Review of The Night of the Hunter (1955) by Roger T — 27 Jul 2012

The Night of the Hunter is a great, classic thriller. It interestingly combines a good amount of seeming naivete with some really dark and disturbing material for its time period (1955). It tells a solid story with one of the best movie villains ever, and it has a really interesting visual style to boot.

The story, mostly told from the viewpoint of children, concerns a couple of kids who are terribly threatened by a thoroughly evil man during the Great Depression. The kids' father, who has recently been executed, had hidden a bunch of stolen money somewhere in their house. Knowledge of this situation prompts a bogus preacher (Robert Mitchum) to invade the kids' lives under a pretense of good will and piety. Frightening things develop from there.

The most famous part of this movie by far is Robert Mitchum's sinister performance as the evil preacher, a serial killer who hides behind the Bible and his own sermons (which he tells using tattoos which spell "Love" and "Hate" across his knuckles. Mitchum is utterly creepy and slithery in this role. It's a brilliant, by-now iconic performance. Shelley Winters plays the children's almost surreally gullible and pliant mother, while Lillian Gish turns up late in the movie as a fierce, genuinely faithful protector.

The movie was directed by Charles Laughton, better known as a bombastic actor in movies like Witness for the Prosecution and Mutiny on the Bounty. This was his only film as a director, sadly. His visual style is brilliant, especially for a first-time director. He uses a lot of weird set designs to make the interiors claustrophobic and scary. The sequence of the children boating down a river has a lot of striking, memorable imagery. A couple of other shots, particularly an underwater one, are especially amazing for the time. This is probably the best movie about child endangerment ever made.