Charles Laughton (1955)

The only film directed by Laughton and a film like no other.  Adapted by James Agee, with Laughton, from the novel by Davis Grubb (which appeared in the same year), The Night of the Hunter is set in, and describes the culture of, a specific time and place – Charlsburg, West Virginia during the Great Depression[1].  Yet the psychic landscape of childhood that the picture inhabits and reflects is far larger:  it resonates with anyone raised on Bible stories and fairy tales.   Harry Powell is a self-ordained preacher who insinuates himself into the family of a widow, Willa Harper.  Briefly in jail for stealing a car, he shared a cell with Willa’s husband Ben, who was awaiting execution for his part in a robbery in which two men were killed.  Harry tries to find out from Ben what happened to the money that he stole.  Ben won’t tell but, the night before he hangs, he mutters in his dreams ‘And a little child shall lead them …’

The story is anchored by a simple Christian sensibility but the Biblical patterning in the material is complex.  Harry has ‘hate’ tattooed on the fingers of his left hand and ‘love’ on those of his right; the hateful and loving aspects of Christianity are embodied by, respectively, Harry and a woman called Rachel Cooper.  Harry’s religion is fake:  he is one of the ‘false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravening wolves’, against whom Rachel warns when, at the start of the film, she begins to tell the story (‘Now listen, children …’)  Harry also represents the censorious, harshly puritanical aspect of Christianity.  Rachel, whose rural home is a sanctuary for variously lost children, embodies the practical altruism of Protestantism.  One of the most charged moments in The Night of the Hunter is when Rachel sits through the night in her rocking chair, gun at the ready, guarding her flock; outside the window lurks Harry. He sings ‘Leaning (On the Everlasting Arms)’ – his chilling signature tune – and Rachel competes with a cheerful, fearless counterpoint.

Harry’s hatred of women, as sexual temptresses, is pathological but the story itself is infused with a different strain of Christian misogyny.  Except for Rachel, it characterises females of all ages as easily tempted – daughters of Eve in that sense rather than as sources of temptation. When Ben Harper makes his children John and Pearl promise they’ll never tell anyone where he’s hidden the stolen money, Pearl’s unconvinced shake of the head immediately indicates that she’s more likely to give away the secret.  The loose cannon in Rachel’s household is Ruby, a teenager with a low IQ but a well-developed capacity for being led astray.  (When Ruby wanders into Charlsburg, she’s drawn both to adolescent boys who exploit her and – a witty touch – the movie magazines on the news-vendor’s stand.)  It’s the women of the community – the uncertain, submissive Willa, the confidently self-righteous Icey Spoon, who runs the local ice-cream parlour with her mild, hen-pecked husband Walt – who are seduced by Harry Powell’s physical magnetism and honeyed words.    When, in the final sequence, John presents Rachel with a Christmas present of an apple, she describes it as ‘the richest gift’ anyone could receive.  The apple is also a reminder that John, in the course of the film, has consumed more than his fair share of the knowledge of good and evil.

After Harry Powell has killed their mother, John and Pearl keep trying to escape his clutches and he keeps coming back.  His nightmarish persistence and the children’s oneiric nocturnal journey down the Ohio River work together to give the story the quality of a dream.  Laughton manages to make the point that he is creating a dreamscape at the same time that he has us experience it.  The small rowing boat drifting on the dark, deep water simply but strongly visualises the relationship between conscious and unconscious.  The frightening sequence in which the children face Harry in the unlit cellar – and John manages to lock him in down there – has a similar effect.  Both sequences are completely involving on an emotional level as well as immediately understandable on a symbolic one.   That weird man who seems to live at BFI was in the NFT2 audience and, when Rachel confronted Harry with her rifle, he called out, ‘Shoot the bastard!’  Although that reaction might at one level seem to miss the point, it’s very right at another.  Because Harry is so impossible to get rid of, you become desperate for him to be erased.

There’s a slight loss of momentum after Harry’s trial, when the mob of good Christian people turn on him with the shrill Icey Spoon in the vanguard:  their vengeful change of heart is too obvious to be very startling.  But I felt a greater sense of anti-climax – and alarm – when the Charlsburg hangman, who’d expressed misgivings about his job after executing Ben Harper, announced, ‘This time it’ll be a pleasure’ – and we didn’t get to share the pleasure of seeing Harry Powell’s execution.  I wanted proof that the wicked menace had been extinguished.  (The film induces urgently primitive feelings:  shoot the bastard, lynch the bastard – anything to stamp him out!)  But Charles Laughton’s discretion at this point is right.  There would have been no point showing Harry’s death because he would still live on in the mind – and in the Harper children’s bad dreams.

The music by Walter Schumann is among the most memorable film scores in my experience.  (The frightening chords which introduce Harry seem to foreshadow a phrase in the music for The Godfather part II.)  It includes two songs – the affecting ‘Pretty Fly’ (originally sung by the child who plays Pearl but obviously dubbed by an older voice in the final version) and the beautiful, mysterious ‘Lullaby’, sung by Kitty White and which is used both at the start of the picture and during the children’s night-time journey down the river.  (According to Wikipedia, Kitty White just died last month at the age of eighty-six.)   Even I can see that the lighting and angles of Stanley Cortez’s black-and-white photography are influenced by German expressionist cinema but to label it in that way is somehow reductive:  perhaps because the locations and the subject matter here are so different from those I associate with German expressionism, the look of The Night of the Hunter has the power of the unexpected.    There are so many extraordinary images – like the body of the murdered Willa floating under the river (Ophelia behind the wheel of a Model T Ford) or Rachel leading the children away from the mob baying for Harry’s blood, which is like a storybook illustration come to life – a moving picture in every sense.

The actors, in order for their performances to be completely successful in this battle of the forces of light and darkness, need to be convincing as people and as archetypes.  Both the children – Billy Chapin as John and Sally Jane Bruce as Pearl – manage to do this but, of the three main adult performers, I think that only Lillian Gish as Rachel Cooper is wholly satisfying.  Her career in silent cinema perhaps gives her a head start on the archetypal side.  The associations she carries with her from that era certainly mean that Gish connotes a venerable tradition of film storytelling and is authentic as the narrator of a tale which Laughton manages to make feel like an ancient one.  But the really magical blend of cussed valour and sweetness which she brings to the role of Rachel – and which is genuinely heartwarming – is thanks to the actress’s artistry, not her prehistory.   As Willa, Shelley Winters is touching but less effective than usual:  the character’s being in two minds sometimes feels like tentativeness on Winters’s part.  (Perhaps her essentially naturalistic approach made her uncomfortable in a role that’s conceived as a type of woman rather than an individual.)  For many people, The Night of the Hunter means Robert Mitchum as Harry Powell.  He proves here (as he proved again in Cape Fear, a few years later) that he’s exceptionally well equipped in physical terms to play a bogeyman.   The photography obviously helps (as does the music) but Mitchum cuts a truly intimidating figure – whether Powell appears to the children either as a small figure on horseback on the horizon or as a looming shadow which eclipses them.  Mitchum seems to me a naturally (and irritatingly) lazy actor:  that laidback quality is part of his appeal to many but he’s making an effort here.  Perhaps the difference from what we normally expect makes Harry all the more frightening.  Mitchum sings ‘Leaning’ well – there’s an impenetrable gentleness in his voice which resonates with the wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing aspect of the character.  Yet I think his unusual efforts also reveal Mitchum’s limitations:  when he talks the holy talk, he’s too false – you register not a man plausibly shamming sincerity but an actor pretending unconvincingly to be insincere.  It wouldn’t need the moral antennae of a Rachel Cooper to spot him and beware.

The film has, as well as the quality of a dream, the quality of a quintessential children’s story.  It’s full of the creatures and images that were as much part of the books you read as of the real world you experienced as a child:  sun, moon and stars, wild animals.  The rabbits, the bullfrog, the fox that we see near the river during the night both animate the landscape and have a reassuring quality.   Rachel Cooper’s dwelling is an Edenic homestead with farm animals that are similarly evocative.   We first see the place in bright sunshine; the final shot of the film shows the house covered in snow at Christmas.  The Bible stories told in Rachel’s home are an inextricable part of this texture – and it’s both amusing and apt that one story gets confused with another (the flight of Jesus, Mary and Joseph into Egypt with the discovery of Moses in the bulrushes), and that Rachel can discern an enlightening moral even from these confusions.   Because The Night of the Hunter begins with Rachel telling her brood a story, we hold on to the hope of a happy ending but what happens in the interim has the trajectory of a gruelling test of courage familiar both from scripture and from the Brothers Grimm.  The final line, spoken by Rachel, is in praise of little children – ‘They abide and they endure’ – and the film could be seen as an apotheosis of childhood.  But it’s a clear-eyed apotheosis and the corruption of childhood is central to it:  that stolen money is hidden in Pearl’s rag doll.

The cast also includes Evelyn Varden (as Icey), Don Beddoe (as Walt), Peter Graves (famous in later years from the TV Mission Impossible, as Ben), Gloria Castillo (Ruby), James Gleason (Uncle Birdie, the lonely old man who provides the rowing boat) and Paul Bryar (the hangman).

2 September 2009

[1] According to Wikipedia, the book has a true crime source:  Harry Powers (sic) was hanged in West Virginia in 1932 for the murders of two widows and three children.