The Night of the Hunter (1955) Pages: ( 1 ) ( 2 ) ( 3 ) Background The Night of the Hunter (1955) is a truly compelling, haunting, and frightening classic masterpiece thriller-fantasy, and the only film ever directed by the great British actor Charles Laughton. The American gothic, Biblical tale of greed, innocence, seduction, sin and corruption was adapted for the screen by famed writer-author James Agee (and Laughton, but without screen credit). Although one of the greatest American films of all time, the imaginatively-chilling, experimental, sophisticated work was idiosyncratic, film noirish, avante garde, dream-like expressionistic and strange, and it was both ignored and misunderstood at the time of its release. Originally, it was a critical and commercial failure. Robert Mitchum gave what some consider his finest performance in a precedent-setting, unpopular, and truly terrifying role as the sleepy-eyed, diabolical, dark-souled, self-appointed serial killer/Preacher with psychotic, murderous tendencies while in pursuit of $10,000 in cash.

Lillian Gish played his opposite - a saintly good woman who provided refuge for the victimized children. The disturbing, complex story was based on the popular, best-selling 1953 Depression-era novel of the same name by first-time writer Davis Grubb, who set the location of his novel in the town of Moundsville, WV, where the West Virginia Penitentiary (also mentioned in the film) was located. Grubb lived in nearby Clarksburg as a young teenager. [Robert Mitchum's role was inspired by the real-life character of Harry Powers, known nationally as "the Bluebeard of Quiet Dell" (outside of Clarksburg) and West Virginia's most famous mass murderer, who was hanged on March 18, 1932, at the West Virginia Penitentiary. Powers was convicted of killing Asta B. Eicher, a widow, along with her three children, and another widow, Dorothy Lemke of Massachusetts in the early 1930s. He may also have killed a traveling salesman.

The menacing figure of The Preacher inspired such characters as The Tall Man (Angus Scrimm) in Phantasm (1979) and (especially) Mr. Dark (Jonathan Pryce) in Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983) who similarly stalk their young prey.] In addition, the visual-striking black-white photography of Stanley Cortez (who also shot Welles' black and white The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) ) and the evocative musical score of Walter Schumann (mixing hymns, children's songs, and orchestral music) are exceptional. However, the film was not nominated for a single Academy Award, in a year when the short romantic drama Marty (1955) unaccountably won the Best Picture Oscar. The film's slogan on a major poster proclaimed: "The wedding night, the anticipation, the kiss, the knife. BUT ABOVE ALL...THE SUSPENSE!" The image showed actor Mitchum hugging a distressed Shelley Winters, with the L-O-V-E tattooed hand embracing her back, and the H-A-T-E tattooed hand grasping a knife.

[Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing (1989) referenced the love/hate, left and right hand theme, when Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn) explained the love/hate dichotomy. In The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), LOVE and HATE were tattooed on Eddie's (Meat Loaf) knuckles, and in The Blues Brothers (1980), the two brothers (John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd) have their names tattooed on their knuckles. In The Simpsons episode "Cape Feare", the menacing Sideshow Bob (voice of Kelsey Grammer) had similar tattoos on each set of knuckles as well - but since the characters in the cartoon show had only three fingers and a thumb, the tattoos were humorously "LUV" and "HAT" - (with a bar over the A).] The stylistic film, shot in only thirty-six days - an adult story with children as major characters, was extremely unusual and unpopular for its time for other reasons.

It was black and white (when color was en vogue), shown in standard ratio (when theaters were showing Cinemascope wide-screen films), and it daringly portrayed a perverted, pedophile Preacher as the main protagonist - a villainous, obsessive, homicidal, and misogynous character with repressed sexuality and violence. The high-contrast, melodramatic-horror film with macabre humor deliberately pays tribute to its silent film heritage, and to pioneering director D. W. Griffith in its style (the use of stark, expressionistic black and white cinematography, archaic camera devices such as iris down) and in its casting of Griffith's principal protegé/silent star, the legendary Lillian Gish (in her first film since Portrait of Jennie (1948)). Told with inventive, stylized, timeless and dark film noirish images, symbolism and visual poetry, it blends both a pastoral setting with dream-like creatures, fanatical characters, imperiled children during a river journey, a wicked guardian/adult, and salvation and redemption in the form of a old farm woman, 'fairy godmother' rather than a saintly Bible-totin' Preacher.

In Laughton's words, it was "a nightmarish sort of Mother Goose tale." From its start, the film is designed to have the special feeling of a child's nightmare, including the difficult keeping of a secret, and a magical journey to safety - all told from a child's point of view. It also accentuates the contrasting, elemental dualities within the film: heaven and earth (or under-the-earth), male and female, light and dark, good and evil, knowingness and innocence, and other polarizations including equating the Preacher with the devil. The Story The credits play over a starry night sky (heaven), after which a plain, Bible-fearing farm woman named Rachel (Lillian Gish), dressed in a plain dress with shoulder shawl, magically materializes over the star-filled night background. To her five disembodied foster children around her and suspended in the heavens, she tells a Bible story about false prophets ("ravening wolves") in sheep's clothing, while a chorus sings behind her, "Dream, Little One, Dream": Now, you remember children how I told you last Sunday about the good Lord going up into the mountain and talking to the people.

And how he said, 'Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God.' And how he said that King Solomon in all his glory was not as beautiful as the lilies of the field. And I know you won't forget, 'Judge not lest you be judged,' because I explained that to you. And then the good Lord went on to say, 'Beware of false prophets which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly, they are ravening wolves. Ye shall know them by their fruits.' The camera then moves plunges downward to earth to the film's general locale - the Ohio River Valley. The farm landscape is first shown in aerial helicopter shots or from a God's eye-view. There is a wooded area near the banks of a winding river. Children are playing hide-and-seek outside a rural house. Suddenly, one of the children discovers the legs of the corpse of a murdered woman inside a basement entrance, and the other children gather around. The Bible story's lesson continues as the camera pulls back to another high-angle view, recoiling from the murder: A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit. Neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. Wherefore by their fruits, ye shall know them.

The camera then tracks after an open touring Essex car [stolen], a Model T driven down a country road by a sinister, crazed, malevolent, black-cloaked, wide-brimmed and hatted 'Preacher' Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum), one of the 'false prophets.' In a chilling, perversely evil and memorable monologue to the Lord, the killer-evangelist with borderline sanity, glances heavenward and delivers an insane prayer. He complains that he is "tired" of ridding the world of tempting females [one being the dead body just discovered]. As he drives by a cemetery, he reveals that he is a serial killer who receives divine inspirations to first marry, and then murder and rob women (usually rich lonely widows who do not see the menacing perversity in him): Well now, what's it to be Lord? Another widow? How many has it been? Six? Twelve? I disremember. (He tips his hat.) You say the word, Lord, I'm on my way...You always send me money to go forth and preach your Word. The widow with a little wad of bills hid away in a sugar bowl. Lord, I am tired.

Sometimes I wonder if you really understand. Not that You mind the killin's. Yore Book is full of killin's. But there are things you do hate Lord: perfume-smellin' things, lacy things, things with curly hair. In the next scene, the avenging 'preacher' sits in a burlesque strip show with a stripper in action on stage. He stares with hate in his eyes at the sinful dancer, despising the sexy woman because she arouses his carnal instincts. His left hand, tattooed with the letters "H-A-T-E" on his four fingers, clenches and then reaches in his coat pocket to grab his concealed switchblade knife. As his libido is aroused, the flick-knife spontaneously opens - a sexual phallic symbol - violently and orgasmically ripping out the pocket as he thinks what he might do to the stripper (he would literally open her up with his 'knife') to punish her for tempting him to lustful sin. But then the sexually-repressed Preacher reconsiders: There are too many of them. Can't kill the world.

Suddenly, a long arm of the law grabs him on the shoulder and apprehends him - the hand belongs to a policeman, and with a scene wipe left, 'Preacher' Harry Powell is sentenced before a judge to thirty days in the Moundsville, West Virginia Penitentiary for stealing an auto. The judge is disbelieving: "A man of God? Harry Powell." Another aerial view, the second overhead shot in the film, shows it is rural West Virginia during the height of the Depression in the 1930s. On a flowery lawn in the small riverside town of Cresap's Landing on the Ohio River [a Mark Twain-like environment], a young nine-year old boy John (Billy Chapin) is playing happily with his little sister four-year old Pearl (Sally Jane Bruce) and her doll named Miss Jenny when he sees a car speeding down the road. He cries: "Daddy," and jumps up to meet his father Ben Harper (Peter Graves). He stops suddenly when he sees his agitated father climb out of the car, bleeding from a bullet wound in the shoulder. He is also holding a gun in one hand and a wad of money in the other.

[Harper has robbed a bank of ten thousand dollars to feed his family during hard times, but in his escape killed two people and was wounded.] As police sirens approach closer from the distance, Ben is desperate to conceal the money. He thinks of places to hide his stolen money, almost $10,000: "The rock in the smokehouse, no, the bricks in the grape arbor, no, no, they'll dig for it. Sure. That's the place." He picks a place no one will guess. [Offscreen, the money is stashed inside the body of Pearl's doll.] Then, because he believes that his wife doesn't have "common sense" and won't keep secret the hiding place of the money, he entrusts the knowledge to John. He also has his son swear or promise to be an adult guardian - to take care of and protect his sister, and look after the money: Harper: First, swear you'll take care of little Pearl, guard her with your life, boy. Then, swear you won't never tell where the money's hid, not even your Mom. John: Yes, Dad.

The Night of the Hunter Movie Review (1955) | Roger Ebert Tweet Charles Laughton's "The Night of the Hunter” (1955) is one of the greatest of all American films, but has never received the attention it deserves because of its lack of the proper trappings. Many “great movies” are by great directors, but Laughton directed only this one film, which was a critical and commercial failure long overshadowed by his acting career. Many great movies use actors who come draped in respectability and prestige, but Robert Mitchum has always been a raffish outsider. And many great movies are realistic, but “Night of the Hunter” is an expressionistic oddity, telling its chilling story through visual fantasy. People don't know how to categorize it, so they leave it off their lists. Advertisement Yet what a compelling, frightening and beautiful film it is! And how well it has survived its period. Many films from the mid-1950s, even the good ones, seem somewhat dated now, but by setting his story in an invented movie world outside conventional realism, Laughton gave it a timelessness.

Yes, the movie takes place in a small town on the banks of a river. But the town looks as artificial as a Christmas card scene, the family's house with its strange angles inside and out looks too small to live in, and the river becomes a set so obviously artificial it could have been built for a completely stylized studio film like "Kwaidan" (1964). Everybody knows the Mitchum character, the sinister “Reverend” Harry Powell. Even those who haven't seen the movie have heard about the knuckles of his two hands, and how one has the letters H-A-T-E tattooed on them, and the other the letters L-O-V-E. Bruce Springsteen drew on those images in his song "Cautious Man”: "On his right hand Billy'd tattooed the word "love” and on his left hand was the word "fear” And in which hand he held his fate was never clear” Advertisement Many movie lovers know by heart the Reverend's famous explanation to the wide-eyed boy ("Ah, little lad, you're staring at my fingers.

Would you like me to tell you the little story of right-hand/left-hand?”) And the scene where the Reverend stands at the top of the stairs and calls down to the boy and his sister has become the model for hundred other horror scenes. But does this familiarity give "The Night of the Hunter” the recognition it deserves? I don't think so because those famous trademarks distract from its real accomplishment. It is one of the most frightening of movies, with one of the most unforgettable of villains, and on both of those scores it holds up as well after four decades as I expect " The Silence of the Lambs " to do many years from now. The story, somewhat rearranged: In a prison cell, Harry Powell discovers the secret of a condemned man ( Peter Graves ), who has hidden $10,000somewhere around his house. After being released from prison, Powell seeks out the man's widow, Willa Harper ( Shelley Winters ), and two children, John ( Billy Chapin ) and the owl-faced Pearl ( Sally Jane Bruce ).

They know where the money is, but don't trust the “preacher.” But their mother buys his con game and marries him, leading to a tortured wedding night inside a high-gabled bedroom that looks a cross between a chapel and a crypt. Advertisement Soon Willa Harper is dead, seen in an incredible shot at the wheel of a car at the bottom of the river, her hair drifting with the seaweed. And soon the children are fleeing down the dream-river in a small boat, while the Preacher follows them implacably on the shore; this beautifully stylized sequence uses the logic of nightmares, in which no matter how fast one runs, the slow step of the pursuer keeps the pace. The children are finally taken in by a Bible-fearing old lady ( Lillian Gish ), who would seem to be helpless to defend them against the single-minded murderer, but is as unyielding as her faith.

The shot of Winters at the bottom of the river is one of several remarkable images in the movie, which was photographed in black and white by Stanley Cortez , who shot Welles' "The Magnificent Ambersons," and once observed he was "always chosen to shoot weird things.” He shot few weirder than here, where one frightening composition shows a street lamp casting Mitchum's terrifying shadow on the walls of the children's bedroom. The basement sequence combines terror and humor, as when the Preacher tries to chase the children up the stairs, only to trip, fall, recover, lunge and catch his fingers in the door. And the masterful nighttime river sequence uses giant foregrounds of natural details, like frogs and spider webs, to underline a kind of biblical progression as the children drift to eventual safety. The screenplay, based on a novel by Davis Grubb , is credited to James Agee , one of the icons of American film writing and criticism, then in the final throes of alcoholism. Laughton's widow, Elsa Lanchester , is adamant in her autobiography: “Charles finally had very little respect for Agee.

And he hated the script, but he was inspired by his hatred.” She quotes the film’s producer, Paul Gregory : “. . . the script that was produced on the screen is no more James Agee's . . . than I'm Marlene Dietrich .” Advertisement Who wrote the final draft? Perhaps Laughton had a hand. Lanchester and Laughton both remembered that Mitchum was invaluable as a help in working with the two children, whom Laughton could not stand. But the final film is all Laughton's, especially the dreamy, Bible-evoking final sequence, with Lillian Gish presiding over events like an avenging elderly angel. Robert Mitchum is one of the great icons of the second half-century of cinema.

Despite his sometimes scandalous off-screen reputation, despite his genial willingness to sign on to half-baked projects, he made a group of films that led David Thomson, in his Biographical Dictionary of Film, to ask, “How can I offer this hunk as one of the best actors in the movies?” And answer: “Since the war, no American actor has made more first-class films, in so many different moods.” “The Night of the Hunter,” he observes, represents “the only time in his career that Mitchum acted outside himself,” by which he means there is little of the Mitchum persona in the Preacher. Mitchum is uncannily right for the role, with his long face, his gravel voice, and the silky tones of a snake-oil salesman. And Shelly Winters, all jitters and repressed sexual hysteria, is somehow convincing as she falls so prematurely into, and out of, his arms. The supporting actors are like a chattering gallery of Norman Rockwell archetypes, their lives centered on bake sales, soda fountains and gossip. The children, especially the little girl, look more odd than lovable, which helps the film move away from realism and into stylized nightmare.

And Lillian Gish and Stanley Cortez quite deliberately, I think, composed that great shot of her which looks like nothing so much as Whistler's mother holding a shotgun. Advertisement Charles Laughton showed here that he had an original eye, and a taste for material that stretched the conventions of the movies. It is risky to combine horror and humor, and foolhardy to approach them through expressionism. For his first film, Laughton made a film like no other before or since, and with such confidence it seemed to draw on a lifetime of work. Critics were baffled by it, the public rejected it, and the studio had a much more expensive Mitchum picture (“Not as a Stranger”) it wanted to promote instead. But nobody who has seen "The Night of the Hunter” has forgotten it, or Mitchum's voice coiling down those basement stairs: "Chillll . . . dren?” Popular Blog Posts Super Reviewer ½ This tense and bleak film noir, aesthetically mesmerizing and borrowing heavily from German Expressionism, is all the more surprising when you know that Laughton hated children - and while Mitchum is great as the expressionist villain, he seems though too one-dimensional to be truly menacing.

Carlos Magalhães Super Reviewer The very definition of a film noir. Robert Mitchum is spectacular as psychotic preacher and serial killer Harry Powell. Few films actually earn the title "edge of your seat" but this dark and incredibly well made film by first (and only) time director Charles Laughton will certainly have you gripping both seat handles in suspense. Edward Boxler Super Reviewer ½ A phony preacher infiltrates a family in order to find hidden money. I have trouble making sense of Charles Laughton's only directorial effort. On the one hand, the thrills - the film's construction as a suspense - is compelling and oftentimes frightening. The action sequences are well-choreographed, and the performance by Robert Mitchum makes the preacher seem like a predecessor of Hannibal Lector. On the other hand, there are clearly images of religious hypocrisy being deployed here, but there doesn't seem to be a coherent statement about faith's effects or faith as an affect. The foiling of Rachel Cooper and Harry Powell doesn't provide much insight about religion as a guise or a guide. Overall, as a surface thriller, this is quite good, but I think one of us - the film or me - is missing something deeper.

Jim Hunter A directing career in one film: “The Night of the Hunter” A directing career in one film: “The Night of the Hunter” Enlarge April 1, 2011 The Night of the Hunter (1955) is the only film ever directed by the great Charles Laughton . Based on the 1953 southern gothic novel by Davis Grubb and set in 1930s West Virginia, it tells the nightmarish fairy tale of two children terrorized by a vicious yet charismatic criminal named Harry Powell, who travels from town to town posing as a preacher so he can swindle and murder rich widows. Defying easy categorization and initially overlooked when first released, the movie has more recently come to be regarded as an American classic – one that Pauline Kael and Roger Ebert have both called one of the most frightening motion pictures ever made . The Criterion Collection has now reissued The Night of the Hunter in a definitive two-disc set, featuring a beautiful new print of the film as well as a treasure trove of extras. The circumstances of Laughton directing the picture came about almost by accident.

Charles Laughton was an established Oscar-winning character actor and theater director from Great Britain who had become famous in film roles such as King Henry in The Private Life of HenryVIII (1933), Captain Bligh in Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) and Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939). When he and producer/business partner Paul Gregory purchased the rights to The Night of the Hunter, Laughton assumed he would be playing the preacher. But Gregory convinced him that they could not finance the movie that way and suggested that Charles direct the picture instead. Putting Laughton in charge was the first of several fortuitous decisions. The movie is perfectly cast with film noir icon Robert Mitchum at his most charming and intimidating as preacher Harry Powell – a misogynistic killer who has the words “love” and “hate” tattooed on his knuckles. Shelley Winters is also memorably effective as Willa Harper, the children’s naïve and vulnerable mother who is looking for an easy salvation after her financially desperate husband has been hanged for bank robbery and murder.

Billy Chapin and Sally Jane Bruce play her children, John and Pearl, who know where their father’s money is hidden, and whose battle of will against Powell to keep their father’s secret form the heart of the story. Luminous silent film legend Lillian Gish plays Rachel Cooper, a religiously stern but kind earth mother-type who recognizes the preacher for what he truly is, and shelters the children from him after they escape up the Ohio River to freedom. Working with a budget of about $600,000 – small money even in 1955 – The Night of the Hunter was shot mostly on sound stages, with Laughton keeping his editor Robert Golden and composer Walter Schumann on set every day so that they could see the footage as it was being created and tailor their work to the film. Schumann’s evocative, shifting score of dread, wistfulness, and childlike innocence is so effective that some critics have called his the second most important contribution to the film after Charles Laughton’s direction.

Using fabricated sets also gave Laughton and cinematographer Stanley Cortez the opportunity to fashion a very distinctive look for the picture, drawing directly from the film language of silent movies – especially the German expressionism of the 1920s as well as the work of D.W. Griffith , whose landmark films they screened repeatedly at the Museum of Modern Art in New York before shooting began. Much of the allure of The Night of the Hunter is due to its cinematography, which may be considered one of the cinema’s greatest achievements in black and white. If Cortez didn’t already earn his immortality with his gorgeous work on Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), he cemented it here. Most films are lucky to have one memorable shot. The Night of the Hunter has at least six – including the preacher’s introduction into the children’s lives as a shadow looming on their bedroom wall, the ghostly underwater shot of a corpse sitting in a car, and John’s view of the preacher on horseback, far in the distance and singing as he searches for the children during the middle of the night. Most remarkable is the film’s centerpiece, in which John and Pearl flee by boat down the river.

Laughton and Cortez achieve a surreal almost painterly beauty, with twinkling stars, shimmering water, angular farmhouses, and on dry land, disproportionately large animals who seem to watch the children’s journey. Stanley Cortez said that of all the directors he worked with, only Orson Welles and Charles Laughton really understood the intangible magic of lighting. Criterion has provided some terrific supplements here, including two documentaries from 1995 and 2010, featuring many interviews with the film’s stars and crew. Also fascinating are storyboard sketches drawn by author Davis Grubb, which Laughton enthusiastically received and used in creating the striking visuals. There are two essays – one by Terrence Rafferty about the movie’s themes, the other by Michael Sragow about Pulitzer Prize winning screenwriter James Agee, who wrote a detailed 293-page first draft that Laughton pared down to 93 minutes. A thorough audio commentary featuring second-unit director Terry Sanders, film critic F. X. Feeney, archivist Robert Gitt, and author Preston Neal Jones walks you through the film.

But the crown jewel is Charles Laughton Directs The Night of the Hunter (2002), a two-and-a-half hour collection of outtakes and rushes that were salvaged from Laughton’s garage by his widow, then restored and pieced together by Gitt over a period of 20 years. It shows Charles Laughton’s artistic process and directing style first hand, as it progresses through scenes of The Night of the Hunter in chronological order – occasionally pausing to provide historical information about the production and its participants. Watching multiple takes of the same scene may not be for everyone, but the documentary allows us to appreciate the craft involved and learn about the artistson set – particularly Laughton and Robert Mitchum. Laughton comes across a patient perfectionist who always kept his cameras rolling to capture any surprise moments of inspiration. He is often heard feeding lines to his actors (especially Winters and the two children) until the exact desired effect is achieved. Mitchum, on the other hand, defies his notorious reputation of being drunk or stoned while working.

He is remarkably present, not only delivering his lines with little correction by Laughton, take after take – but helping to bring out the performances of his child co-stars in their scenes together. One story tells of Robert Mitchum dashing out of the screening room to throw up after watching some dailies of the film. When asked by Laughton if he was okay, Mitchum replied, “I had no idea I could be so good.” Mitchum would later go onto call Laughton his favorite director that he ever worked with. Lillian Gish also remembered the set as a happy and unified one, with all cast and crew realizing that they were making something truly special. The Night of the Hunter opened to some mildly positive reviews. But United Artists didn’t know what to make of the picture, with its dark contrast of good and evil, occasionally odd humor, and themes of hypocrisy and redemption. Their confused marketing campaign and limited distribution – in the bottom half of a double bill – doomed its financial prospects. Despite showing up on a few top ten lists, the movie quickly disappeared. Laughton was deflated by the critical and commercial indifference.

He was removed from a second directing project – an adaptation of Norman Mailer’s The Naked And The Dead – when his business relationship with Paul Gregory quickly fizzled. Laughton returned to being a character actor in other people’s films, never to direct again. He died of cancer in 1962. As the sixties progressed, a curious thing happened. Bolstered by airings on television, The Night of the Hunter developed a cult following. It began to play again in art houses and revival cinemas around the country into the seventies, winning over audiences who couldn’t forget it. In 1992, the Library of Congress selected the movie for preservation on its National Film Registry, cementing its classic status and artistic importance. In a 2007, the influential French film magazine Cahiers du Cinema ranked The Night of the Hunter number two in their listing of the 100 Greatest Films Ever Made, second only to Citizen Kane (1941). The irony is that Charles Laughton is probably better remembered today for the one film he directed than for his lengthy acting career. His biographer Simon Callow doesn’t think he would be unhappy about this.

Laughton felt that making The Night of the Hunter was one of the most creative periods of his life, having brought him much happiness and fulfillment. It is easy to regret that he only had the opportunity to direct one motion picture. But in an industry where many directors struggle for years to make a good movie, Laughton created a masterpiece – one that moves beyond genre and is unlike anything made before or since. Peter Bogdanovich once lamented to Orson Welles that Greta Garbo had only made two really great films. Gazing back at him, Welles calmly replied, “You only need one.” The Night of the Hunter (1955) 93 minutes. Black & white. Criterion collection DVD. __ ‎The Night of the Hunter (1955) directed by Charles Laughton • Reviews, film + cast • Letterboxd 14 One of cinema’s great travesties is that Charles Laughton only directed one official film. So poorly received, both critically and commercially, was The Night of the Hunter that Laughton never helmed another film again.

Whilst many works of art go unappreciated in their creator’s lifetime it still begs the question: why were people in 1955 such fucking idiots? To miss this film’s brilliance is difficult to comprehend. Laughton has created one of the great American films of the ‘50s, a decade positively bursting with classics. It is hard to pigeonhole (and may well be the reason for its poor reception upon release) because whilst it is a noir thriller it feels more like a twisted bedtime story. It blends the… 19 The Night of the Hunter is a classic Gothic fairytale: an evil being charms an unsuspecting parent, while only the children are aware that things are not what they seem. It was only while watching the film, enthralled but also deeply unsettled, that I fully realized just how insidiously terrifying the stories of our childhoods are. It's probably not the kind of entertainment that children should be absorbing, but there you are. When Reverend Powell arrives in town, singing a hymn in his deep, carrying voice, he immediately charms everybody but the children he wants to steal ten thousand dollars from.

Little John and Pearl have been burdened with an enormous secret: to keep this vast amount of money safe… Review by Hamushy ★★★★½ Whenever I am in the mood to get deeper down into the depths of cinema and find some of the more obscure gems that helped shape the evolution of moving pictures. I have one go to place, The Criterion Collection. Even though all of their titles does not resonate well with my taste. They always prove to be worth taking the time to watch. The Night of the Hunter on the other hand, is a Criterion release that fits my taste perfectly. An eerie tale of suspense that follows a young boy, John, whose father leaves him 10,000 dollars to keep for himself and his younger sister right before he is pulled away by police officers to his inevitable execution… ”It's a hard world for little things.” Score: 56/100 THE BOTTOM LINE: Another classic that I was hoping (and, for the most part, heavily expecting) to love and ended up just thinking it was decent.

The atmospherically strange phenomena and weird set structures used to bother me; once you harbor the idea that Night of the Hunter is supposed to play more like a ghost story than an actual retelling of events, these elements become less bothersome and start to make more sense. I’m talking things along the lines of odd house designs, strangely angled ceilings and hallways, and a constant sense of claustrophobia. There’s a scene in particular where Rachel Cooper (Lillian Gish) is sitting by her window with… 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 THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER - CHILDREN'S LULLABY(A FILM BY CHARLES LAUGHTON - 1955) - YouTube THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER - CHILDREN'S LULLABY(A FILM BY CHARLES LAUGHTON - 1955) 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. Published on Jun 20, 2012 The Night of the Hunter—incredibly, the only film the great actor Charles Laughton ever directed—is truly a stand-alone masterwork. A horror movie with qualities of a Grimm fairy tale, it stars a sublimely sinister Robert Mitchum as a traveling preacher named Harry Powell (he of the tattooed knuckles), whose nefarious motives for marrying a fragile widow, played by Shelley Winters, are uncovered by her terrified young children. Here they sing "Pretty Fly" (originally sung by Sally Jane Bruce as Pearl, but later dubbed by an actress named Betty Benson). Category The Night of the Hunter (1955) - The Criterion Collection The Criterion Collection Spine #541 The Night of the Hunter—incredibly, the only film the great actor Charles Laughton ever directed—is truly a stand-alone masterwork.

A horror movie with qualities of a Grimm fairy tale, it stars a sublimely sinister Robert Mitchum as a traveling preacher named Harry Powell (he of the tattooed knuckles), whose nefarious motives for marrying a fragile widow, played by Shelley Winters, are uncovered by her terrified young children. Graced by images of eerie beauty and a sneaky sense of humor, this ethereal, expressionistic American classic—also featuring the contributions of actress Lillian Gish and writer James Agee—is cinema’s most eccentric rendering of the battle between good and evil. Cast Robert Golden Disc Features New digital transfer made from 35 mm film elements restored by UCLA Film & Television Archive in cooperation with MGM Studios, with funding provided by the Film Foundation and Robert Sturm, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition Audio commentary featuring second-unit director Terry Sanders, film critic F. X.

Feeney, archivist Robert Gitt, and author Preston Neal Jones Charles Laughton Directs “The Night of the Hunter,” a two-and-a-half-hour treasure trove of outtakes and behind-the-scenes footage New documentary featuring interviews with producer Paul Gregory, Sanders, Feeney, Jones, and author Jeffrey Couchman New video interview with Laughton biographer Simon Callow Clip from the The Ed Sullivan Show in which cast members perform a scene deleted from the film Fifteen-minute episode of the BBC show Moving Pictures about the film Archival interview with cinematographer Stanley Cortez Gallery of sketches by author Davis Grubb, author of the source novel New video conversation between Gitt and film critic Leonard Maltin about Charles Laughton Directs Original theatrical trailer PLUS: A booklet featuring new essays by critics Terrence Rafferty and Michael Sragow New cover by Eric Skillman Current Posts Downriver and Heavenward with James Agee By Michael Sragow November 18, 2010 In Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter, terror and tenderness grapple with each other as profoundly as the words HATE and LOVE when they’re tattooed, one per hand, across the knuckles of . . .

Read more » Film Essays The Night of the Hunter: Holy Terror By Terrence Rafferty November 16, 2010 The Night of the Hunter (1955)—the first film directed by Charles Laughton and also, sadly, the last—is among the greatest horror movies ever made, and perhaps, of that select company, the most . . . Read more » Film Essays The Night of the Hunter By David Ehrenstein February 01, 1988 “It’s really a nightmarish sort of Mother Goose tale we are telling,” Charles Laughton has said of The Night of the Hunter. But, as anyone who has seen this extraordinary film knows, its maker’s . . . Read more » Film Essays Downriver and Heavenward with James Agee By Michael Sragow November 18, 2010 In Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter, terror and tenderness grapple with each other as profoundly as the words HATE and LOVE when they’re tattooed, one per hand, across the knuckles of . . .

Read more » Film Essays The Night of the Hunter: Holy Terror By Terrence Rafferty November 16, 2010 The Night of the Hunter (1955)—the first film directed by Charles Laughton and also, sadly, the last—is among the greatest horror movies ever made, and perhaps, of that select company, the most . . . Read more » Film Essays The Night of the Hunter By David Ehrenstein February 01, 1988 “It’s really a nightmarish sort of Mother Goose tale we are telling,” Charles Laughton has said of The Night of the Hunter. But, as anyone who has seen this extraordinary film knows, its maker’s . . . Read more » Photo Galleries Press Notes: 2010—One Last Look January 03, 2011 Before we put 2010 to bed, we thought we’d catch up with all the year-end lists that have sprung up over the past week or so. A good place to start is DVD Beaver’s annual poll, which ranks the . . .

Read more » Press Notes Press Notes: Looking Back at 2010 December 22, 2010 Sight & Sound ’s annual poll of the year’s best DVD (and Blu-ray) releases is out, and this edition features choices from twenty-four “contributors, DVD distributors, and curators.” We’re . . . Read more » Clippings Powers’s Picks December 03, 2010 ’Tis the season for DVD gift guides, and critic John Powers is quick out of the gate with a lineup of movie recommendations for NPR’s Fresh Air. Among his top choices are works by two great . . . Read more » Press Notes Press Notes: The Night of the Hunter November 19, 2010 It’s easy to forget that audiences and critics were baffled by Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter, starring Robert Mitchum and Shelley Winters, upon its release in 1955. Yet, as Dennis . . .

Read more » Film Essays Downriver and Heavenward with James Agee By Michael Sragow November 18, 2010 In Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter, terror and tenderness grapple with each other as profoundly as the words HATE and LOVE when they’re tattooed, one per hand, across the knuckles of . . . Read more » Film Essays The Night of the Hunter: Holy Terror By Terrence Rafferty November 16, 2010 The Night of the Hunter (1955)—the first film directed by Charles Laughton and also, sadly, the last—is among the greatest horror movies ever made, and perhaps, of that select company, the most . . . Read more » Clippings Slate Goes A-Huntin’ November 10, 2010 In a new article for Slate, critic Elbert Ventura digs insightfully into what makes Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter (coming to Criterion Blu-ray and DVD next week) the one-of-a-kind . . .

Read more » Film Essays The Night of the Hunter: Holy Terror - From the Current - The Criterion Collection The Criterion Collection The Night of the Hunter: Holy Terror By Terrence Rafferty The Night of the Hunter (1955)—the first film directed by Charles Laughton and also, sadly, the last—is among the greatest horror movies ever made, and perhaps, of that select company, the most irreducibly American in spirit. It’s about those venerable American subjects fear, sex, money, and religion, and for the beleaguered children who are its heroes, salvation comes at the end of a long, drifting journey down a river: our old native idea of finding the way to someplace better. These Depression-era West Virginia kids, John Harper (Billy Chapin) and his little sister, Pearl (Sally Jane Bruce), orphaned by the recent death of both their parents, light out on the river in a tiny boat to escape the grasping hands of their stepfather, one Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum).

In flight, John and Pearl just go where the gentle current takes them, sleeping when they can and meandering past other small creatures, who seem to be watching over them anxiously from the riverbank: owls, rabbits, frogs, even spiders. Toward the end of the film, the children’s savior, an old woman (Lillian Gish) who gathers in the many orphans the river washes up, looks into the camera and says, “It’s a hard world for little things.” In The Night of the Hunter, all the little things, human and otherwise, know too well and too soon how hard the world is. When John and Pearl are sleeping, in their fragile craft on the river and with the night animals keeping vigil, you feel as if you were inside their heads, dreaming a child’s dreams, part blind terror and part sweet hope.

The river sequence is the centerpiece of The Night of the Hunter, and the clearest indication of Laughton’s extraordinary visual gifts, but the film is stuffed with beauties: a superb ghostly image of the children’s murdered mother (Shelley Winters), her body lifeless under the water of that same indifferent river and her blonde hair trailing upward toward the light; an extreme long shot of the preacher on horseback, silhouetted against the first faint light of dawn as John watches from a hayloft and whispers to himself, “Don’t he never sleep?”; a wonderful scary-comic scene, expressionistically lit, of Powell scrambling up cellar stairs in pursuit of the escaping children. Laughton, in his midfifties at the time of filming, had been a very famous actor on the stage and screen in his native England for nearly three decades, and a prominent (usually flamboyant) character actor in Hollywood since the thirties.

His best-known starring roles were in Alexander Korda’s The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), Leo McCarey’s Ruggles of Red Gap (1935), Frank Lloyd’s Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), and William Dieterle’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939); he had also acted in films directed by Jean Renoir (This Land Is Mine, 1943), Alfred Hitchcock (The Paradine Case, 1947), and David Lean (Hobson’s Choice, 1954), and in the theater had worked with Bertolt Brecht (on a 1947 Los Angeles production of Galileo, for which he was also credited as codirector). Even for someone as experienced in the theatrical arts as Laughton, though, The Night of the Hunter presented some pretty formidable challenges. The 1953 novel, written by the West Virginian Davis Grubb, tells a strong, uncomplicated story, but in an idiom with which readers and filmgoers were still not entirely familiar: what we now call southern gothic.

William Faulkner had been introducing elements of the grotesque into his fiction for a while (see especially the ingenious use of a corncob in his self-described 1931 “potboiler” Sanctuary), and powerful whiffs of the outré had recently been wafting from the humid dramas of Tennessee Williams and the melancholy stories of Carson McCullers. But in 1955, the southern style, redolent of strange sex, bad booze, old-time religion, and the collective regional memory of defeat, was for the general public fairly exotic stuff. (Flannery O’Connor, who was second only to Faulkner in her understanding of the South’s tortured consciousness, brought out her first collection of stories that year.) It’s a style that, at its best, makes horrors lyrical, that gives the darker, damper aspects of the human condition a weird kind of shine. Grubb’s novel, which is no longer in print, is a good middle-range exemplar of the style, written in the rolling, replete, mock-biblical prose typical of southern gothic, and plotted with a keen sense of the sensational.

The story revolves around the preacher’s attempts to get his hands—LOVE tattooed on one, HATE on the other—on a stash of money stolen by the Harper children’s father, who was Powell’s cell mate in the penitentiary. After Harper’s execution, Powell, oozing piety, marries the widow and begins sniffing around for what he considers his just, providential reward; he’s convinced (rightly) that the kids know where the loot is hidden. And after the new Mrs. Powell comes to her untimely and unnatural end, and the children flee, the story becomes a simple chase, the black-clad demon harrowing the innocents, pursuing them with all his unholy ardor. In approaching this unusual material, Laughton made several remarkably canny decisions right at the start, beginning with his choice of screenwriter: James Agee, the Tennessee-bred journalist, fiction writer, and film critic who had a few years before supplied John Huston with the elegant script for The African Queen (1951). Agee was steeped not only in the right kind of southern sensibility but also in the work of the silent-film pioneer D. W.

Griffith, which Laughton, with near miraculous intuition, believed should be the touchstone for the telling of the story; Griffith was the master of heightened, poetic melodrama, and that’s what Laughton wanted for The Night of the Hunter. He screened as many of Griffith’s movies as he could dig up at the Museum of Modern Art, and hired the terrific cinematographer Stanley Cortez, who had done brilliantly imaginative work in black and white on Orson Welles’s second film, The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). The black-and-white imagery of The Night of the Hunter is in a different, more deliberately archaic style from that of the Welles film, keyed to the basic emotions of love and fear, just as the great silent movies were. It’s as if Laughton had resolved to recover something the movies had lost, some secret, long-forgotten cache of letters from ancestors—the scripture of the art’s early magic. Perhaps as an aid to invoking the mighty spirits of the elders of cinema, he cast the sixty-one-year-old Gish, the most piercing of Griffith’s actors, in the role of the Harper children’s ultimate protector, Miz Rachel Cooper.

The sequences she appears in, near the end of the picture, have a tone that borders on reverence. Laughton frames her with the unfussy eloquence Griffith favored, often shooting her still-lovely face straight on as she tells the children stories or addresses the audience directly; when she speaks, he confers on her the air of authority Griffith gave her in the old days, in movies like Broken Blossoms (1919) and Way Down East (1920), in that time when movies didn’t need to speak at all. The other female star of The Night of the Hunter, Shelley Winters, is cast ideally to type, as a gullible sexual optimist doomed to perish early; she’d already played a variation on that theme in George Stevens’s A Place in the Sun (1951), and would do so again in Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita in 1962. (There’s something about her—an unseemly eagerness—that appears to bring out the worst in men.) 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. When Miz Cooper threatens him with a shotgun, he hops away, whooping like a big skittish animal. Small things have to run; the larger beasts are expected to stand their ground. Maybe the most radical aspect of The Night of the Hunter, and its least appreciated virtue, is its sense of humor. More conventional horror movies overdo the solemnity of evil. The monster in The Night of the Hunter is so bad he’s funny.

Laughton and Mitchum treat evil with the indignity it deserves. And that, perhaps, is the reason this one-of-a-kind movie didn’t catch on with audiences on its initial release. It was an abject flop at the box office, and Laughton never directed another film. He died seven years later. The failure of The Night of the Hunter was not, forty-five years ago, much remarked upon: it was a modestly budgeted picture, a little thing in Hollywood terms. But it has drifted slowly, steadily down the river of the years between then and now, and the long flow of time has brought it to a better place, where critics and filmmakers and moviegoers honor it and even feel protective toward it. The world seems harder than ever, and we all feel, individually, smaller and more vulnerable. Laughing at evil may be an idea whose time has come. Terrence Rafferty is the author of The Thing Happens: Ten Years of Writing About the Movies and a frequent contributor to the New York Times. He teaches a course called The Fear of God: American Horror from Jonathan Edwards to “Cloverfield” at Princeton University.

Movie Review - - Bogeyman Plus - NYTimes.com Bogeyman Plus By BOSLEY CROWTHER Published: September 30, 1955 A WEIRD and intriguing endeavor to put across something more in the way of a horror story involving children than the mere menace of a bogeyman is made in "The Night of the Hunter," a film based on the novel of Davis Grubb and directed by Actor Charles Laughton, which came to the Mayfair yesterday. Paul Gregory produced this audacious film. The trenchant and troubling proposition they are obviously aiming to convey is that being a child in the midst of sordid adults is a terrible experience. Innocent, sweet and trusting youngsters are sorely torn in a world of greed and hate. Withal, the authors assure us, the strength of little children abides. This is a difficult thesis to render both forceful and profound in an hour and a half of tangled traffic with both melodramatic and allegorical forms. And the fact that Mr. Laughton, undertaking his first film directorial job, has not brought forth a wholly shattering picture is easy to understand. The story that Mr.

Grubb provided is a dark and horrifying account of the torment a fake evangelist inflicts upon a couple of kids. In a frenzy to discover where a hanged bank robber has hidden $10,000 in stolen bills, ??? perambulating back-country preacher insinuates himself into the home of the robber's family, marries his moronic widow, murders her and then persecutes her kids (the only ones who know where the money is hidden) until he drives them forth into the world. All this has been crisply compacted into clear screen drama by the late James Agee and it is put forth under the direction of Mr. Laughton in stark, rigid visual terms. The locale is crushingly rural, the atmosphere of "the sticks" is intense, and Robert Mitchum plays the murderous minister with an icy unctuousness that gives you the chills. There is more than malevolence and menace in his character. There is a strong trace of Freudian aberration, fanaticism and iniquity. Credit Mr. Laughton with a clever and exceptionally effective job of catching the ugliness and terror of certain ignorant, small-town types.

He has got out of Shelley Winters a grueling performance as the vapid widow and wife. The scene of the wedding-night of Miss Winters and the preacher is one of the most devastating of its sort since Von Stroheim's "Greed." And Evelyn Varden's and Don Beddoe's performances as village gossips and busy-bodies are edged with a sharp and treacherous cruelty that shows through the appearance of homely farce. But unfortunately the story and the thesis presented by Mr. Grubb had to be carried through by Mr. Laughton to a finish—and it is here that he goes wrong. For the evolution of the melodrama, after the threatened, frightened children flee home, angles off into that allegorical contrast of the forces of Evil and Good. Strange, misty scenes composed of shadows and unrealistic silhouettes suggest the transition to abstraction. When the children find sanctuary in the home of a little old lady who befriends orphans, the idea comes across. The preacher, pursuing, is the Devil; the little old lady is Goodness and Love. All this is handled with obvious pretense.

Lillian Gish is sweet but wispy in the role of the benefactress of orphans, and Billy Chapin and Sally Jane Bruce, who are fine as the youngsters through most of the picture, become posey and incredible in the later scenes. The toughness of the grain of the story goes soft and porous toward the end. The conclusion is an uncontestable statement that children, God bless them, will endure. THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER, screen play by James Agee, based on the novel by Davis Grubb; produced by Paul Gregory and directed by Charles Laughton; released by United Artists. At the Mayfair. Preacher Harry Powell . . . . . Robert Mitchum Willa Harper . . . . . Shelley Winters

Question: 'Night of the Hunter'(1955),was the only film directed by which famous actor?
Answer: CHARLES LAUGHTON