Review of The Night of the Hunter (1955) by Kevin D — 18 Jul 2009

I like to feel sympathy for even the most repugnant characters. Mitchum does not allow us to feel for him an inch (it doesn't help that he's not only an unrepentant murder, but also an evangelist).

He doesn't even have any capacity for pleasure, turning a young Shelley Winters out of bed (!) and using sancitmony as pretext. Laughton, however, is not giving us a figure of pure evil to sneer at and delight in the destrucion of, but presenting a fable of more moral complexity.

It's a shame he never directed again.