- The Night of the Hunter is famous both as Charles Laughton's sole directorial credit and for featuring Robert Mitchum in one of his most memorable roles as the diabolically insane preacher, Harry Powell. While I'm not convinced that the film deserves its critical reputation as one of the best films noir, I'll gladly endorse Mitchum's performance as the key ingredient to what success the film does achieve. Having Mitchum replace his usual casual indolence with the wound-up energy of a fanatic was a brilliant choice and one that should have convinced any remaining skeptics that the immensely talented actor could play roles far beyond his stereotypical wisecracking heavy.
- We first get to know Harry Powell in prison, where he has the good fortune (although no doubt he would call it providence) to share his cell with Ben Harper (Peter Graves), who's on death row for a violent robbery. Although he'd never admit it to his suspiciously curious cellmate, Harper let on to his young son John (Billy Chapin) and younger daughter Pearl (Sally Jane Bruce) where he hid the money just before the police hauled him away. He didn't bother to tell his wife Willa (Shelley Winters), citing the silliness of women, but given Willa's later behavior, maybe that wasn't such an unwise decision.
- I say that because Powell isn't out of prison long before Willa accepts his marriage offer despite the rather recent execution of her husband. Of course, she's hardly alone in falling for Powell -- even the local salt-of-the-earth shopkeepers (Evelyn Varden and Don Beddoe) are immediately seduced by his deep singing voice and his charismatic "right-hand/left-hand" tales of good and evil. The only real skeptic is John, who worries that this eccentric preacher may be more interested in hidden riches than in the Harper family's welfare. When Willa goes missing (only to be discovered later in the film's most haunting shot), John doesn't hesitate to grab Pearl and her ever-present playdoll to head downriver in their late father's boat.
- And what a strange trip they have. While the small town that John and Pearl fled from seemed realistic enough, the river is an eerie expressionist landscape populated exclusively by silhouettes and oddly exaggerated night creatures. At the end of their journey, the children encounter the physical embodiments of good and evil in the forms of the kindly and sensible adoptive mother Rachel Cooper (Lillian Gish) and the increasingly desperate and unhinged Powell, the latter of whom tracks them on horseback in a truly preternatural fashion. Now the helpless children, those poor "little lambs," will get to see which hand wins in real life.
- I feel confident in asserting that without Mitchum, The Night of the Hunter wouldn't have worked at all. The climactic mob scene arrives decades after Fritz Lang, Laughton's obvious inspiration, did it better in multiple films, including Metropolis, M, and Fury. Likewise, Powell's character comes ten years after Hitchcock used a vastly superior film, Shadow of a Doubt, to introduce a man who kills widows and menaces children, but always with a smile. Still, the film does achieve moments of transcendence that coincide roughly with Powell's bouts of religious ecstasy. When the character's madness bursts out like the blade on his knife, usually at the suggestion of female sexuality, we get a good look at a man who's crazy enough to kill but religious enough that nearly everyone trusts him. In other words, the quintessential "wolf in sheep's clothing."
- Based on the novel by Davis Grubb.
