir and everythin about it is brilliant!!it still terrifys me now even though i know whats going to happen!!!watc it, you'll love it!!
"It doesn't matter. It's me your mother believes"
Review date: 2007-12-22 Rating: 10 out of 10
The story may be simple - two children, John and Pearl, are pursued by the evil 'Preacher' who killed their mother and is after the money their father stole - but there is nothing in cinema to compare to The Night of the Hunter. Both Robert Mitchum's stunning extroverted performance and the film itself were shamelessly plundered by De Niro and Scorsese for their all but inept remake of Cape Fear, but this is the genuine article. A flop in its day and plagued with censorship problems (it was banned outright in Memphis and some of the more stridently Catholic countries), Laughton's perverse fairytale of innocence and evil is far more disturbing and affecting in its subversion than modern shock tactics could ever be.
The pacing and construction are almost akin to a vintage Disney animated feature, and just as primal albeit far more explicit. Disney would never have addressed the dark undercurrents as directly as Laughton, with the traditional safeguards of family, religion and small-town values soundly undermined. Here Mitchum's preacher plays the two children against each other and their mother (the most chilling line in the film is when Mitchum tells the boy "Well, it doesn't matter. It's me your mother believes") while the very forces that bay for his blood at the end are the same that all but forced Shelley Winters' widow and Mitchum's psychopath together.
Here people are to be judged by their actions rather than their apparent position, with the matchless Gish as the Mother Goose with her brood of the waifs and strays of the Depression showing that the forces of good needn't be wishy-washy or wimpishly self-righteous. When she says "I'm a strong tree with branches for many birds. I'm good for something in this old world and I know it," you believe it. Through her generous performance the film radiates a faith in the power of goodness and the endurance of children ("Children are men at their strongest. They abide," notes Gish) that provides a direct link between Laughton's film and D.W. Griffith and ultimately heals the boy's deep wounds.
While Pearl is oblivious to what goes on around her, the boy is clearly seriously scarred by the responsibility of it all (when Gish takes out her Bible, he skulks away, and, in the film's most masterly touch, his reaction to the arrest of Mitchum's preacher is identical to his reaction to the arrest of his father. There are moments in his relationship with Gish as he edges back to trust and innocence that are among the most intensely moving in all cinema.
One of the most sensual films ever made, Night of the Hunter is also surprisingly frank in its sexual analogies. It is made clear that the children's parents' relationship was primarily sexual, with Winters' sexuality, both humiliated and rejected by the Preacher, transformed into a disturbingly blind religious devotion. Like Lucifer, a fallen angel who has made a mockery of the religion he once proposed to serve into something "the Almighty and me worked out betwixt us," to Mitchum's Preacher Powell sexuality is violence, his switchblade bursting through his pocket like an erection.
It's often what happens on the sidelines that sets it so apart: the hangman coming back from executing the children's father to watch his own children, Pearl innocently repeating the hanging song the other children have been taunting them with at the beginning, the comforting singing coming from the nearby farmhouse as the children sleep in the barn only to be awoken by the Preacher's threatening rendition of 'Leaning on the Everlasting Arms' (later reclaimed by Gish) in the distance.
Not nearly enough has been written about Walter Schumann's truly extraordinary score. The nocturnal journey downriver under the watchful gaze of animals benefits enormously from a simple narrative song, while the score's shifting menace, melancholy and warmth both embraces the visual and psychological aspects of the film to perfection. One of the great neglected works of the 50s, it cries out for a recording.
There is a visual mastery here that recalls Griffith at the height of his powers, with a magnificent use of light and shade (when John talks of bad men, he unwittingly summons the menacing shadow of the Preacher on his bedroom wall) and a brilliant use of sets that are at one moment realistic and the next highly stylised, often both within the same shot thanks to Stanley Cortez' remarkable cinematography. Laughton may never have directed another film, but he packed more into this one than most other directors can manage in their entire career.
Sadly, no extras apart from a trailer on the DVD - and even that has had the original captions removed.
Unclassifiable, unforgettable
Review date: 2007-11-22 Rating: 10 out of 10
When I saw this film for the second time ever after I caught it once years previously on television, I found I remembered it almost scene for scene.
It's a very odd film in many ways; highly stylized and quite unlike a fifties film noir. It's visually beautiful, but the characters are also extremely stylized; in an ordinary film you would say they were underdeveloped, but in Night of the Hunter it's more that there's something archetypal about them. This applies above all to the Robert Mitchum and Lilian Gish characters; it's not over the top in this movie to say they are the living, breathing embodiments of the Hate and Love struggle that the Mitchum character acts out so famously early on. There are so many spine-tingling (not to say spine-chilling) moments in the film, but the one I remember above all is the strange moment during the final Good vs Evil confrontation where Gish joins in the singing of Mitchum's sinister hymn and transforms it into something quite different.
There's no other film quite like this. Reviewers who think it's dated or the ending is too sentimental have missed the point, I think. It's a weird parable of a grand struggle between good and evil, set in a beautiful and frightening world of its own
Product Details/Specifications
Actor(s):
Evelyn Varden
Robert Mitchum
Lillian Gish
Shelley Winters
James Gleason
Director(s):
Recording label: MGM Entertainment
Manufacturer: MGM Entertainment
EAN: 5050070005158
Binding: DVD
Number of items: 1
Format: Black & White, Dubbed, Full Screen, PAL,
Release date: 2001-03-19
Number of discs: 1
Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
Audience rating: Suitable for 12 years and over
Region code: 2
Running time: 89 minutes
Theatrical release date: 1956-03-16
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