The Night of the Hunter — A Remembrance on Its 70th

Night of the Hunter has turned 70. The odds are pretty high you have, in some form or another, seen the letters H-A-T-E and L-O-V-E tattooed on the fingers of a left and a right hand in popular culture. From The Rocky Horror Picture Show to Do The Right Thing to The Simpsons, all of those representations stem from one movie, adapted from the fevered imaginings of a former copywriter from West Virginia — Davis Grubb’s The Night of the Hunter, an immediate best-seller in 1953 adapted in 1955 as the single film directed by Charles Laughton.

Now, the odds are, you’ve never heard of Grubb before my having named him, but you know his work, so it’s a little like naming one of the many anonymous artisans behind the cathedral at Chartres — you’ve felt the impact of his work without ever knowing his name. As I type this, I’m reminded myself that I didn’t really know who Charles Laughton was the first time I learned about this film — he was just a name affixed to a title, not really one associated with a face I could picture. At that point, I had no idea what a singular actor he was, a singular artist — an eccentric Englishman, deeply closeted in a lavender marriage, who lived and breathed for art, whether it was his own acting or Japanese woodprints; who found a home and film stardom in the States, traveled around the country doing dramatic readings, before being tempted to shift from theatrical directing to film directing when his producing partner was given the galleys to Grubb’s book, because it fit his sensibilities — a sort of Gothic-by-way-of-English-fairy-tale-cum-Bible-story — perfectly. With the right writer, the right technicians, the right cast, it seemed the sort of endeavour Laughton would excel at his first time out.

And he did. It just wasn’t recognised immediately, that’s all.

When the film was released in July 1955, it slowly ground to a halt in wide distribution. 1955 was not quite the time for a film like The Night of the Hunter — the studio had no idea how to market it, reviewers were generally baffled by its mixture of tones, and it was the “wrong” sort of a religious fable — people wanted scantily-clad Technicolor starlets, not silent film legends speaking on the endurance of children in hard times. It took harder times — and being sold to run on a little box called the television — for children, and adults, to discover the film, its genius, and the genius behind it.

There have been many stories laid on about The Night of the Hunter — about its making, about its legacy, from those who fell in love with it and from the people who made it. Some of those stories are even true. But a number of the false ones still cling to the film like old cobwebs, unseen and still believed as true. While I’m singing its praises, I may as well clear up the more egregious ones for you.

Clearing Up the Untruths

• The film’s credited screenwriter, acclaimed Tennessean James Agee — who, sadly, died just months before the film came out, having never gotten to see it — did not spend most of his time on the project slumped by the producer’s pool drunk, and certainly did not leave Laughton with an unfilmably-long script that bore no relation to the novel; indeed, Agee’s first script for the film was found again 22 years ago, bearing signs that Laughton approved of it (in the early goings, at least), and enough memoranda between his agency representatives and letters between himself, Laughton, and producer Paul Gregory still exist to show most of the horror stories spread about Agee being useless on the film, originating in the main from the notoriously unreliable biographer Charles Higham, are nothing close to true.
• Agee was also paid in full for five weeks’ worth of revisions to get that draft down into shooting form, which did not, by his own contract, necessarily need to happen — they could have dispensed with his services for a smaller sum — so Laughton and Gregory could not have been so displeased as producer Gregory would eventually intimate to have rehired, at full price, someone whose work it was claimed they felt they couldn’t use.
• With Agee’s first draft now finally published, we can see it is lengthy — 293 pages — but it also contains some of the most iconic images and lines in the film that don’t originate in Davis Grubb’s novel — for instance, the Preacher’s knife popping out of his pocket like an ejaculation, and the character of Rachel Cooper comforting one of her charges with the line, “You was lookin’ for love, Ruby, in the only foolish way you knew how”. It also emphasises characters, such as the store owner Miz Cunningham, whom Grubb insisted he wanted to be even more prominent in the film — but under Laughton’s pen during the revision process, is cut down to just two lines, just large enough for the character to make an impression. Laughton having mailed several “volumes of marked Dickens” to Agee when he began the script, Agee thus inserted verbal similarity to Uriah Heap from David Copperfield in Preacher’s first scene in prison; Laughton surely appreciated that, but it, too, is cut. Laughton’s changes, although coming at the expense of Agee’s local colour, arguably make the film even stronger, and sharper, and that continued into shooting, with deletions to what was found on-set did not work in the children’s dialogue. That brings me to:
• Charles Laughton’s direction of the children, which has been long-said that he hated doing, couldn’t direct them, and thus left direction of them to Robert Mitchum (which Mitchum himself implied was true on several occasions). Sally Jane Bruce, as Pearl, working on her first film, was a novice actress, chosen for her doll-like look and her ability to sing (she had won a singing contest — ironically, in post-production her song in this film was dubbed), and in the outtakes from production we have, Laughton does have some difficulty getting her to say her lines or move through a scene in exactly the way he wants, but he is never less than gentle and courteous with her. With Billy Chapin, an experienced child actor playing Pearl’s older brother and the child lead of the film, John, Laughton has an almost-instinctual rapport, and although Chapin does need Laughton’s verbal coaching at times, this is not unique to him on this production; Laughton feeds line readings and direction during a take to every actor except Mitchum, never calling cut on a scene and only slating the beginnings and ends of takes, which actress Evelyn Varden is, in the outtakes, unnerved by, but which actor Peter Graves, much later in life, praised as “a wonderful way to work” . Laughton does, at least in outtakes, have difficulty with Shelley Winters, the female lead and Graves’s onscreen widow, with his direction of her in the scene where Mitchum’s Preacher berates Winters’ Willa on their wedding night coming across as remarkable harsh and gruff — it’s unclear whether this was because Laughton actually was displeased or whether he was trying to get Winters into the right mindset for the scene, but it’s the only sequence where he seemingly does vocally put hatred into his direction. (And the scene in the finished film, regardless of technique, works.)
• Finally, Laughton himself was not so totally destroyed by the financial failure of this film that he never directed another — he did set out on directing another, an adaptation of Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead (it was such an open secret in the industry Laughton was going to adapt Mailer next that Agee’s own agent thought she could nab him the job to script it); however, Laughton had such trouble in the process of adapting it (rather than Agee, his two second-unit directors on Hunter, Denis and Terry Sanders, were hired to do the job), and found such difficulty in trying to retain financing on it during the process — a backer dropped out when Laughton told his producer he thought he needed another six months to have a screenplay ready to shoot — that Laughton finally withdrew from the project, making Hunter his only film. (Producer Paul Gregory felt obligated to continue getting Naked made; the eventual film was directed by Raoul Walsh, and released, bearing no resemblance to Laughton’s version, in 1958.)
• And now, we reach the certain untruths spun by this film’s producer — Paul Gregory, born James Lenhart in Iowa, a talented theatrical agent who became Laughton’s producer in the theatre, on this film, and seemingly would have been again; he made a tidy sum off the Mailer adaptation, far more than he had on Hunter , and he continued to be very successful in television and theatrical ventures — but the most recognised and beloved work he’d ever been involved with was The Night of the Hunter, and he knew it. So, after Laughton’s passing, and as the film’s renown grew — and after, in particular, a tragic car accident he was in that fatally injured his wife, Janet Gaynor, in 1983 — the bulk of Gregory’s public appearances and statements about the film became increasingly unreliable; such remarks as The Naked and the Dead falling apart and Laughton never making another film because “Charlie was scared” , or that Agee’s script bore no resemblance to the book and that “I read a third of it and threw it out a window” — to the point where, despite evidence preserved in the film’s rushes showing the original man to play the character Uncle Birdie Steptoe, regular Western sidekick actor Emmett Lynn, was fired by Laughton and replaced with James Gleason because he wasn’t working, Gregory flat-out denied to a historian of Western sidekicks asking about it that it had ever happened! This was corrected, but only some time after Gregory’s passing was announced in 2016.

Let me emphasise, though, this is not a listicle; this is a remembrance, a celebration. With these points out of the way, let’s now turn to the maestro and his canvas: Charles Laughton, the teller of tales — but not of untruths.

A Tale of Old Wives, Foolish Husbands, and the Production Code

Charles Laughton had been working in the United States since the early 1930s, so he was well-aware by 1954, when The Night of the Hunter went into production, of the difficulties of navigating-Hollywood’s censorious Production Code, helmed by the stringent Catholic Joseph Breen. Indeed, he was probably aware of the letter Breen sent to Columbia‘s Harry Cohn when it was rumoured in trades he was possibly producing an adaptation of The Night of the Hunter, warning in no uncertain terms that the Code forbade most of what the novel directly depicted about religion and sexuality, from the murderer Harry Powell preaching to a congregation within an actual church, to frank depictions of bordellos and rough sex by young women inexperienced in it, culminating in a lynch mob heavily implied to murder the jailed Preacher without any proper law enforcement intervening to stop them. This, Breen insisted, would not do.

And yet, by the time Laughton was done communicating in memoranda with the Breen Office, Breen so appreciated Laughton’s work of ameliorating his concerns about the adaptation that he sent him a letter, upon his retirement from heading the Code in 1955, basically extending Laughton the metaphorical laurel and a hardy handshake, and thanking him for being so respectful and helpful. That he sent such an effusive letter to a man most of Hollywood knew to be gay is nothing short of miraculous.

But those of us who have seen the film, and who do love the film, know that it is critical of religion, and does generally hew — albeit shorn of many of those plot attributes I described above — to what in book form Breen found objectionable. So, what happened?

Laughton was very canny; his own lavender wife, Elsa Lanchester, said he had a gift for editing — of “building a dramatic house” . Laughton had removed specific references to religious denominations — gone are the novel’s Miz Rachel Cooper derisively speculating on antagonist Icey Spoon being “a Duck River Baptist, and Republican to boot” (surely a paying audience member might be a Republican), which even Agee had kept in his script; finessed, too, are shots where John sees Rachel Cooper holding a Bible before she tells a story and is scared to be reminded of the evil Preacher; a memo exists from Laughton to Agee exactly instructing how the order of shots should be changed, and restructuring scenes down the line into the edit so that he could outright say, in letters to the new Production Code head, Geoffrey Shurlock, “we are not against religion, but for it”, and be telling the truth.

Here’s a few points to tell:

• The young character Ruby in the novel and Agee’s draft confesses she has“done it with men! Yes, I done what they asked me to” in shame; Laughton reduces this to Ruby simply telling Rachel Cooper “I’ve been out with men” , and that is enough to be ashamed about and enough for Rachel to forgive.
• Preacher’s encounters at nudie shows and bordellos with topless prostitutes so bored they don’t even remove their chewing gum in the moment, his mumbles in his sleep of sin and gold and the blood of the Lamb; all are reduced to three scenes, strong but inoffensive to both the religious taste and the vice squad, wherein we meet Mitchum’s Preacher driving in a stolen car, then cut to him in a den of iniquity, featuring a non-topless woman bumping and grinding, where he is immediately picked up by the police and, cutting swiftly to another scene, sentenced by a judge for the theft of that car (before that judge outright denies him the courtesy of being listed as “Preacher” on the record).
• As the Code insisted all houses of sin of that sort must — absolutely no exceptions — either be repented of or burned down if they had to be depicted in a film (one of the few scenes deleted from Citizen Kane was cut because it depicted a whorehouse and neither thing happened), Laughton skillfully managed to both condemn the place by having the murderous villain be there and imply, with a state trooper clamping down on his shoulder inside the building, quite firmly via that police presence that the cathouse was about to be shut down.

I’m never in a million years saying the Code should be brought back, but if you need to imply something without outright saying it and still get the point across, there’s arguably nothing more artful than that kind of a dodge. Laughton: Artist Bewitching the Censors at Work.

And this film’s particular point can said to come at both that of a stick-knife, hidden in bed-blankets, and the barrel of a shotgun, wielded by a woman who knows better even than most men.

Of Villainy, Masculinity, and a Silent Star

For Laughton, in using both Grubb’s text and Agee’s draft, has crafted a villain even the novel feels it must dance around outright calling a “Bluebeard” — the fearsome man with six late wives whose secret his seventh must never discover, lest she face his wrath; a hideous cautionary tale in the guise of a fairy-story — but who expresses almost constantly an outright revulsion and fear of sex, preening like a murderous overgrown child in his heavenly father’s nightshirt, who must resort to a stick-knife to avenge himself on children; someone who cannot in any way compare as a substitute father or as an actual “man” , to Willa Harper’s first husband, Ben, and is clearly in no way somebody to take after in “modeling masculinity” . If his could be said to be any masculinity, his is a negative masculinity, a sex-negative one, full of fear and hatred of women. The sort of thought-process you see typecast as the “incel” in online thinking today — the man with a fulminating hatred against any positive view of women.

(It is intimated that our young hero, late in the novel in his own point-of-view narration, mishears the fairy-story appellation mentioned above as “Bluebird” — well, if Harry Powell is one, he’s certainly not the damned bluebird of happiness.)

In Preacher’s very first point-of-view section in the novel, Grubb even writes, stepping out for a moment from Harry Powell’s viewpoint, very, very bluntly what he sees Preacher for, and it sounds horribly familiar even today: “Paul is choking misogynistic wrath upon Damascus Road.”

His is, to invert Laughton’s direction to his second-unit men, the unhealthy point-of-view — but what, to quote Laughton directly, then, is the “healthy point-of-view” ? It can’t entirely be Ben Harper’s way, for even he is a murderer who outright burdens his son with a secret that torments him all throughout the film, going to his death without ever breathing it and thinking a child could do the same — a father’s Ghost giving orders to a pre-teen Hamlet until he snaps. (Surely Laughton, the great Shakespearean actor, wouldn’t have neglected this.)

Young John Harper’s other masculine role model in the film, Uncle Birdie Steptoe, seems to be a canny type, crafty and common-sense, albeit with a weakness for drink, who sees through Preacher and offers John his protection, but the minute actual death confronts him in the face, he immediately falls to pieces and retreats back inside the bottle and cannot be roused even to protect John and Pearl. No, although warm and friendly as he is, Uncle Birdie is too weak to be effective; a model ought be made of sterner stuff.

No; if you want to find a positive role model for a boy in masculinity in this film, you must, paradoxically, find it in a woman — in Miz Rachel Cooper, played by the silent-screen legend Lillian Gish with both a gentle understanding of the children under her charge and a fierce ability to see through any bullshit thrown her way, whether at farmers’ market or via the rumbling baritone of a murderer calling himself a Preacher. Indeed, she’s the first adult figure with any authority since the judge who sentenced Harry Powell at the beginning of the film to outright declaim, “No, and he ain’t no Preacher, neither!”

By denying him that status, she has done the first work anybody has in this film of finally robbing Preacher of his power, and at the point of a loaded shotgun — and she completes it in the next sequence featuring them both. Gish had not been in many films since the silent period, but was always a welcome, almost-saintly presence in them; here, a little shorn of that saintliness — she is the only adult figure in the film to positively understand and recognise sex, after all — she is maybe the most inspired casting in the while film, after Mitchum; clearly a co-lead, not merely supporting, next to the young hero John. If any Mister, Man or Boy, wants to see “positive masculinity” modeled in this film, Gish’s Rachel Cooper is your lodestar for it — just as she acts a lodestar in the opening of the film.

It’s no surprise that this healthy, positive masculinity in the form of a saintly woman should be crafted by the queer auteur Laughton, now should it be? No wonder so many people love it — no wonder it lasts.

Of the Code, Art, and Bob Mitchum

I’m going to dip my toe slightly in the politics of the time, but only to make a historical point — Charles Laughton, an Englishman naturalised as a U.S. citizen in 1950, canvassed in the first election he could vote in for Adlai Stevenson; his leading man, Robert Mitchum, born in the North but almost always playing roles with something of a Southern flavour, musically inclined from the first moment he stepped into Hollywood to the point he wrote an oratorio with Orson Welles to benefit Jewish refugees before American entry into the war yet a dyed-in-the-wool supporter of Reagan, Bush, and Goldwater, and the sort of star who came to that point doing endless artless retakes under the heavy producorial boot of Howard Hughes — you might think there’s not much the two of them could agree on, but I think that mention of music may’ve already pointed you in the direction I’m tending. That direction being — Laughton and Mitchum clearly saw eye-to-eye on this story and the character Mitchum was crafting; and certainly, in particular, Mitchum and Laughton saw eye-to-eye on how to point up the religious hypocrisy of the Preacher and the society he operates in while also threading that needle with the Production Code.

It was to Laughton’s good fortune, too, that the Production Code did not keep him from making Art — even as he thought he was making something “commercial” (the novel was a best-seller, after all). But what might’ve registered “commercial” to him becomes, in his hands, something stranger, weirder, and more wonderful.

And it’s how we get to something that’s always bugged me about how the film is categorised; time and time again, I’ve seen it described solely as a “noir”. You might as well call Citizen Kane a noir, you know; that still wouldn’t do it justice.

Of “Noir”, Music, and the Cycle of All Things

No noir in history that you might’ve seen prior would open with a children’s choir singing over a starry sky about “dreams”, followed shortly by a woman hanging weightless in those same stars reading excerpts from the Beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount and ushering us into the mind-frame for the picture. You might almost expect Virginia Madsen’s disembodied head to float into view speaking about how “a beginning is a very delicate time”. And, indeed, if that rings some sort of bell with you as being Lynchian — redolent of so much of Eraserhead, Dune, and The Elephant Man — it’s no wonder: The Night of the Hunter was one of David Lynch’s favourite films.

And a beginning is a very delicate time — one must set the tone, after all — whether with a reference to The Shining in the form of an unseen Road Runner cartoon, or with a gory scene-setting cameo almost totally unrelated from anything else you see after. And Laughton, the storyteller (as his own released album of him doing just that calls him), sets his film’s tone in this beginning quoting to “beware of false prophets” while emphasising in bold underscore just how prominent the role of music, whether composer Walter Schumann’s or “a sweet old gospel tune” about leaning, is to his art in this film.

There is something… instinctual, about music, when it comes, when it finds itself upon you, that strikes to the very heart of you, so nearly at times that it seems a very part of you. When it seems unfitting, it takes you out of whatever you might be experiencing, but when it twins together perfectly with whatever moment is occurring to you, in your mind, there’s a flood of some primal emotion, whether good or bad — there’s some connection. And when it comes out of the aether with a low echoing rumble and the timbre of Bob Mitchum, paired with images so simultaneously luminous and Gothic you can scarcely believe actual film can capture them… that’s a master reaching out from the past to you, knowing exactly how to connect, on that unthinking, achingly haunting level.

For all that screenwriter Agee and director Laughton may have eventually disagreed on textually, they clearly agreed on how important music was to the story. Agee had a history of threading compelling older tunes into his work, trying out several different numbers in his Oscar-nominated African Queen scripts for a drunken Humphrey Bogart to sing (before Bogart tried one on his own that he remembered), and giving Abraham Lincoln’s mother a slightly-ahistorical but compelling Skye Boat Song to sing in scenes directed by a young Stanley Kubrick for television, and he brings that ability to bear to his work on Hunter , filling the script with genuine songs and hymns from the period. Laughton kept only one of these changes — Agee increasing the prominence of “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms” by having Preacher sing it as he stands outside of the Harper house for the first time — but although the hymn itself is not quoted in the score (as composer Walter Schumann felt it would be “a mockery of a prayer” ), the music of the film itself is even more prominent, and as strongly entwined with it, than if Agee’s song choices had been literally followed.

That could be said to be the genius of the adaptation.

Perhaps too many times have I seen this be called a “noir“, or a “thriller“. And it is thrilling, but it’s not Hitchcock — it’s not meant to be. It’s a Southern Gothic fairy tale, suffused with music and songs and haunted in its rolling hills by a Biblical wraith made flesh. He’s a figure frightening enough for children, and for adults, but bested in the end by the wisest person in the whole story — a canny river woman; a mother; “a strong tree with branches for many birds”, as Rachel Cooper calls herself. A woman who bests a false preacher in song, but is unafraid of picking up an old shotgun to finish him off with just in case.

And, if there’s something noir-ish about the torment these children, this family, are thrown into, there’s nothing less noirish than its resolution. Most noirs end quite unhappily, with certain things unresolved, like how actual life might unspool, only worse. But here, quite un-noir-ly, in almost a gorgeous fairy-tale welter of song and images, a heretofore unending cycle of violence — in particular, cycle of violence against women and children — is broken.

For those of you who remember, this is not the first film I’ve talked about this year that features two children losing their mother to a hideous entity than invades their lives — nor may it be the last one I speak about that concerns misogynistic cycles of violence being overcome; it’s a rather popular topic, for film and television, rather recently. It’s these thematic resonances, this currency that also harkens back to an older time, that I think makes the occasion of this film marking its 70th anniversary even more important: There will always be a time for The Night of the Hunter; a film both of its time and out of its time.

Between the Hands of Grubb and Laughton

Grubb wrote his novel with lived experience from having grown up along the vast Ohio River during the 1920s and ’30s; work as an advertising copywriter sharpened his ability to translate that into words that feel so true to the region, down to the roots, with a prose that makes you feel the black, deep, rich river loam he describes, damply clinging to your fingers as if you had drove them into the earth yourself. But prose can only be translated so much into film form — everybody has trouble with it, from the very start of cinema — and Grubb had no screenwriting experience. Thereby lay Grubb’s other talent: Drawings to depict the scenes, locations, and characters of his novel. Laughton, as a novice director, grabbed onto these with both hands, sending Grubb’s drawings to the art department and soliciting Grubb’s opinions on casting and characters, not all of which were followed to the letter. But if there’s a striking image literalised in the film from Grubb’s novel, it usually passed through his drawing-paper first — such as the iconic shot of Preacher riding a horse in the distance at night, Billy Chapin’s John silhouetted by moonlight in the foreground, looking at him from a loft in a barn; with John’s line written under the drawing, as if to sum up the scene, “Don’t he never sleep?”

But Laughton, keeping his own novice auteur status always in mind, finds his own blend of cinematic brew — between art and practicality; between thematicism and necessity. Something at once both naturalistic and completely stylised. It is as if D. W. Griffith were being blended with F. W. Murnau and brought into (as it then was) the modern era.

You may have picked up merely from cultural osmosis one of Mitchum’s iconic scenes in this film, even stripped somewhat of its iconography — the Preacher demonstrating with his tattooed hands the Story of Life, of L-O-V-E battling and overcoming H-A-T-E, before an audience at an ice cream parlour all-too-willing to be entranced and spellbound, drawn into his spun web of religiosity — all, save the boy, John. I say you may have picked it up because it was homaged almost word-for-word in Spike Lee’s legendary (and legendarily-snubbed) Do The Right Thing by Bill Nunn’s character of Radio Raheem:

(Would it shock you any to learn at this point that Spike Lee is also a massive fan of The Night of the Hunter?)

Now, I am probably not the only person to have seen the work inspired by this before the inspiration itself. Yet even in its original form, Right-Hand-Left-Hand loses none of its power from having been referenced — because the form itself is spellbinding: A daytime scene in an interior that looks almost like night, Mitchum framed by silvery shadows and light, the Preacher a player on a stage of his own making; kept by the Production Code from mounting an actual pulpit, Harry Powell creates one on ground-level just the same:

Mitchum plays this part in a way he normally doesn’t play any part; normally much more restrained, almost somnambulant, here he plays it with more emphasis, almost like Preacher is a part Preacher himself is playing — and Mitchum is clearly enjoying the ability to stretch and slightly ham for the camera. It’s reminiscent of performances in Erle C. Kenton’s Island of Lost Souls and Frank Lloyd’s Mutiny on the Bounty by another actor who always seemed to revel in the act of performance, in the very art of playing a ole — and I’m referring in both, of course, to Charles Laughton. It’s no surprise Mitchum clearly takes his acting cues from Laughton — indeed, it explains just why Mitchum doesn’t require anywhere near as much active direction from Laughton in the film’s outtakes!

And, in the equal opposite of Mitchum’s Preacher, for every character lifted in the film by their own good or evil deeds, there’s a character doomed or consigned to torment either by the works of others or by their own misassigned guilt. Because, as we know — as John Milton said — the mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heav’n of hell, a hell of heav’n.

Of a Woman, Under The Influence

As Grubb details quite plainly about his novel’s tragic initial mother becoming corrupted by Preacher into hating sex, “Willa had discovered sin”. Agee’s script calls her “a prostitute for God”. Laughton, in his own instructions to the supporting artistes for the tent revival sequence (as captured in the film’s outtakes), tries to find a better word for what the sequence is depicting “religion as a substitute for”, before just agreeing with his much-earthier leading man when Mitchum, also in the scene, breaks in with the single word “poontang” .

And thus does Icey Spoon, by her own doings, force Shelley Winters’s Willa Harper into a deeper hell than she ever might have feared befall her from being the widow of a man deemed a “murderer” . Not content to publicly humiliate her husband Walt over issues in the bedroom — Don Beddoe’s Walt Spoon is a low-key comic scene-stealer next to Evelyn Varden’s operatic Icey — the ice-cream shoppe proprietor sees the Preacher as a “keeper” for her community, although clearly she is looking to pair Willa with a man before her husband’s body is even cold. And when Willa, against her own better judgment, goes along with Icey’s plans and outright marries Preacher, she has no idea she’s gotten in bed with a man her husband kept his secret from in his prison cell during his own last days.

Because it’s not just a film about religion, about love, and about “positive” and “negative” masculinity — it’s also about how a woman can internalise misogyny, and how that can drive a woman to the point where she accepts death from a villain over any sane course of action. It shows just how damaging a society ‘s loathing turned inward onto a soul can be.

And in her final scene in the film, laying in bed, Mitchum’s Preacher standing over Winters with his knife, we see the whole bedroom in cross-section — suspended in an inky blackness as if lifted upon a stage — with the roof forming a “nave”; Willa’s bed becoming the altar Preacher intends to “sacrifice” her on for his terrible god. And Walter Schumann’s music which plays under the scene — Willa’s theme — is in waltz time, as if a dance; an innovation suggested by cinematographer Stanley Cortez on the set, as he was hearing Sibelius’s “Valse Triste” in his head when lighting the set, and which Laughton, to his credit, immediately took up and instructed Schumann to incorporate.

Is it any wonder that, two Broadway seasons ago, my first time viewing a play set someplace so similarly, with such similar themes, and with such strong musical elements, despite almost completely different plots, my mind couldn’t help but connect it — to The Night of the Hunter? The film has such a long shadow, anything brilliant surely will incorporate its brilliance, too.

But that bring me, for a moment, to the most famous sustained part of this entire film: The river sequence. You could call it “a dark trip from Charles Laughton”, but it’s really more the culmination of one; an orphan, and another, escaping into the ink-black night — from the driving rush of danger into what Laughton described to his second-unit directors ought to look like an “animal picture book” .

And that’s an effect you simply can’t replicate on location. In 1954, only the very finest Hollywood studio technicians could achieve that.

Of Time, the River, and the San Fernando Valley

in the novel, the seasons pass — visibly, in the text, marked by Grubb’s gorgeous descriptions of the changing wildlife and people on the Ohio, up and down that waterway artery of commerce and life (as so many rivers in the country were, before modernity struck) — and, although the film (and I don’t feel this is a spoiler to say; it has been 70 years, after all) ends as the novel does with Christmas ringing in a great thematic statement before its conclusion, it does not as much mark the passing of the seasons, from winter to spring and on back into winter again, for the practical reason that it simply can’t; it was filmed from August to October 1954 in California, and although the San Fernando Valley, various movie-ranch ponds within it, and enormous studio tanks on Gower can create an almost-flawless West Virginia on the opposite U.S. coast, they cannot mark the passage, to nab a phrase from Thomas Wolfe, “Of Time and the River” , to the same visible extent — there can only be a shift at the end.

But Laughton turns this, too, to his advantage, with the keen eye and lighting of Cortez his cinematographer — who takes both the novel’s and first Agee script’s mentions of “chiaroscuro”, to heart. And so the film’s timeline feels suspended in a dewy, gossamer web, framed by darkness and light — a perfect sort of recreation of the dream-state our two “little one” protagonists must be viewing their lives in — little aeronauts in Slumberland — as they journey into fear, literally, down the river, and then back into comfort itself, with the hardy, warm embrace of Gish’s Rachel Cooper.

Even Laughton himself was astonished by how effectively Cortez had translated his direction; according to Cortez, after seeing the first rushes on the film’s river sequence, Laughton bluntly asked, “How the hell did you do that?” Cortez replied, “Because you used the word “fairy tale”.” Although not perfect grammar — who’s expecting a cinematographer to employ perfect grammar? — the point’s made; the tone’s established, and that sort of art is the sort you can only really get from perfect craftsmanship backing it.

But even what might technically violate cinematic grammar, within the film, only “does” so as a means of further increasing the overall impact and power — resulting from the perfect confidence, as Orson Welles might have said, of a novice auteur at work.

I’ll give you an example — one of so many I can give, but I’ll just keep it to one. When Willa walks home at night from her job, after expressing an almost-demented pride in her “burden” of being the mediator between John and Preacher, and then inadvertently stumbles into something she cannot brush aside as being another “lie” from John about his new father, Laughton builds the moment before, intercutting from John to Pearl and Preacher and then to Willa and back to Pearl and Preacher, slowly teasing out the scene, almost word-for-word as it plays out in Grubb’s novel — shorn, however, as a movie has to be, of scenic description, of interior monologue, and of artful turns of phrase in the prose. What a novel’s prose can say, Laughton lets the voices of Mitchum and Sally Jane Bruce express as best as he can direct them (very little in Mitchum’s case, much more thoroughgoing in Bruce’s), and has Cortez’s lighting facilitate required mood. So far, nothing you might not expect from Hitchcock.

And then a remarkable fusion of cinematography and editing occurs. With an unearthly amount of light streaming out of every window of the house’s exterior, like an inverted version of how Janusz Kaminski lights a Steven Spielberg movie, Laughton has his editor, Robert Golden, keep the voice of Mitchum’s Preacher unnaturally close — almost as if we are still in the front room with him and Pearl — so that his “Answer me, you little wretch, or I’ll tear your arm off!” hits both Willa and us like a thunderclap, literalising Grubb’s description in the novel of his reply being “as swift and solid in the evening silence as the thump of a butcher’s cleaver in the block” (yet another passage Agee’s first draft outright quotes in its scenic descriptions, quotation marks and all). It says everything Grubb wants to say without actually being the novel — surely a goal any good adaptation ought to strive for, but this is a great one; there are no missed goals, here.

Of Cellar Doors and Gothic Comedy

Even the goals Laughton and Agee seem to’ve shared when first embarking on their scripting journey, with Agee’s ebullience in following almost all of what he believed Laughton wanted of him naturally being tamped down by a Laughton who needs to make a script to shoot with from what he has gotten, aren’t missed — for example, the film’s second sequence set in the cellar, where John finally gets one over on Preacher after Pearl reveals the stolen money is hidden in her doll.

This is played in Grubb’s original text as completely straight horror, complicated by Harry Powell’s religious mania and brittle impatience at having to bargain with literal children. However, in his own first draft of the scene, Agee seems to take into account things that have been confirmed by others regarding Laughton’s concerns about Preacher — for example, Lillian Gish saying Laughton wanted to “lighten it up” with moments of comedy so the audience would not be too scared of Mitchum’s character, and Mitchum himself saying he wanted to take it “right to the max… and Charles wouldn’t do it to me”, quoting Laughton saying ,“Otherwise mothers would drag their children from you in the street at your approach” (the sort of thing the character actor Laughton might’ve been all-too familiar with happening to himself).

Thus, Agee crafts his version of the cellar scene with two straight pages of “suggestions” of detailed sight gags, the actual formulation of which he feels is “Ideally to be done by Buster Keaton”; one can imagine Laughton being a bit taken aback by the length and the specificity, and so the two pages are, in the final revisions for shooting by Laughton and Agee, cut down to John knocking down a candle and shelves simultaneous to Preacher pulling a funny face in the darkness; it’s a moment of levity, but it’s in the midst of something reverted to far more Grubbian horror.

And it’s a horror, for a moment, as the children shriek and fly up the stairs, the cellar framed in cross-section exactly like the bedroom nave, and Mitchum… raises his arms out blindly and stamps his way forward as if he’s Lon Chaney, Jr. at the end of The Ghost of Frankenstein (a film directed by… Erle C. Kenton from Island of Lost Souls), the cunning mind of Bela Lugosi’s Ygor plunged into an unfamiliar pitch-blackness. For all the Preacher’s murderous intent and honeyed guile, he is the sort of monster a dropped candle and a shower of canned fruits can hold back, even for a moment.

(And speaking of a Frankenstein, and of “fairy-stories”… Guillermo del Toro, who wrote and directed a new upcoming Frankenstein adaptation? He loves The Night of the Hunter, too.)

Again, when Rachel Cooper finally does have Preacher in her sights with a shotgun, rather than the killer rocketing up into the light, as Grubb describes him, knife raised high and ready before she does pull the trigger, Laughton’s revision for the scene has a cat rush out of the darkness onto the floor, whereby Preacher steps on the cat, the cat screams, and Preacher — in an approximation of Grubb’s image — shoots up, sans outstretched knife, sinister but caught unawares as Rachel shoots him. Screaming like a wounded animal, he runs out her back door into her barn — but this is not any sort of anticlimax, for Harry Powell, at this point, has been defeated for several minutes before being shot — he has been defeated in song, the good and wise Rachel Cooper drawing his power away from “Leaning On the Everlasting Arms” in a quiet duet.

Thus — just as a good witch might vanquish evil through chants, words, and songs in a fairy tale, so, too, are the children saved in this Gothic fairy story of the 1930s South. No wonder it was first children, watching this perhaps at a time of night well past their bedtimes on television, who may have this film so deeply imprinted in their collective memories that those children, now adults even more appreciative of the darkness and beauty of this tale, have carried it forward through the generations, through their esteem, and through their veneration of Laughton’s talents.

And why shouldn’t they?

An Abiding, in Remembrance

It’s hardly ever that an auteur with only one film in his canon winds up making a work so bedazzling, so beloved, that it continues to grow stronger in esteem by the year. 70 years on? Well, that’s when you know you’ve got a classic. When you can summon up the image in the shared collective consciousness merely by mentioning “the one with the tattoos on the fingers, Love and Hate” , or by softly singing, “Leaaaaaning, leaaaaaaning…” in away that Mitchum’s image, voice, and unmistakable manner in this film immediately come to mind.

Perhaps it’s for the best that this film did not win — nor was even nominated for — a single Oscar . (“Best Picture, 1955” went to Marty — no shade on the beloved Ernest Borgnine-starring romantic movie meant.) That the film itself is remembered, and still quoted, and still haunting the imaginations of young and old to this day, perhaps to this very night… well, as unjustly unawarded as I feel it was, that people still know it to this day, and that it’s for so many people such a grand intro to Charles Laughton’s art, shows just how right Laughton was to make the film his way, in the face of that initial artistic rejection. Because people figured it out, eventually, and love it all the more for it.

The film abides; it abides, and it endures.

Acknowledgements for The Night of the Hunter on its anniversary

I am deeply indebted in this article to the scholarly work of Jeffrey Couchman, who has written about the film, its scripts, and the novel in ways I can only really hope to reference in excerpt here. if you appreciate this film as much as I do, I heartily recommend you seek out what he’s published on it — including a much more detailed artistic rundown of the film in monograph form, and the original script material for The Night of the Hunter, only released for the first time just eight years ago. And, of course, there’s Davis Grubb’s original novel, which is a little masterwork, often completely overshadowed by its film adaptation, and which is an incredibly-readable and modern text for a popular novel published over 72 years ago — that may not sound like much, but I tell you the prose style is a proper jolt.

• Couchman, Jeffrey. The Night of the Hunter: A Biography of a Film. Northwestern University Press, 2009.
• Couchman, Jeffrey. The African Queen and The Night of the Hunter: First and Final Screenplays (Collected Works of James Agee) (Volume 4). University of Tennessee Press, 2017.
• Grubb, Davis. The Night of the Hunter. Original pub. Harper & Brothers, 1953. Repub. New York Vintage Books, 2015.

Additionally, I am indebted to the astounding amount of work done by Robert Gitt in collating the outtakes and rushes for The Night of the Hunter stored at the UCLA Film & Television Library and edited into the incredible documentary Charles Laughton Directs The Night of the Hunter, which is on the film’s Criterion release and which I commend to you the reader as a must-watch.

Finally, I leave you now with Charles Laughton — the storyteller: