1955

EVERETT

The Night of the Hunter

DIR. CHARLES LAUGHTON

© UNITED ARTISTS, COURTESY PHOTOFEST

Robert Mitchum reveals the deeply sinister side of his trademark cool to The Night of the Hunter’s embattled innocents.

The first and only directorial outing from actor Charles Laughton, The Night of the Hunter may be “the creepiest noir of all time,” Otto Penzler, owner of the Mysterious Bookshop in New York City, tells LIFE. The film famously features Robert Mitchum as Harry Powell, a convict with the words love and hate tattooed on the fingers of his right and left hands, respectively. “It’s the story of good and evil,” Harry explains. “You see these fingers, dear hearts? These fingers has veins that run straight to the soul of man.”

When Powell learns about a fortune hidden in his condemned cell mate’s house, he hatches a plan. Once released from prison, determined to possess the money, he seduces the man’s widow (Shelley Winters). When she dies, he pursues her two children in a mythic trip down a dark river.

Set in Depression-era West Virginia, The Night of the Hunter embodies the Southern gothic tradition, “redolent of strange sex, bad booze, old-time religion, and the collective regional memory of defeat,” according to critic Terrence Rafferty. But the physical location is almost beside the point, since the film seems to rise from the deep wellsprings of the unconscious, the liminal place where nightmares breed. In fact, it has often been called a horror film. (The harrowing scene in which Mitchum shouts at the children from the top of the stairs has been endlessly imitated but never bettered.)

Laughton was clearly inspired by film pioneer D.W. Griffith—“the master of heightened, poetic melodrama,” Rafferty continued. (Griffith regular Lillian Gish even has a pivotal role.) “It’s as if Laughton had resolved to recover something the movies had lost, some secret, long-forgotten cache of letters from ancestors—the scripture of the art’s early magic.”

The film is defiantly expressionistic, reflecting the noir genre’s roots. (“The town looks as artificial as a Christmas card scene,” critic Roger Ebert wrote.) And its dark fairy-tale quality brings to mind the likes of “Hansel and Gretel” as much as Out of the Past or Double Indemnity. “It’s really a nightmarish sort of Mother Goose tale we are telling,” Laughton said. “We tried to surround the children with creatures they might have observed, and that might have seemed part of a dream.”

EVERETT

Screen pioneer Lillian Gish gets her gun in The Night of the Hunter, a poetic, dreamlike film that has more in common with French poet and filmmaker Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast than, say, Double Indemnity.

© UNITED ARTISTS, COURTESY PHOTOFEST

Mitchum pursues the kids in a scene reflecting the look of F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu. (Compare it to this image.)