Reliving the Night of the Hunter

Will LOVE beat HATE? -- Picture courtesy of MGM/UA

by blogSpotter
Tuesday night, I had to stay up 'til 2AM to babysit a production process for my job. I needed a chilling, thrilling movie to help keep me awake -- I scored the mother lode with 1955's Night of the Hunter on my Apple TV. I have to digress for a moment; when I looked up this movie in Leonard Malton's Showtime movie guide, he only gave it 3.5 stars. If ever a movie deserved highest praise of 4 stars it is Night of the Hunter (abbreviate hereon as NOTH). I think Malton comes from a more conservative, conventional background so I'm not surprised that he gave only 2 paltry paragraphs to this ground-breaking movie. Sometimes it's a to a movie's credit if Malton shorts it a little.

So why was NOTH preserved by the US Library of Congress and rated one of the 100 best thrillers of all time by the American Film Institute? Set in West Virginia of the 1930's, the movie tells the story of Harry Powell -- a psychopathic, woman-hating evangelist on a murder spree. He cons, marries and murders women partly for their money and partly out of a perverse joy in punishing the "evil, weak sex". In NOTH, Powell has just been sprung from prison after serving a term for car theft. While in prison, Powell has received an inadvertent tip from cell mate Harper that Harper's family might know where he stashed $10K of stolen money. Harper is executed for his crime. Powell is released and seeks out Harper's bereaved widow, Willa, and children -- in hopes of finding their money. With his handsome and compelling style, he endears himself to Willa and marries her.

The children are precociously intelligent and do not like or trust Powell. They resist his demands to tell where the money is hidden. At a point where Willa finally discovers Powell's demonic intent, he cuts her throat and drives her car into a nearby lake, with her in it. I'll compress some details here for brevity... The children sense that Powell has done something to their mother and flee in a small boat, down the Ohio River. Powell hunts them via horseback on a road that courses along the river bank. The children dock their boat near the farm of Rachel Cooper, an elderly Good Samaritan who happens to raise homeless kids. She takes them under wing, basically adopting them as her own. In an ironic twist, Rachel is also very religious -- singing the same type of hymns ("Leaning on the Everlasting Arms") as Powell. In a climactic stand-off, Rachel wounds Powell (who has located the children at Rachel's farm) with a shotgun blast and has him arrested.

NOTH was decades ahead of its time in both subject matter and style. It's fascinating (and possibly disturbing to the devout) that the arch extremes of Good and Evil are Bible literate evangelizers. NOTH had sexual content and references that while not explicit would have been downright shocking to a 50's audience -- Powell tells Rachel on their wedding night that she's evil to be wearing a negligee and consummation would be a sin. NOTH is absolutely stunning in its black and white hues -- there are shadows at play, reflective waters, and various frogs, owls and spiders that populate the foreground in the scenes where the children flee. The music is haunting, and the camera angles are unusual. The movie is one of only two directed by actor Charles Laughton -- it's thought that he borrowed his style from German Expressionist movies of the 1920's. This would put the Germans about 70 years ahead of their time, stylistically speaking.

Night of the Hunter was a commercial dud upon its 1955 release. No doubt, the people of the "I Like Ike" era would have trouble digesting a movie which darkly, starkly insinuates that organized religion could ever be misused to such evil purposes. The Powell character has "LOVE" tattooed on his right hand and "HATE" tattooed on his left (a piece of cinema imagery stolen by many imitators since 1955). Powell hoodwinks the ladies at the outset by having his hands wrestle each other -- "LOVE" wins over "HATE", of course. At the end of the movie, LOVE really does win out over HATE and maybe that's the only message we need to distill from all the things that happen in this incredible film.

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