"The Night of the Hunter" is a 1955 American Christmas film noir, horror, thriller directed by Charles Laughton and starring Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters and Lillian Gish. The screenplay by James Agee was based on the 1953 novel of the same name by Davis Grubb. The plot involves a serial killer who poses as a preacher and charms an unsuspecting widow to get his hands on $10,000 in stolen bank loot hidden by her executed husband.
The novel and film draw on the true story of Harry Powers, who was hanged in 1932 for the murder of two widows and three children in Clarksburg, West Virginia. The film's lyrical and expressionistic style, borrowing techniques from silent film, sets it apart from other Hollywood films of the 1940s and 1950s, and it has influenced such later directors such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Robert Altman, and Martin Scorsese.
Despite receiving negative reviews upon its original release, it has been positively re-evaluated in later decades and is now considered one of the greatest films ever made. It was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry in 1992. The influential French film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma selected The Night of the Hunter in 2008 as the second-best film of all time, behind Citizen Kane. In spite of the film's later acclaim, the negative reaction to its premiere made it Charles Laughton's only feature film as director.
Plot[]
Reverend Harry Powell is a misogynistic serial killer and self-proclaimed preacher traveling along the Ohio River in West Virginia during the Great Depression. He is arrested for driving a stolen car and serves 30 days at Moundsville Penitentiary. There he shares a cell with Ben Harper, who killed two men in a bank robbery for $10,000. Harper made his children, John and Pearl, promise to never reveal where he hid the money. Despite Powell's attempts to worm it out of him, Harper takes the secret to his grave when he is hanged for the murders.
Upon his release from prison, Powell visits Harper's tiny hometown, where he charms the townsfolk and woos Harper's widow, Willa, a waitress for Walter Spoon and his wife Icey. Overnight Powell manages to win the town's trust and weds Willa, but John remains instinctively distrustful of him. Powell suspects that John knows where the money is hidden and threatens him to reveal its location. John accidentally reveals that he and Pearl know where the money is hidden. After Powell refuses to consummate their marriage, Willa deludes herself that he married her to redeem her soul and begins preaching alongside him in tent revivals. She later loses her faith in him when she overhears Powell threatening Pearl to make her reveal where the money is hidden.
After Powell murders Willa and ties her body to a Model T that he sinks in the river, he claims that she left her family for a life of sin when Walter and Icey question her abrupt disappearance. He threatens the children and learns the money is hidden inside Pearl's doll. Birdie Steptoe, an elderly friend of the family, discovers Willa’s body while fishing but refrains from telling the police for fear that he will be accused of murder.
The children escape an enraged Powell and attempt to seek refuge with Birdie, whom they find in a drunken stupor. They use their father's small johnboat to flee down the river and find sanctuary with Rachel Cooper, a tough old woman who looks after stray children.
Powell tracks them down, but Rachel sees through his deceptions and runs him off her property with a shotgun. Powell returns after dark. During an all-night standoff, Rachel gives Powell a face full of birdshot and he flees into her barn. She summons the state police, who arrive and arrest Powell for Willa’s murder. John breaks down during Powell’s handcuffing, having a flashback of his father’s fate. He beats the doll against Powell's struggling body in anguish, spilling the cash.
During Powell’s trial John cannot bring himself to testify against him. After Powell's sentencing, Rachel takes John and the other children away as a deranged Icey leads a lynch mob toward the police station. Powell is escorted out the back to safety just in time, but the prison hangman vows to see him again soon. John and Pearl spend their first Christmas together with Rachel and her brood of stray children.
Cast[]
- Robert Mitchum as Reverend Harry Powell
- Shelley Winters as Willa Harper
- Lillian Gish as Rachel Cooper
- Billy Chapin as John Harper
- Sally Jane Bruce as Pearl Harper
- James Gleason as Uncle "Birdie" Steptoe
- Evelyn Varden as Icey Spoon, Willa's employer
- Don Beddoe as Walt Spoon, Icey's husband
- Peter Graves as Ben Harper
- Gloria Castillo as Ruby, one of Rachel's girls
- Paul Bryar as Bart the Hangman (uncredited)
External links[]
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