The Night of the Hunter: Laughton's Only Film, and a Miracle

Charles Laughton directed one film in his life, The Night of the Hunter, it lost money and got mixed reviews, and he never directed another. This is one of the cruellest facts in film history, because the film he made is among the most beautiful and terrifying ever produced in America, a crime story told as a Grimm fairy tale, and the industry’s failure to see it in 1955 cost us every film Laughton might have gone on to make. He died eight years later having proven, once, that he was one of the great visual directors, and then having been talked out of ever doing it again.

Time settled the account. The film now sits on every serious list of American cinema, its images quoted by directors who were not born when it flopped. It is a revisit that rearranges how you think a crime film can look.

A preacher, two children, and a hidden fortune

The story, from Davis Grubb’s novel, is deceptively simple. Harry Powell is a travelling preacher and a serial killer of widows, a man who reads God’s will off the tattoos on his own knuckles — LOVE on one hand, HATE on the other. In prison for a minor offence he shares a cell with a condemned man, Ben Harper, who robbed a bank and hid the ten thousand dollars before his arrest, telling only his two young children where it is. Powell learns the money exists, gets out, and comes to the widow Willa Harper’s Depression-era West Virginia town wearing his collar and his charm, intent on marrying the mother and prising the location out of the children.

Everything that follows is a pursuit. The boy, John, has sworn to his father to protect his little sister Pearl and never tell where the money is, and Powell is a patient, smiling predator who will not stop. What lifts this above a simple thriller is Laughton’s decision to tell it entirely from the children’s point of view, so the film becomes a nightmare in which the adult world offers no protection and a monster in a good hat walks the roads singing hymns. It is one of the few crime films that genuinely feels like a bad dream a child would have.

Mitchum’s preacher is the great screen villain

Robert Mitchum played many things across a long career, and Harry Powell is the deepest well he ever drew from. His preacher is seductive, theatrical, and completely without a floor — a man who has convinced himself that his appetites are instructions from God, so that the murders come wrapped in a velvet baritone and a wounded, righteous self-pity. Mitchum plays him with a showman’s relish and a snake’s stillness, and the famous knuckle tattoos become a whole theology when Powell performs the story of the eternal fight between LOVE and HATE with his own interlaced fingers, a sermon so charismatic that you understand exactly how a lonely widow would fall for it.

The performance is a study in how a great actor can make evil charming without ever making it sympathetic. You are never tempted to side with Powell, and you are never able to look away from him either. It is the flip side of the tenderness Mitchum could summon elsewhere; nearly two decades later he would play a small, tired Boston crook with such worn-down humanity in The Friends of Eddie Coyle that the two performances together mark out the whole range of what the man could do. The preacher and the informer, the predator and the prey, both played from the same deep quiet.

Why it works: a crime film shot like a silent nightmare

Laughton and his cinematographer Stanley Cortez built the film out of German Expressionism, American folk art and the silent cinema Laughton adored, and the seams show gloriously. Powell on horseback appears on the horizon as a black paper cut-out against a false, luminous sky. The children’s night-time river journey downstream, drifting past cobwebs and frogs and owls in the foreground while the camera watches from the reeds, is staged like a woodcut come to life, storybook and menacing at once. Interiors are lit into hard triangles of black and white that owe everything to the silent horror of the 1920s.

The single most famous image — a body underwater, hair streaming like river weed in the current — is one of the most beautiful shots in all of cinema, and Laughton achieves it with such calm that the beauty becomes the horror. This is the film’s governing method. It makes dread lovely, so that you cannot defend yourself against it by flinching; the nightmare arrives dressed as a lullaby. The score by Walter Schumann leans on hymns and children’s songs to the same end, sweetness weaponised.

Laughton’s other masterstroke was structural: the arrival, late in the film, of Lillian Gish as Rachel Cooper, the old woman who takes in stray children and stands, shotgun across her lap, as the only adult in the picture who can face Powell down. Gish, herself a monument of silent cinema, brings the fairy tale its good witch, and the long night-time stand-off between her hymn-singing and Powell’s — the two of them harmonising across a dark porch, predator and protector singing the same tune — is the emotional summit of the film. It works because Laughton has spent an hour teaching us that no grown-up will help, and then produces one who will.

The film’s long afterlife

The Night of the Hunter was a commercial failure in 1955, and its reputation was rebuilt slowly by critics and filmmakers over the following decades until it became untouchable. Its DNA is everywhere. The hunter who cannot be stopped, the child who sees the truth adults refuse to, the fairy-tale logic laid over real violence — you can feel it in horror and in crime alike. The film sits at an angle to the standard noir of its day; where the doom of Out of the Past or the perfect machinery of Double Indemnity belongs to the adult world of desire and money, Laughton relocated the same fatalism into a child’s cosmology of monsters and rescuers, and in doing so made something no other American crime film of the period resembles.

The lineage runs forward into every later film about a monstrous man who wears righteousness as a mask, and into the whole tradition of the serial-hunter thriller. Its shadow reaches films as different as The Silence of the Lambs, which shares its interest in a predator whose intelligence is seductive, and countless later pictures that learned from Laughton how to make evil quotable.

Where to watch

The Criterion Collection edition is definitive, and it carries an extraordinary bonus: hours of Laughton’s surviving rushes and outtakes, which let you watch one of the great directors actually directing, coaxing performances take by take. Seeing the footage of the film he never got to make more of is heartbreaking and thrilling in equal measure. Watch the film first, then the outtakes, and mourn.

Spoilers below

The film’s shape is a two-movement structure, and the hinge is the murder of Willa. Powell marries her, cannot get the money’s location from her because she does not know it — only the children do — and when she overhears enough to realise what he truly is, he kills her and sinks her in the family car at the bottom of the river. That underwater shot of Willa, seated upright in the submerged Model T with her hair moving in the current and her throat cut, is the image the whole film is remembered by, and it arrives at roughly the midpoint, converting the story from a tale of a menaced marriage into a straight pursuit of two children.

From there the children flee downriver, and the film’s second movement belongs to Rachel Cooper. The climax is the night Powell tracks the children to her farm and the two adults hold their singing vigil across the dark, Gish answering his hymn with her own until dawn, when she wounds him and he is taken. Laughton then does something startlingly bitter and true: John, the boy who spent the whole film guarding the secret of the money, breaks down at the sight of Powell being arrested, because the handcuffed preacher in the yard triggers the memory of his own father being taken the same way. The trauma has fused the murderer and the murdered father into one image of male authority destroyed, and the child cannot tell his rescue from his loss. It is a psychological insight far ahead of its year.

The money, incidentally, has been hidden all along inside Pearl’s little cloth doll, which she has carried through every scene — the fortune men have killed for tucked into a child’s toy, ignored by everyone because it was in plain sight. Grubb’s novel and Laughton’s film share that fairy-tale symmetry, and it lands the theme cleanly: the adults chase the treasure and the children simply hold it, never knowing its power, protected by their own innocence of what it means.

For more Mitchum at the opposite pole of this performance, The Friends of Eddie Coyle is essential; for another monster whose charm is his weapon, Sweet Smell of Success trades the preacher’s hymns for a gossip columnist’s poison.