The Night of the Hunter (1955) - IMDb IMDb 17 January 2017 4:34 PM, UTC NEWS There was an error trying to load your rating for this title. Some parts of this page won't work property. Please reload or try later. X Beta I'm Watching This! Keep track of everything you watch; tell your friends. Error The Night of the Hunter ( 1955 ) Approved | A religious fanatic marries a gullible widow whose young children are reluctant to tell him where their real daddy hid $10,000 he'd stolen in a robbery.

Director: James Agee (screenplay), Davis Grubb (based on the novel by) Stars: From $2.99 (SD) on Amazon Video ON DISC a list of 22 titles created 15 Aug 2011 a list of 44 titles created 18 Jan 2013 a list of 31 titles created 20 Jul 2014 a list of 32 titles created 05 May 2015 a list of 26 titles created 17 Jul 2015 Title: The Night of the Hunter (1955) 8.1/10 Want to share IMDb's rating on your own site? Use the HTML below. You must be a registered user to use the IMDb rating plugin. A stark, perverse story of murder, kidnapping, and police corruption in a Mexican border town. Director: Orson Welles Crooks plan and execute a daring race-track robbery. Director: Stanley Kubrick A private eye escapes his past to run a gas station in a small town, but his past catches up with him.

Now he must return to the big city world of danger, corruption, double crosses and duplicitous dames. Director: Jacques Tourneur A woman is asked to spy on a group of Nazi friends in South America. How far will she have to go to ingratiate herself with them? Director: Alfred Hitchcock Pulp novelist Holly Martins travels to shadowy, postwar Vienna, only to find himself investigating the mysterious death of an old friend, Harry Lime. Director: Carol Reed Private detective Philip Marlowe is hired by a rich family. Before the complex case is over, he's seen murder, blackmail, and what might be love. Director: Howard Hawks An insurance representative lets himself be talked into a murder/insurance fraud scheme that arouses an insurance investigator's suspicions. Director: Billy Wilder A marshall, personally compelled to face a returning deadly enemy, finds that his own town refuses to help him. Director: Fred Zinnemann In a murder trial, the defendant says he suffered temporary insanity after the victim raped his wife. What is the truth, and will he win his case? Director: Otto Preminger A police detective falls in love with the woman whose murder he is investigating.

Director: Otto Preminger A care-free girl is sold to a traveling entertainer, consequently enduring physical and emotional pain along the way. Director: Federico Fellini A private detective takes on a case that involves him with three eccentric criminals, a gorgeous liar, and their quest for a priceless statuette. Director: John Huston Edit Storyline It's the Great Depression. In the process of robbing a bank of $10,000, Ben Harper kills two people. Before he is captured, he is able to convince his adolescent son John and his daughter Pearl not to tell anyone, including their mother Willa, where he hid the money, namely in Pearl's favorite toy, a doll that she carries everywhere with her. Ben, who is captured, tried and convicted, is sentenced to death. But before he is executed, Ben is in the state penitentiary with a cell mate, a man by the name of Harry Powell, a self-professed man of the cloth, who is really a con man and murderer, swindling lonely women, primarily rich widows, of their money before he kills them. Harry does whatever he can, unsuccessfully, to find out the location of the $10,000 from Ben.

After Ben's execution, Harry decides that Willa will be his next mark, figuring that someone in the family knows where the money is hidden. Despite vowing not to remarry, Willa ends up being easy prey for Harry's outward ... Written by Huggo The Hands Of ROBERT MITCHUM in "The Night of the Hunter" See more » Genres: 24 November 1955 (Argentina) See more » Also Known As: Die Nacht des Jägers See more » Filming Locations: Did You Know? Trivia Reportedly it was Robert Mitchum himself who thought of the shot of hanging upside down in his bunk. Charles Laughton liked the idea, and it was shot that way. See more » Goofs (at around 1h 17 mins) When Harry says good morning to Ruby and Mrs. Cooper, he holds the hat about his chest. In the subsequent shot he is lifting the hat from about his knees. See more » Quotes Rachel Cooper : [to Ruby, sobbing in her lap] Child... You were looking for love, Ruby, in the only foolish way you knew how.

Leaning on the Everlasting Arms (1887) (uncredited) Sung a cappella by Robert Mitchum often Also sung a cappella by Lillian Gish (London, England) – See all my reviews I still hear the lullaby singing sweetly in my head, like a hazy, haunting dream that won't go away. From the opening scene of the beautiful Lillian Gish and her children, watching over the world in a starry sky, this movie just sinks you into a mesmeric fairy tale land. The camera takes us down in one sweeping move to a scene of children playing, a hot sunny day, and right to the feet of a murder victim. And that sweet music turns on us like a twisted nightmare as the scene chases after a car speeding along a country road to find one of movies worst villains. Charles Laughton, in sadly his one and only stab at directing, created a masterpiece of horror with Night of the Hunter. The moments of sugar coated sweetness only make this movie even more disturbing as you wonder how the two can inhabit the same world. Mitchum is terrifying.

More-so in a town full of simple folk ready to match him up with the local widow who needs a father for her lit'le n's. Its like he's walked into the middle of a Frank Capra movie and he's going to do what he wants to. This is not just a great horror movie, but an artist achievement to rival Welles' Kane. The river scene is one of many moments of pure visual splendor. And that sound track just keeps drifting alone, as if trying to coax you into slumber, till the singing madman of your nightmares comes over the hill, relentless. "Chil-dren, Come along now" You don't watch this movie, it watches you. ...Hush, Lit'le ones, Hush. 176 of 230 people found this review helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes Reverend Harry Powell | Villains Wiki | Fandom powered by Wikia Not that You mind the killings, Your book is full of killings... „ ~ Rev. Harry Powell to God. (Reverend) Harry Powell is the main antagonist in Davis Grubb's novel The Night of the Hunter and Charles Laughton's 1955 homonym film adaptation.

The story was based on the crimes of real-life serial killer Harry Powers. He was played by Robert Mitchum . Biography He is introduced as a preacher with a contempt for women, who travels across the estates surrounding the Ohio river delivering his sermons. His modus operandi consists in marrying widows only to later kill them and steal their money. Powell seems to think he is actually doing christian service, since he's spreading the gospels and believes God hates women too. While serving 30 days in jail that he receives for the theft of a touring car, he meets bank robber Ben Harper, who has been sentenced to death for the murder of two men during the robbery. He tries to convince Harper to tell him where are the 10.000 dollars he stole, which he gave to his children to hide, as he vaguely implies during his sleep. As he refuses, Powell decides that upon his release he'll find and marry Harper's widow in order to get the money. After arriving in West Virginia (where the Harper family lives), he fools the townspeople into thinking he was chaplain from the Moundsville penitentiary.

When Willa (the widow) asks him if he knows about the money her husband stole, he answers that Ben told him he threw it in the river. This is enough to convince naive Willa, who marries Powell a few days later, allowing him to spend time alone with her kids Pearl and John to ask them about the money; but as they show reluctant to tell him (because of a pact they made with their father), he'll have to resort to trickery and threats, secretly killing the mother once she finds out about the situation by herself, and, upon learning that the money is in Pearl's doll -he made her talk by threatening to kill John-, forcing the children to escape in boat as he continues the persecution by land. He has the words "LOVE" and "HATE" tattooed on his right and left hand knuckles respectively, which he uses to tell the story of Good and Evil, where ultimately Love (Good) wins. His body language seems to imply that he's naturally left-handed, further adding to his menace as anytime he clasps his hands, all the audience can see is the word "HATE".

Trivia He is ranked as the #29 greatest villain in AFI 's 100 Years...100 Heroes and Villains list. Robert Mitchum once said that this was his favorite movie role he played. The primal pull of Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter | Library of America The Moviegoer June 1, 2016 The primal pull of Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter By Francine Prose Indelible black and white imagery, James Agee’s extraordinary screenplay, and powerful performances by Lillian Gish, Robert Mitchum, and Shelley Winters combine to create a near-Biblical drama of the struggle between good and evil in this 1955 film. Robert Mitchum as Reverend Harry Powell in The Night of the Hunter (dir. Charles Laughton, 1955). (United Artists/Photofest) If we were to measure a film’s achievement purely on the basis of the depth and the indelibility with which it has engraved an image (or images) on our minds, the winner might well be Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter (1955).

For some, the unforgettable image from the film is Robert Mitchum’s hands—the letters L-O-V-E tattooed on the fingers of his right hand, H-A-T-E on his left—enacting their grim wrestling match for the benefit of the (wary or transfixed, worshipful or sensibly skeptical) audiences gathered around Mitchum’s serial killer turned bogus, God-haunted preacher, the Reverend Harry Powell. And then there are the images which, throughout the film, signal the stages and rounds of the Manichean struggle between good and evil: between the deity and the devil. The forces of good are concentrated in Lillian Gish, as Rachel Cooper, who protects the innocent children—John and Pearl—against the murderous predations of Mitchum’s preacher. Long after watching the film, we can still see her in silhouette, keeping a nighttime vigil on her front porch, a rifle across her lap. She is the person we want on our side, the sweet tough grandma willing to go further even than our own sweet tough grandma did, to keep danger and threat at bay.

For some, the image they cannot get out of their minds, however much they might wish to, is that of the children’s mother, Willa Harper (Shelley Winters), wearing her nightgown, her weed-like hair floating behind her among the weeds, sunk to the bottom of a river in the front seat of a Model T. Jeffrey Couchman’s fascinating book, The Night of the Hunter: A Biography of a Film , describes the ingeniousness with which cinematographer Stanley Cortez and art director Hilyard Brown staged this scene, a two-day process that involved a wax dummy of Willa, with its throat slit: “The car and its grisly passenger were submerged in a tank at Republic Studios.

Cortez shot the scene using two cameras, one inside the tank and one outside, and huge arc lamps ‘to create that ethereal death-like something you had in the water.’ Brown created current by spraying water in from a hose, and he set a fig tree upside down in the tank ‘so that the roots of the tree looked like water willows.’” Brighter souls may find themselves returning to the image of the two children, John and Pearl escaping down the river to safety beneath the enormous dark sky, twinkling with starry pinpoints of light. Like so many other plot turns and visual moments in the film, this one brings to mind the Bible. And if we are are unsure about which part of the Bible, exactly, that is, Rachel clears it up for us, and for the children. It’s the story of Moses in the bulrushes, only doubled: two little children instead of one, washing up on shore. Added to that is an evocation of Huckleberry Finn, but without the moral complexities that Twain’s characters must face as members of a slave-owning society. John and Pearl are purely good, the preacher purely evil.

Yet the movie has the emotional complexity, and the ineluctable pull, of a primal fairy tale. Original novel by Davis Grubb The film closely follows the novel by Davis Grubb that was published in 1954 and spent seventeen weeks on The New York Times Best Seller list. Producer Paul Gregory optioned it for his friend Charles Laughton; it would be the only film that Laughton directed. Directors often talk, sincerely or not, about their respect for the book on which a film is based. Laughton meant it, and he and Grubb maintained a close working relationship throughout the making of the film. Couchman’s book includes a selection of the drawings that Grubb made when Laughton asked him to illustrate how he’d imagined certain scenes. As it happened, Grubb could draw, and Couchman points out the similarities between his drawings and those of William Blake and the German Expressionists. Several of these drawings made it into the final cut, for example, the preacher’s shadow appearing on the children’s bedroom wall, and the long shot of the preacher as seen by John, who is hiding in the hayloft.

READ THE SCREENPLAY and Selected Journalism The director’s relationship with the screenwriter was less seamless—less amicable—than his connection with the novelist. One can understand why James Agee was drawn to the project and why the filmmakers would think of him. More than a decade before, Agee had worked with photographer Walker Evans on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men , a book-length study of sharecroppers in the Depression-era South. The Night of the Hunter’s milieu is one that Agee was believed, and believed himself, to know a great deal about. (Robert Mitchum wanted to make the film entirely in West Virginia, to more closely evoke the ambience of the novel, but for budgetary reasons it was filmed mostly on a Studio City lot and on locations in the San Fernando Valley.) Legend has it that Agee submitted a first draft that was over 400 pages long. Couchman rebuts this myth. In reality, the number of pages was 287, roughly double the length of the shooting script, but hardly “bigger than a phone book” (the phrase is Gregory’s).

Agee did go on at great length about this or that minor character, adding monologues and elaborations that never made it to the screen. Still, Couchman writes, ”With few exceptions, even scenes that Agee invents arise straight out of lines or situations in the novel.” Laughton kept Agee working on the film even though they tangled on the rewrites. Couchman reprints in full a cordial memo that Laughton wrote to Agee in the thick of the revisions, the director suggesting tweaks one professional to another. In any case, the published version of the script that appears in Agee On Film and in the Library of America edition of Agee’s Film Writing and Selected Journalism is a model of thoughtful and effective page-to-screen adaptation. It’s extraordinarily faithful to the book, even as it shortens certain scenes and rearranges the sequence of others for greater dramatic effect. This is especially apparent in the economy with which the film conveys essential information about Ben Harper, his crime, and the hidden cache of loot that the preacher (who shares a prison cell with Ben) is determined to find, regardless of the hideous cost.

Again, though, 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. Much has been made of Laughton’s decision to shoot the film in black and white; Couchman writes persuasively about Laughton’s debt to early silent film and to the films of the German Expressionists. In any case, having seen the film, we are utterly unable to imagine it in color. This is partly because the clear and sharp division between black and white mirrors the clarity and the extremity of the film’s divisions between good and evil. Except perhaps in the cases of Ben Harper, who commits a crime out of poverty and desperation, and Willa, who convinces herself that marrying Powell is her salvation, very little in the film occurs in any sort of “gray area” of moral ambiguity—of characters doing the wrong thing for the right reasons.

Original 1955 theatrical poster (click to enlarge) Harry Powell is not so much a character as a personification of everything that is vile. Many villains have a single fatal flaw (jealousy, envy, greed) or even a bit of virtue mixed in with their sins. But Harry Powell displays a rather high percentage of the seven deadlies; he’s greedy, angry, arrogant, and his twisted psyche converts lust into homicidal rage. When we first meet him, he is riding along, trying to remember how many women he has killed. Laughton took Grubb’s sketch (so like a drawing by George Grosz) of the preacher at the burlesque theater and turned it into a sort of terrifying visual joke. As the dancer performs, much to Harry’s disgust, his H-A-T-E hand twitches convulsively in his pocket and his switchblade knife springs open, slicing through his coat in a grimly funny simulacrum of an erection, or an orgasm. What’s striking is how many of the artistic decisions that Laughton made seem to us to have been wholly correct.

Decisions about casting, for example: Couchman tells us that Laughton originally had Laurence Olivier (or more surprisingly still, Jack Lemmon) in mind for the role of Harry Powell. But we can’t think of the preacher without thinking about Mitchum: his sleepy, slightly hooded eyes, his cleft, oddly angled jaw, the way the hair curves up from his forehead. Nor can we think of anyone but Lillian Gish for the role of Rachel, or of Willa Harper as anyone but Shelly Winters, in a role that would prefigure one she played in Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita: the hapless, yearning, not terribly bright widow who falls in love with the predator whose sights are set on her child. The evil step-parent is, of course, a familiar figure from classic fairy tales, and at several points during the making of the film Laughton referred to the similarity between the work he envisioned and a fairy tale. “It’s a really nightmarish sort of Mother Goose tale,” he told Gregory.

“A beautiful ballad, folk-tale, and real Americana.” As the film progresses, we may be reminded of different stories we knew as children: Hansel and Gretel wandering in the woods, escaping their murderous stepmother’s plans for them. But the story I found myself thinking of most often is Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen”: an innocent little boy and girl must contend with the dark and often erotic dangers of the strange new world in which they find themselves. By the end of the film, the preacher has come to seem like one of the wolves who—in tales ranging from “Little Red Riding Hood” to “The Three Little Pigs”—is wounded, maddened, reduced from the status of a rogue demon to that of the animal that indeed he is, and always was. The Night of the Hunter did not do well commercially or critically upon its release. Most contemporary reviewers who praised its power also condemned what they considered “artiness.” But like something out of another kind of fairy tale—the sad story with the happy ending—Laughton’s film is now generally acknowledged as a work of art and a classic.

It is the tale of cream rising to the top, of the scullery maid recognized as the true princess, of greatness and virtue making its presence felt. I can only be grateful for the way that the film’s fortunes played out. It went from the big screen to television much more rapidly than was common at the time, or at any time. And it was on television that I first saw the film, when I was a child, and where its images became inscribed on my mind. Now it can be seen in occasional theatrical revivals, or on DVD or streamed into one’s home, giving us all a chance to again drink in the images we cannot forget, and to discover that the film remains as powerful, as original, as haunting and beautiful as we remember. Turner Classic Movies airs The Night of the Hunter on July 18, 2016 . Trailer for The Night of the Hunter (1:55) The Night of the Hunter (1955). Directed by Charles Laughton. Written by James Agee, based on Davis Grubb’s novel. With Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters, and Lillian Gish.

Buy the Criterion Collection DVD/Blu-ray • Watch on iTunes • Rent from Netflix • Watch on Vudu Francine Prose is the author of more than twenty works of fiction, most recently Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932. Her nonfiction books include The New York Times best seller Reading Like a Writer. A former president of PEN American Center, she is a Distinguished Visiting Writer at Bard College. The Moviegoer, a biweekly feature from Library of America, showcases leading writers revisiting memorable films to watch or watch again, all inspired by classic works of American literature. Explore Further Robert Mitchum as Reverend Harry Powell: 10 Quotes About Iconic Role Robert Mitchum as Reverend Harry Powell: 10 Quotes About Iconic Role By Shannon Jones | Thursday, 02 Apr 2015 07:00 PM Close A A Described by director Charles Laughton as "a nightmarish sort of Mother Goose tale," the film "The Night of the Hunter" was a turning point for Robert Mitchum's career. Mitchum starred as Rev. Harry Powell, a man of God who is far more sinister than he lets on.

Here are 10 quotes about the iconic role of Robert Mitchum as Rev. Harry Powell. 1. "His performance in Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter (1955) – now on re-release — is startlingly stiff-necked and straight backed, with a mannered theatrical baritone, a change from Mitchum's usual rangy coolness. Perhaps it was this unfamiliarity that contributed to the film's failure on first release, a bruising experience that helped make it Charles Laughton's sole directorial credit." – Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times 3. "But Mitchum as the alarming preacher is a really daring bit of counterintuitive casting. For the previous ten years or so, he had been perhaps the coolest and toughest of film noir heroes. With his loose, lazy walk, his somnolent eyes, and his deep, buttery drawl, he always gave the impression of a man who could not be fazed, even in the direst circumstances. Harry Powell is not that sort of character. It isn’t just that Mitchum is playing a villain, or even that he’s using his indolent manner to convey a profoundly sinister kind of unctuousness.

What’s truly startling about his performance is how buffoonish he allows himself to be, in between bouts of menace. His Harry Powell is a man whose composure masks the most unruly impulses — imperfectly capped wells of lust and greed and violence that tend to leak in moments of crisis, and not in attractive ways." Vote Now: Who Is Your Favorite Actor of All Time? 4. "Mitchum's performance prevents us from dispassionately engaging with Harry merely as an assemblage of diverting and revelatory signifiers, though, as he's too lively and uncontainable for that. The actor plays Harry not exactly as an evil deity, but as a self-entitled child who feels that he should have whatever he wants because he makes a pretense of being in the "God business" with the reverend shtick. Mitchum lets you see Harry's absurdity, and thus his humanity, which only allows him to grow larger in your thoughts as a figure of terror, an agent of unquantifiable reckoning who reveals that faith is only as noble, or as diseased, as its practitioner." – Adam Smith, Empire 9.

"They worked on it for five months after I was finished and Charles [Laughton, the director] put in all those owls and pussycats. Said he thought I was too horrific. He didn't want people to drag their children off the streets every time I passed. The character was too strong for him, but that is what he asked me to begin with." – Robert Mitchum, on his "Night of the Hunter" performance 10. "Mitchum gives one of cinema's greatest performances as a demented man who's one part preacher, one part murderer, and totally determined to track down a stash of stolen loot in the possession of two kids." Strange Culture: Spiritual Leaders in Film: Robert Mitchum as Reverend Harry Powell Sunday, September 19, 2010 Spiritual Leaders in Film: Robert Mitchum as Reverend Harry Powell One of the topics this blog has explored over the years has been the presentation of spiritual ideas in films, more specifically I've recently explored some pastors, preachers, priests and reverends in film.

Such recent posts have included discussions about the stereotypes of film priest or my appreciation of the character of Father O'Malley (Bing Crosby) in the Oscar winning film Going My Way. I continue this discussion with a look at famous film villian, Reverend Harry Powell in the film Night of The Hunter, played by Robert Mitchum (pictured above). Understandably unpopular in 1955 when it was released, this film featuring a villianous traveling preacher, has over time become increasingly popular and influential. The character of Harry Powell was created by David Grubb who published the book the book The Night Of The Hunter in 1953, based loosely on a murderer who was hung in 1932 named Harry Powers. In the 1955 film, one of the most iconic images of Harry Powell is his tattooed knuckles, one reading "love," while the other reads "hate." This in itself is interesting to me, and perhaps shows my ignorance of tattoo history, as I have a hard time picturing even the concept of tattooed knuckles in 1955.

Yet, early in the film (in a bizarre floating head intro) with a reference to scripture from Jesus' Sermon on the Mount Beware of the false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits. Grapes are not gathered from thorn bushes nor figs from thistles, are they? So every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit. --Matthew 7:15-17 And it is this idea of a wolf in sheeps clothing, that is very clearly in the character of Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum) the entire film. The Impact of Wolves in Sheep's Clothing While the 1955 audience might have partially been appauled at the character of Harry Powell because they could have deemed it skeptical or inappropriate to paint a preacher in a evil or deceptive light, over fifty years later this image of the manipulative and corrupt preacher might resonate better. The world has always had religious scandal, but it seems like in today's world you don't have to look far to find it.

When young John Harper (Billy Chapin) sees through the preacher's manipulation, it is understandable that later in the film when he comes in contact with another stronly religious person (Rachel Cooper played by Lilian Gish, pictured right), that Ben would pull back and run to the porch when she pulls out the Bible to tell a story. The implication is clear in this film, and relatable in culture. When someone acts on religious authority to manipulate people for personal gain the impact on long-term perceptions on God and other religious leaders and followers is tarnished. The Modern Discussion: Rachel Cooper & Harry Powell I think the modern discussion around this film that could really be impactful is to look at this character as well as the Rachel Cooper character. Rachel Cooper is not Reverand Harry Powell and although both carry a weapon and no the same spiritual songs (their duet in the film of "Leaning on the Everlasting Arms" is eerly haunting in context). Yet this film, particularly the juxtaposition of these two characters can open up a whole realm of relevant questions including: • How can you tell the difference by Rachel Coopers and Harry Powells (especially if you're faith is new or young)?

• How do spiritual followers handle those they identify as "wolves in sheep clothing?" • How can the influence of "wolves" be repaired? While this film is hardly for everyone's "must see film lists," I think it's a unique film that has a unique relevance that resonates with modern viewers. Image of Robert Mitchum as Harry Powell from Guardian's Article: "There Are No Real Men In Movies Any More." Image of Lilian Gish from the blog post by Foxy Librarian titles "In Praise of the Battleaxe." Posted by Amazon.com: The Night of the Hunter: Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters, Lillian Gish, James Gleason: Amazon Digital Services LLC By Wing J. Flanagan on September 28, 2001 Format: DVD|Verified Purchase There are images in Night of the Hunter, Charles Laughton's only film as a director, that will sear themselves into your brain and haunt you the rest of your life. That's not hyperbole; this film is simply that potent. Nothing about Night of the Hunter is "realistic" or even plausible - not the plot, not the dialogue, not the behavior of the child characters, not the photography.

Yet, Night of the Hunter transcends realism utterly to do something far more challenging than merely create a simulacrum of reality. It creates a waking dream - a vivid hallucination of fearsome beasts, tragic heroines, children in peril, and ultimate redemption. It succeeds as a modern fairy tale in the darkest tradition of the brothers Grimm. Even comparisons to German expressionist cinema of the silent era (apt though they are) diminish the singular, elemental power of this film. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Nosferatu are stunning, but it's hard to imagine either of them getting under the skin in quite the same way. The plot centers on the evil machinations of Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum), a murderous, psychotic "preacher" who does time with bank-robber Ben Harper (Peter Graves), father of two young children (Billy Chapin - brother of Father Knows Best star Lauren, and Sally Jane Bruce). Before being taken away by the police, Harper hid the money he stole and swore his children to secrecy about its location. No one else - not even their mother Willa (wonderfully played by Shelley Winters) - knows where the money is hidden.

But after Ben Harper is hanged for the murder of two bank guards killed during the robbery, Harry Powell makes it his business to find out. Thus begins a cinematic odyssey like no other, filled with stark symbolism and eerie imagery. Perhaps the most unsettling image is the celebrated shot of Willa's corpse in the river, strapped into a car, her hair billowing out in the water like the aquatic plants that surround her. It is one of the strongest images in all cinema - comparable to the baby carriage racing down the Odessa steps in Battleship Potemkin, or the eyeglasses landing on the snow-covered battlefield of Dr. Zhivago. The central sequence is a boat journey that the children take down-river in an attempt to escape the evil preacher. Though obviously filmed on a sound stage and filled with incongruous and frankly theatrical moments, the overall effect is nearly overwhelming in the way it evokes childhood fears of abandonment and pursuit. Every time I see it, I fall completely under its spell. Stanley Cortez's breathtaking black-and-white cinematography is complemented by Walter Schumann's atmospheric score. There is a moment during the river journey when Pearl (the little girl) begins singing a children's lullaby.

The orchestra swells and turns the song into a dreamy, meditative piece of night music - filled with dread, sadness, and awe. It's not at all realistic, but if that scene doesn't give you chills, then you're just made of stone. It is fitting that Lillian Gish plays the children's savior, the elderly Mrs. Cooper - a righteous woman with a steely constitution. Gish was there for the birth of cinema itself. Her presence in Night of the Hunter is like seal of approval, a testimony to this film's enduring status as a classic. My only reservation with this otherwise superb DVD is the warning at the beginning that "This film has been modified from its original version. It has been formatted to fit your TV". Either that's flatly untrue (as Night of the Hunter looks perfectly at home in 4:3), or MGM has cheated us by not giving a true American classic its due. By Sheila Chilcote-Collins VINE VOICE on June 14, 2004 Format: DVD From the novel by Davis Grubb - the first and only film directed and purportedly written by the flamboyant and swashbucking actor, Charles Laughton.

In Robert Mitchum's biography, he stated that Laughton found the script by James Agee (co-writer of the African Queen) totally unacceptable. Laughton paid off Agee, sent him packing and rewrote virtually the entire script himself, uncredited. This 1955 melodrama cum Grimm's Fairy Tale is brilliantly directed, acted, scored and the cinematography by Stanley Cortez is breathtakingly creepy and beautiful all at the same time. Mitchum plays the sexually repressed, thieving, lying, cheating and quite sociopathic Rev. Harry Powell. The ol' Rev. got caught in a stolen vehicle while watching a "hootchie cootchie" dancer in a burlesque establishment and is sentenced to 30 days in the state penitentiary. It just so happens as fate takes a turn that the scheming Rev's bunkmate is in the clink for killing two men and robbing a bank of over $10,000.00 that has never been recovered. The Rev. tries to get the "sinner" to tell him where the money is hidden but the man won't budge. The man is hanged for his crime, the Rev.

is let out of jail and goes to find the man's wife, played by Shelley Winters, his two young children and , of course, the loot! The Rev. even marries the young widow to get to the money and many evils ensue... Lillian Gish turns in a wonderful performance as a benefactor of the children. I don't want to spoil the premise of the movie as other reviewers have done. Just know that it's a horror/fairytale/melodrama/satire all rolled into a great piece of filmaking! If you liked Mitchum in "Cape Fear" you will love him as the sociopathic Rev. Powell! Happy Watching! By claus_byrial@hotmail.com on April 30, 2001 Format: DVD Charles Laughton unfortunately only directed one film, but what a brilliant one it turned out to be! A gothic film-noir classic infused with a wicked sense of understated black humor. The storyline is quite simple; centered around the quest for the loot of a bank-robbery gone wrong, but the real high-point of this film is Robert Mitchum.

Mitchum's portrayal of a sexually frustrated, sadistic, murderous conman, that tries to uncover the whereabouts of 10.000 $ by presenting himself as a god-fearing preacher-man, is one of the most sinister and menacing displays of criminally insane, psychopatic behaviour ever captured on film. Laughton's direction and Stanley Cortez's cinematography, especially in the underwater, where the dead body of Shelly Winters is found strapped to her car, and in the nightmare-ish, dream-like sequense, where Mitchum stalks the river-bound children, creates scenes that has forever etched themselves in my "movie-memory". Laughton's directing-style seem influenced by german expressionists as Fritz Lang or Walter Ruttmann with his highly stylized use of film-techniques to underline Mitchum's darkened mental state and the general disturbed "feel" of this truly frightening film.

The Night of the Hunter – review | Film | The Guardian The Night of the Hunter – review 5 / 5 stars Robert Mitchum is a preaching paterfamilias from hell, and Charles Laughton's complex 1955 classic thoroughly deserves the turnaround in its reputation over the years Startlingly stiff-necked … Robert Mitchum in The Night of the Hunter. Photograph: BFI Thursday 16 January 2014 17.31 EST First published on Thursday 16 January 2014 17.31 EST Share on Messenger Close "I come not with peace, but with a sword," says Robert Mitchum's psychopathic bogus preacher, brandishing a switchblade that at moments of extreme sexual excitement and disgust will poke out of his trouser-pocket, tearing the material. His performance in Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter (1955) – now on re-release – is startlingly stiff-necked and straight backed, with a mannered theatrical baritone, a change from Mitchum's usual rangy coolness.

Perhaps it was this unfamiliarity that contributed to the film's failure on first release, a bruising experience that helped make it Charles Laughton's sole directorial credit. In fact, this suspense thriller is a stunning piece of work, with the shadows of German expressionism and a compositional sense comparable to the work of George Stevens: it trumps its own noir cynicism with a thrilling and plausible idealism in the final moments. Critic James Agee adapted the 1953 bestseller by Davis Grubb, inspired by the real-life "Bluebeard" serial killer Harry Powers who in depression-era America killed widows and their children for the family savings. Mitchum plays "Reverend" Harry Powell, a predatory killer, grifter, car-thief and horse-thief who believes his own god-fearing rhetoric. In the poverty-stricken south, a world of broken families and economic despair, this paterfamilias from hell finds credulous victims. He is the ancestor of many a modern televangelist and snake-oil scripturalist.

While in jail, Powell hears that a fellow prisoner on death row for robbery and murder has hidden the $10,000 loot with his kids: once free, Powell sets out to find the man's frightened widow ( Shelley Winters ), seduce her and terrify the children into giving him the cash. Every frame of this film is brilliantly contrived, particularly the underwater nightmare at the end. A gripping, complex chiller. Film Notes -The Night of the Hunter The Night of the Hunter (American, 1955, 93 minutes, b/w, 16 mm) Directed by Charles Laughton Robert Mitchum . . . . . . . . . . Rev. Harry Powell Shelley Winters . . . . . . . . . . Willa Harper James Gleason . . . . . . . . . . Birdie Steptoe Peter Graves . . . . . . . . . . Ben Harper The following film notes were prepared for the New York State Writers Institute by Kevin Jack Hagopian, Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at Pennsylvania State University: Usually, James Agee got it right.

His fiction, like A Death in the Family, hits the palate like mountain water, clear and stinging and sweet. His essays, like his 1930s analysis of the Tennessee Valley Authority for Fortune magazine, have the incisiveness of the surgeon’s knife. And his reportage, like the iconoclastic Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, speaks the truth so uncompromisingly you feel like you’re looking at a naked soul. Agee was known as a film reviewer of unusual compassion and intelligence, willing to see brilliance in the "B" horror films of Val Lewton and just as willing to chortle at the pomposity of the same season’s "important" films. In 1946, James Agee reviewed the film OUT OF THE PAST for The Nation, and was appalled. "Bob Mitchum is so very sleepily self-confident with the women that when he slopes into clinches you expect him to snore in their faces." But what the normally astute Agee mistook for disengagement was a romanticism so arch, so fully committed to a spirit of ennui that the screen had simply never seen its like before.

Agee must have been surprised, then, at the performance Mitchum gave in Agee’s script from Davis Grubb’s novel, THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER. In THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER, Mitchum plays "‘Preacher’ Harry Powell" a charismatic pretender who seduces and murders in order to get at a fortune stashed by a convict named Harper. He wins the heart of Harper’s widow, "Willa" (Shelley Winters) and then eyes her children "John" (Billy Chapin) and "Pearl" (Sally Jane Bruce) for what they know about the loot. Mitchum plays Powell like a volcano, a man who allows those around him to believe that his brutality is a form of religious ecstasy. If they take him at his word, they will surely die. Powell’s romanticism is a blasphemous one, overloaded with eros and starved of love. In films as diverse as HEAVEN KNOWS; MR. ALLISON; WHERE DANGER LIVES; and THE LUSTY MEN; Mitchum played characters in the grip of romance.

Possessed by the spirit of romanticism in NIGHT OF THE HUNTER, he plays on that familiarity, and twists it inside out to portray a man whose whole existence has become nothing more than an expression of his own id. Only a performer who has come to understand the joy of selfless surrender to love so completely as Mitchum could play a character so utterly immersed in his own desires. Charles Laughton never directed another film, perhaps because THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER is such an eloquent statement of false romanticism, and such a complete aesthetic vision in itself that it required no further elaboration. Frequently, there are images so profound as to make it seem as though Laughton and Agee have set out to do nothing so much as reinvent cinema to suit themselves. There is the evocative trip down the river, amid a world so alive with the creatures of the Ark that it seems a watery Eden. There is the powerful presence of "Rachel," shotgun-toting guardian of the endangered children, as played by Lillian Gish with the same fragile beauty and the same conscience of steel that D.W. Griffith had known in the silent days.

There is the blithering Shelley Winters as Willa, a flighty, stupid creature to place alongside Winters’ work in A PLACE IN THE SUN and LOLITA as the pathetic wife of the moment, a creature who is momentarily delighted with her good fortune in love, but who slowly comes to know what we have known all along – that her mate is using her as a way station on a road of deception. Our last sight of Willa restores the beauty Harry Powell had stolen from her, but it is a view we wish we’d never had. But most important, there is frock-coated Harry Powell himself. The way Mitchum plays Harry, towering, fulminating, and immanently catastrophic, we are all standing in the quaking shoes of the two children whose lives are in such mortal danger. He claims to be a walking battle between "love" and "hate," but hate is clearly the winner in that struggle. Harry Powell is the screen’s most spectacular, kinetic villain/protagonist between Karloff’s Frankenstein and Deniro’s Travis Bickle. Perhaps Agee could appreciate the manic intensity Mitchum brought to the role, for Agee himself was as meteoric a personality as Powell.

During his Fortune days, Agee was once found hanging upside down out of his window in the Chrysler building many hundreds of feet above the ground, while a portable record player pounded out Beethoven at earsplitting volume. He was, he said, merely seeking inspiration. On the wall of his apartment building, one of his neighbors chalked, "The man who lives here is a looney." Agee died in the back of a taxicab, dismayingly young, of a heart attack in the year of NIGHT OF THE HUNTER’s release. Mitchum was to live a long and spirited life. Both remained their own men to the very end. For a single moment in NIGHT OF THE HUNTER, each gave voice to the other’s singleness of purpose and strange integrity. — Kevin Hagopian, Penn State University For additional information, contact the Writers Institute at 518-442-5620 or online at Night of the Hunter: a masterpiece of American cinema - Telegraph Film Night of the Hunter: a masterpiece of American cinema The sets look fake, the dialogue is risible, and its director never made another film.

Yet the rereleased 1955 thriller Night of the Hunter, with its chilling performance from Robert Mitchum, still has the power to shock Night of the Hunter: a masterpiece of American cinema Photo: Rex Features By David Gritten 1:26PM GMT 17 Jan 2014 If there’s anything stranger than Night of the Hunter , a curious, melodramatic morality tale blatantly setting forces of good and evil in stark opposition to each other, it’s the way this 1955 film, directed by British actor Charles Laughton and starring Robert Mitchum in one of his most memorable roles, has grown in stature in the decades since its release. Originally shunned by audiences and scorned by most critics, it’s now regarded as a masterpiece of American cinema – which seems all the more remarkable for being the only film Laughton ever directed. In the US and Britain it gets re-issued every few years and somehow looks better than ever. It’s an odd postscript to the life of a distinctly odd movie – a slab of Southern Gothic set in the Depression era. Mitchum plays Reverend Harry Powell, a crooked, demented preacher who preys on the weak.

He’s an unforgettable, iconic character: on each knuckle of his right hand, the four letters, L-O-V-E are tattooed; on the left hand, it’s H-A-T-E. (For years afterwards, young men who fancied themselves as tough guys sported similar tattoos.) While in jail, Powell meets a man condemned to die who discloses he has left $10,000 hidden somewhere in his house, located on the banks of a small-town river. On his release, Powell tracks down the man’s family, charms his widow Willa (Shelley Winters) into marrying him and tries to befriend his young son and daughter, who are suspicious of him. Related Articles 15 Jan 2014 Night of the Hunter (Rex Features) When their mother disappears, the children hide from him in a basement. He finds them but fails to catch them. They take flight, hopping on a small boat that takes them up river. The preacher grimly and single-mindedly follows them: he knows they know where the money is. This chase, made more suspenseful by the children’s terror, takes up half the story.

Still, this plot outline does little to convey the uniqueness of Night of the Hunter. Laughton and his director of photography Stanley Cortez (who worked on Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons) opted for an expressionistic look – all oblique angles, long shadows, shot in black-and-white; stylistically it was a throwback to 30 years before, when German-based directors such as Fritz Lang were in their pomp. And the expressionism of Night of the Hunter heightens its sense of dread. It is based on a novel by Davis Grubb, whose mother, a former social worker, had witnessed Depression-era hardship and the vulnerability of children in those times. READ: Simon Callow on Charles Laughton Its script was the subject of controversy over the years. It’s credited to the celebrated screenwriter James Agee (he also wrote The African Queen), but there were suggestions that Laughton had re-written him after a series of disagreements; Agee was in poor health by this time, and died of a heart attack the year The Night of the Hunter opened. Still, subsequent research suggests that Agee substantially wrote the script, though Laughton may have had some input.

Also, Mitchum and Laughton reportedly fell out during shooting; this was not a happy production. Still, it was a fruitful one with memorable results. The first inkling of what happened to Shelley Winters arrives in a remarkable scene that retains the power to shock; her corpse is seen at the bottom of the river, at the wheel of a car. Her drifting hair is caught up in seaweed. The scene is a crucial one. Up to this point, Mitchum portrays Powell with a light, breezy touch; when he stands at the top of the stairs leading to the basement where the kids are cowering, and coos: “Chillllll-dren?” he’s capable of raising laughs, even if they’re nervous ones. Certainly he’s a rascal and a criminal, but is he any worse? Once it’s clear he’s murdered Willa, there’s no doubting it, and the struggle between innocence and evil, embodied in his pursuit of the children, starts in earnest.

Robert Mitchum (left) and Billy Chapin in Night of the Hunter (Rex Features) The children’s journey up river is represented strangely: as their little boat proceeds, we see an owl, a turtle, a bullfrog and a spider’s web in the foreground. It’s as if they’re in some little Eden before the fall. But then The Night of the Hunter changes pace again in its third act, which is dominated by Rachel Cooper, a kindly, God-fearing old woman who gives shelter to vulnerable or orphaned children. She’s played by Lillian Gish, one of the biggest stars of the silent movie era, who resumed her career after a decade-long break from films. Gish, in her early 60s when she made The Night of the Hunter, shows the tougher side of Miss Cooper; she’s not afraid to pick up a rifle and stay awake in an all-night vigil to protect her charges from the threat of the psychopathic Powell.

The film’s a bizarre piece of work, all the more so because it borders on being laughable: its sets look artificial, and parts of the dialogue, highlighting the difference between good and evil and the importance of protecting children, come close to self-parody in their suggestion of the obvious. After one brief scene, when we see an owl swoop down on a tiny rabbit to kill it, Gish proclaims: “It’s a hard world for little things.” Yes, Miss Cooper, we get it. Still, its eccentricities and contradictions make it fascinating; there are so many different aspects of The Night of the Hunter for admirers to discuss, it’s hardly surprising it’s become a cult movie . Why did it fail commercially and critically on its release? The most persuasive reason is that it was painfully out of step with its times. Mid-50s America was a prosperous, expansionist country, hugely upbeat and optimistic about its future. This twisted little morality tale (not even in colour!) offered a dark side of humanity that people didn’t care to consider. And it hearkened back to an era of poverty and austerity that most Americans wanted to put firmly behind them. READ: James Dean's legend lives on – but what about the films?

Yet it looks better and better with the passing of time. In 1968, the critic Pauline Kael called it "one of the most frightening movies ever made." I’m not sure ‘frightening’ is quite the word, but for certain it’s deeply unsettling: there’s something about the doggedness of Powell’s pursuit of the children, an obsession that suggests an unhinged mind. This sense of unease increases whenever the children glimpse their pursuer, usually not full-on but in shadow or silhouette; his swaggering stance and the outline of his broad-brimmed hat are horribly and immediately recognisable. A masterpiece of sorts, then, and it’s extraordinary that Laughton never directed another film . Yet after the general reception to The Night of the Hunter, one imagines no studio bosses were rushing to court him. And Laughton was wary of Hollywood and its machinations; his experiences on this film may simply have convinced him to stick to acting. A side of his talent lost to us, then. One final aspect of the film that must be stressed is Mitchum’s brilliant performance.

(I’ll confess here that even without The Night of the Hunter, he’d remain one of my very favourite film actors.) It’s a performance like no other he ever gave – none of that heavy-lidded insolence or tough guy shambling, a schtick he did brilliantly and defined him in the public’s mind. As Powell, he’s light on his feet, in full command of a hellfire preacher’s rhetoric – and as chilling a personification of evil as the movies ever gave us. Mitchum alone is reason enough to see The Night of the Hunter; happily, there are many others. The Night of the Hunter is on release now The Night of the Hunter Official Trailer #1 - Robert Mitchum Movie (1955) HD - YouTube The Night of the Hunter Official Trailer #1 - Robert Mitchum Movie (1955) HD Want to watch this again later? Sign in to add this video to a playlist. Need to report the video? Sign in to report inappropriate content. Rating is available when the video has been rented. This feature is not available right now. Please try again later.

Uploaded on Nov 15, 2011 Subscribe to TRAILERS: Subscribe to COMING SOON: Subscribe to CLASSIC TRAILERS: Like us on FACEBOOK: Follow us on TWITTER: The Night of the Hunter Trailer - The evil Reverend Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum) marries a widow (Shelley Winters) in order to locate her late husband's stolen money. MGM - 1955

Question: Robert Mitchum plays Reverend Harry Powell in which 1955 film?
Answer: The Night of the Hunter