Review of The Night of the Hunter (1955) by Cole M — 28 Dec 2010

Had to watch this for my film-class. Many directors have made omages to this film from David Lynch (it starts off in West Virginia amongst the backdrop of a smalltown, very Norman Rockfellar-esque, in the vein of Americana with warm apple pie, kids playing baseball, etc. and then there's a murder.) From the Cohen Brothers (Robert Mitchum's character could best be described as a right-winged fundamentalist, a false prophet, and a zealot who roams from town to town as a fake preacher evangelizing the gospel and jaundicing it to his own demagogeury. How he is like a Cohen Brothers' villain is the way where he looks harmless, much like Javier Bardem in "No Country for Old Men" but yet he is a Boogeyman, cloaked and garbed in terror and deception. And lastly from Spike Lee (Mitchum's Rev. Powell character wears "Love" and "Hate" on his knuckles. Lee made a omage to this in "Do the Right Thing" with Radio Raheem.).

The film has grown on me, being both pecuilarily beautiful and fantastical; the noted scenes being the dead mother underwater where at one moment we think we're looking at a woman's hair submerged beneath the depths and then it turns into seaweed and we finally see her sitting upright in a jeep, drowned and dead. The other noted scene being the kids boating down the river with many animals (both predatorial and friendly) greeting them and watching them from afar as they go by.

Mitchum, when I first watched this, came off as a caricature, but there's something definitely sinister and yet charming about his false preacher role.

Lilian Gish though saves the movie playing what a true Christian looks like; a humanitarian, a speaker of the truth and God, and someone who'll protect her flock and save them from the wretchedness and wickedness of the sinful world.