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Usually, horror film fans and movie critics have few movies they can both laud...one exception is a little film directed by an actor that concerns kids, stolen money, and a psycho preacher...a combo that adds up to...
1955 was not a banner year for horror films. In fact, few would argue that the entire decade was a period of drought for any film that could stand toe to toe with the classic genre pieces of the Thirties and Forties. Oh, there were ample numbers of giant bugs, rubber-suited creatures, and various acne-ridden offspring of the mythic figures created at Universal Studios. There were plenty of good, scary films of course, but these almost always fell squarely into the "science fiction" category (even thought the science involved was specious at best); one need only call to mind titles as dissimilar as Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, The Fly, War Of The Worlds, or 20 Million Miles To Earth to remind oneself of movies that carried a surfeit of chills. But alas, they are science fiction all, following
to varying degrees the Descending from there, the domestic product was hardly something that anyone over the mental age of three could conceive of as being unsettling at a deep, psychological level (has anyone really--really-- been scared by Bride Of The Gorilla, The Screaming Skull, The Manster, or Curse Of The Aztec Mummy, let alone want to see any of them again and again, except possibly to wet oneself with laughter?) The one film from the fifties that remains the apotheosis of pure horror, that in fact redefines the genre while transcending it entirely while at the same time opening itself to appreciation from the standpoint of symbolism, myth, and film history as a whole is actor Charles Laughton's masterpiece (and the only film he ever directed) The Night Of The Hunter. The movie has the look of no other American movie of the period and today, forty-five years after its creation still has the power to move, thrill, and scare audiences. Baldly put, the story sounds schematic and hackneyed: In West Virginia during the Depression, Preacher Harry Powell, a misogynist psychopath, travels around river towns killing women sometimes for their money and sometimes for just being women. (He has the words "Love" and "Hate" tattooed on his fingers to conduct puppet shows of the eternal struggle between the two.) While in prison, he learns that his cell mate Ben Harper, condemned to hang for murder and robbery, has hidden a large cache of money on or near his home. Having served his time and after the execution of Harper, Powell insinuates himself into the affections of Willa, Harper's widow, in the hopes of laying hands on the money.
Willa's two children, John and Pearl, also become the targets of Powell's quest. When he learns that Willa has overheard him interrogating her children about the cash, Powell kills her and then sets about to terrorize John and Pearl into divulging the whereabouts of the loot. They flee his murderous rage and, because nobody believes that Powell is a monster (or is able to do anything meaningful to protect the children) they take to the river as a means of escape. Rachel Copper, a seemingly frail widow who takes in orphans, rescues them from their terror. Single-handedly, she brings Powell down. John and Pearl remain with Rachel and the other orphans.
It is how Laughton made the film look and the actors with whom he populated his story that causes it to be so memorable and downright scary. There can be little doubt about what attracted him to this material. Laughton's career is dotted with roles that allowed him to play the crazed, the obsessed, the murderous, and the deformed. Preacher Harry Powell must have been a role after his heart. Too old (and not the type) to play it himself, he secured the services of Robert Mitchum. Mitchum was able to bring seductiveness and sexuality to the part. It is small wonder that Willa falls for him. Shelly Winters, cast against type here, brings a yearning vulnerability to her role. Because she is a central character in the early part of the film, her death is a shock, knocking the security out from beneath her children as they fall directly into Powell's clutches (and unsettling the audience who had begun to identify with her as a central character--this, five years before Hitchcock killed off Janet Leigh early on in Psycho).
On hand in the first half of the film is James Gleason as Uncle Birdie an old riverboat captain who is the one friend of the children and the only adult to realize that there is something not right about the preacher. Since Gleason had made a career out of playing tough cops, street-wise mugs, and reliable pals, one naturally expects him to be a security net for the children. But the script undercuts this too; with Powell, knife in hand and bent on eviscerating the kids, Birdie is dead drunk when they go to him for help--another switch on audience expectations. So there is the set-up. Two children under ten at the mercy of a murderous psychopath and fleeing into the darkness, knowing that if they are caught they will be killed and nobody can help them. The narrative crunch is unbearable and during a lengthy scene of flight, it becomes evident that the preacher will not rest until he gets what he wants. And here is where Laughton scored his greatest casting coup. To play the role of Rachel Cooper, he lured Lillian Gish out of retirement. Gish, who herself was a recapitulation of film history, had always playing parts of women who, though small and frail, were tough and the embodiment of goodness.
Except for a brief appearance after the opening credits, Rachel does not appear until the film is two-thirds over, when the children are filthy, terrified and bereft of hope. As assayed by Gish, Rachel quickly takes over the film, dispelling the horror and using only her personal strength and her belief in a healthy religiosity (as opposed to Powell's perverted interpretation of religion) to not only protect John and Pearl but also to shoot the madman and see that he is apprehended, tried and hung.
To make the look of the movie match the performances, Laughton made a study of film styles and came up with a melding of expressionism and realism that blended to create a feeling of oppression and terror that has never been quite matched (although David Lynch tried the same sort of approach in Blue Velvet, with varying results). Thus, the parts of the movie dominated by Powell are grim and angular, full of darkness and fog. When the children first encounter Powell, it is via his shadow thrown across their bedroom wall; one is reminded of the vampire's shadow falling over Mina in F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu. When Powell slashes Willa's throat it is in a set that looks like a travesty of a church, full of sharp angles and painted shadows; one thinks inevitably of any number of scenes from The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari. Scenes of the town by day and the passages involving Rachel are shot in the realistic manner of D. W. Griffith: sturdy, well lit, and prosaic. The expressionist passages are so scary that one finds oneself positively reveling in the reassuring natural ones.
The film was a critical and financial disaster for all concerned. The marketing tactic suggested a lewd, Southern romance along the lines of Erskine Caldwell or Tennessee Williams at his most onanistic. If this ploy attracted an audience, it drew in the wrong one. Critics were baffled by what they considered an uneven tone of the film. Horror fans, apparently, scarcely saw the film at all. Released during the heyday of color and Vistavision, the black and white, classic screen ratio seemed outdated. Laughton never directed another film again and his personal decline began. The movie vanished from sight. I first saw The Night Of The Hunter on TV, cut up for advertisements and shorn of scenes that could not be shoehorned into a 90-minute slot. Even in its emasculated form, the film has a hypnotic power to scare; not by visceral shocks but rather by inference. To this very day when I watch this movie, as Harry Powell is seen loitering outside the Harper home and begins to sing the old hymn "Leaning," the hairs stand up on my arms.
When Rachel, alone and in the dark, confronts Powell armed with nothing but her shotgun and her belief in the goodness of God, my eyes fill with tears. The catharsis that comes at the end of the movie is worth every other scary movie made in the The Night Of The Hunter. Viewing The Night Of The Hunter makes everyone remember all the preachers who have terrorized them in the dark and to wish that we all had more Rachels to save us from our fear. Thanks, Gene, for giving Mr. Laughton's scary fairy tale a little of the recognition it deserves. After all these years, the film still has the ability to frighten and to charm...it is most definitely a film not to be missed. Article copyright © Gene Dorsogna |
strictures of that
genre as demanded by the taste of the times. In the realm of pure horror, the pickings, as
the saying goes, were incredibly slim. Even the colorful and lively pastiches of better
films emanating from Hammer Studios always had a workmanlike, assembly-line quality to
them; besides they always relied on gore rather than art to push them across.
