Critics reviews

If it ranks as Mitchum's broadest, showiest performance, it was no doubt egged on by his director, the brilliant Charles Laughton, who knew a thing or two about the deliciousness of pure ham. His only match in that film is the magnificent black-and-white cinematography of Stanley Cortez.

It is the power of the image (as much that of dialogue or setting) that stays with us. What could have been a familiar scene—two criminals sharing a prison cell, one attempting to pry a secret out of the other—becomes something wholly new and shocking as the preacher's head appears—upside down!—when he leans over from the top bunk to better hear what Ben is mumbling in his sleep.

A simple villain becomes a necessary force, just like the sentimentality of townsfolk becomes violence, the film's Expressionist shadowplay (shot by Stanley Cortez) becomes the American South, and so on, until the end of days. It's a movie to watch, maybe, once every decade, as one's face changes, and doesn't.

The Night of the Hunter is so loaded with neurotic symbology that it can accommodate nearly any meaning any generation wishes to assign to it, and that's the source of its uneasy, primordial power... Nearly 60 years after its initial release, The Night of the Hunter still resonates in a corporatized culture that prizes banally encouraging self-marketing jargon as distraction from the gradual legally sanctioned demise of the New Deal's benefits.

It is not a film noir, though it stars Robert Mitchum as a psychopathic killer on the trail of stolen money, and is shot in a style inspired by German Expressionism; nor is it a silent film, though it opens and closes on moral center Lillian Gish in direct-address. It is both Christian parable and folk tale, with its hymns, homilies, and orphans carried to safety by nature's benevolence; but it is also grounded in the social concerns of its makers.

The Night Of The Hunter, in which Laughton does not appear, failed both critically and commercially, ending his career behind the camera before it had even begun. Since he died just seven years later, in 1962, it's unlikely that the world was thereby deprived of multiple masterpieces, but the loss of even one potential film as magnificent and unprecedented as this one is cause for serious mourning. It's as if Woody Allen had only made Annie Hall.

As Laughton crafted his story and its imagery, the work of the American cinematic pioneer D. W. Griffith primarily influenced him. For this new filmmaker, Griffith mastered a heightened, poetic melodrama, and Laughton aspired to recapture the power of his silent cinema. At the same time, Laughton and cinematographer Stanley Cortez also applied the techniques of German Expressionism to render this strange fairy tale of the Deep South.