300. Night Of the Hunter (1955)
Directed by Charles Laughton
Synopsis
A father running away from the cops hides $10.000 in cash and tells his children never to tell anyone. While waiting for the death penalty in jail he shares a cell with a serial killer preacher who when he leaves jail gets married to his wife. In his relentless search for the hidden money he kills his new wife and chases the children around the countryside.
Review
I remember watching this film quite a long time ago, alone, at night, in my room. And I was freaked. Not quite so freaked now, but I think I am able to appreciate the film better, particularly in the context of 1955. It's a weird film. The weirdest since Kiss Me Deadly.
Robert Mitchum plays the part of his career here as a serial killer preacher, a theme that has been taken up many times later. Oh he also has love/hate tattoos in his hands... a theme which has been repeated to exhaustion. The film is strange for several reasons, firstly it is hard to categorise... is it a film noir? A morality play? A horror film? A children film? Maybe it is all of those things at the same time, and surprisingly it really works.
The soundtrack is one of the greatest things in the film, with a couple of great songs put to great use. The filming is slightly strange with a lot of animals being filmed for some reason, again it works. Then there is an exploration of Biblical hermeneutics with two characters showing opposed views of Bible interpretation... again it works. Then Laughton had a clear love for German expressionism and old films, the scene of the wife's murder is a perfect example of an expressionist tribute with weird shapes and shadows. He even gets Lilian Gish to come out of retirement to play the foil to Mitchum... we hadn't seen Gish on this list since 1920! It is a true pity that Laughton did not direct anything else, as this was something promising indeed... but like most visionaries their work doesn't get the recognition it deserves in its own time...
Final Grade
9/10
Trivia
From Wikipedia:
The film's music, composed and arranged by Walter Schumann in close association with Laughton, features a combination of nostalgic and expressionistic orchestral passages. The film also includes two original songs by Schumann, "Lullaby" (sung by Kitty White, whom Schumann personally discovered in a nightclub) and the haunting "Pretty Fly" (originally sung by Sally Jane Bruce as Pearl, but later dubbed by an actress named Betty Benson). A recurring musical device involves the preacher making his presence known by singing the traditional hymn "Leaning on the Everlasting Arms". Mitchum also recorded the soundtrack version of the hymn.
In 1974, film archivist Robert Gitt Anthony Slide retrieved several boxes of photographs, sketches, memos and letters relating to the film from Laughton's widow Elsa Lanchester for the American Film Institute. She also gave the Institute over 80,000 feet of rushes and outtakes from the filming. In 1981, this material was sent to the UCLA Film and Television Archive where, for the next 20 years, they were edited into a two-and-half hour documentary that premiered in 2002, at UCLA's Festival of Preservation.
Some of the beautiful weirdness in this scene:
Synopsis
A father running away from the cops hides $10.000 in cash and tells his children never to tell anyone. While waiting for the death penalty in jail he shares a cell with a serial killer preacher who when he leaves jail gets married to his wife. In his relentless search for the hidden money he kills his new wife and chases the children around the countryside.
Review
I remember watching this film quite a long time ago, alone, at night, in my room. And I was freaked. Not quite so freaked now, but I think I am able to appreciate the film better, particularly in the context of 1955. It's a weird film. The weirdest since Kiss Me Deadly.
Robert Mitchum plays the part of his career here as a serial killer preacher, a theme that has been taken up many times later. Oh he also has love/hate tattoos in his hands... a theme which has been repeated to exhaustion. The film is strange for several reasons, firstly it is hard to categorise... is it a film noir? A morality play? A horror film? A children film? Maybe it is all of those things at the same time, and surprisingly it really works.
The soundtrack is one of the greatest things in the film, with a couple of great songs put to great use. The filming is slightly strange with a lot of animals being filmed for some reason, again it works. Then there is an exploration of Biblical hermeneutics with two characters showing opposed views of Bible interpretation... again it works. Then Laughton had a clear love for German expressionism and old films, the scene of the wife's murder is a perfect example of an expressionist tribute with weird shapes and shadows. He even gets Lilian Gish to come out of retirement to play the foil to Mitchum... we hadn't seen Gish on this list since 1920! It is a true pity that Laughton did not direct anything else, as this was something promising indeed... but like most visionaries their work doesn't get the recognition it deserves in its own time...
Final Grade
9/10
Trivia
From Wikipedia:
The film's music, composed and arranged by Walter Schumann in close association with Laughton, features a combination of nostalgic and expressionistic orchestral passages. The film also includes two original songs by Schumann, "Lullaby" (sung by Kitty White, whom Schumann personally discovered in a nightclub) and the haunting "Pretty Fly" (originally sung by Sally Jane Bruce as Pearl, but later dubbed by an actress named Betty Benson). A recurring musical device involves the preacher making his presence known by singing the traditional hymn "Leaning on the Everlasting Arms". Mitchum also recorded the soundtrack version of the hymn.
In 1974, film archivist Robert Gitt Anthony Slide retrieved several boxes of photographs, sketches, memos and letters relating to the film from Laughton's widow Elsa Lanchester for the American Film Institute. She also gave the Institute over 80,000 feet of rushes and outtakes from the filming. In 1981, this material was sent to the UCLA Film and Television Archive where, for the next 20 years, they were edited into a two-and-half hour documentary that premiered in 2002, at UCLA's Festival of Preservation.
Some of the beautiful weirdness in this scene:
posted by Francisco Silva @ 12:51 AM
1 Comments:
At 2:50 PM,
Gloria said…
Maybe the greatest thing about "the Night of the Hunter" is how it skillfully avoids to get tagged... Noir film, horror film or literary film purists just get mad at how the film never exactly falls within any of their little boxes.
And Laughton wanted to direct more... but with the financial failure of Hunter, poor Charles just couldn't afford it: A few years later Peter Ustinov found Laughton as a bit too sensible a fellow when shooting Spartacus... But then... how could the director of "Romanoff and Juliet" grasp the intense pain that the creator of "The Night of the Hunter" felt about teh failure of one of his most cherished works?
Laughton intended to direct an adaptation of Thomas Wolfe's "You Can't Go Home Again" (he was a great admirer of the works of that writer), but "hunter" producer Paul Gregory got the rights for Norman Mailer's "The naked and the dead". Script work for it was quite advanced when the axe of Hunter's faikure fell over Laughton, and he and Gregory parted ways. Gregory took the book rights for adaptation with him, and teh film was finally directed by Raoul Walsh
(There's more talk about it at my blog if you're curious)
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