There’s a fun game cinephiles play sometimes on social media. (Your definition of “fun” may vary.) Someone asks the room to name a director who has never made a bad movie. Rookies will cite established auteurs like Martin Scorsese, Akira Kurosawa, or Ingmar Bergman. Clever types will cite new filmmakers such as Greta Gerwig or Jordan Peele. And inevitably, some chucklehead comes to Charles Laughton (1899-1962), the British stage actor who made the successful leap to the silver screen, winning an acting Oscar for The Private Life of Henry VIII and starring in classics Mutiny on the Bounty and Witness for the Prosecution. He also directed a single movie, 1955’s The Night of the Hunter, one of the most beautifully haunting films ever made. Despite its inarguable greatness, it was not a hit at the time, and Laughton never directed again.
Set during the Great Depression, the film concerns Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum), a psychopathic preacher who believes he’s on a mission from God to marry unsuspecting widows, steal their money, and kill them. The characterization of Powell feels sharp today, though not exactly revelatory; the hypocrisies of evangelicalism are now well-established. It’s hard to even conceive of the film’s subversive power in the 1950s, when 90 percent of the country identified as Christian. Powell sermonizes against lustful women but attends a striptease just to get his murderous blood up. He destroys women for money and convinces himself it’s God’s plan. He only serves himself but believes—or at least proclaims—that he’s serving the Lord.
Casting Mitchum, one of Hollywood’s great bad boys, does a lot of the heavy lifting. From the moment you see him, you know there’s no chance he’s on the level. But his sculduggery is revealed as monstrosity when he ends up in a jail cell with the condemned Ben Harper (Peter Graves), who robbed and murdered to help his family and stashed the money with his son, John (Billy Chapin). After hearing Harper’s tale, Powell gets out of jail and immediately makes for the Harper home, where he ingratiates himself to Ben’s wife, Willa (Shelley Winters), and begins digging around for cash. John is on to him from the beginning, and works to shield his little sister, Pearl (Sally Jane Bruce), from the violence that he senses is coming.
In essence, it’s the original “from hell” movie, a genre that had its heyday in the ‘80s and ’90s, in which a psychopath worms his way into the lives of an innocent family and wreaks havoc. Fatal Attraction was the one-night stand from hell, while The Hand that Rocks the Cradle featured the nanny from hell. The Night of the Hunter is a “stepdad from hell” movie, with Willa and essentially everyone in town embracing Powell as a virtuous preacher willing to raise another man’s children. The inevitable violence transcends any genre trappings and is filmed by Laughton and his cinematographer Stanley Cortez with both genuine tension and thrilling artistry. With their dramatic use of shadow and light, they pin Powell as a demon sent from hell as soon as he enters the Harper home, which is a groundbreaking bit of visual artistry and an incisive statement on religion and patriarchy.
It’s also the rare film that finds real beauty in terror. The Night of the Hunter is many genres at once. There’s horror, domestic drama, and even a maudlin weepie within its frame. In the end, it astoundingly transforms into a Christmas movie, if you can believe it. Laughton and Cortez find the absolute most haunting images for every form. There are at least five or six shots in this film that will take your breath away, each of them either accentuating the monstrosity of its antagonist or highlighting the idyll he’s disrupting. After John and Pearl escape from him in a ramshackle boat down the river, The Night of the Hunter even shifts into a nature film, with Laughton’s eye capturing animals with the same empathy he offers the film’s children.
In that sense, it’s also a dark fairy tale, the kind the Grimm brothers were once known for. It’s a story of children and the dangers that await them in their homes and in the world. By the time Lillian Gish shows up as a kind but formidable parent type, The Night of the Hunter will establish a surprisingly strong grip on your heart. Of course, that’s only once it lets go of your throat.
The Night of the Hunter plays at 9:45 p.m. on Dec. 7 at Suns Cinema. sunscinema.com. $12.