Expressionism disappointment (The Night of the Hunter)

It’s 1001 Movies Blog Club time again! And once again we’ve cycled around to a movie chosen by me for the club as a whole to watch, 1955’s The Night of the Hunter, the sole film directed by the legendary actor Charles Laughton.

Here are some nice things I can say about The Night of the Hunter (as filtered through some of my major preoccupations):

There seems to be a direct line between Robert Mitchum’s evil-personified character the preacher Harry Powell and Lilian Gish’s virtue-personified character Rachel Cooper and the parallel archetypes from Stephen King’s The Stand, Randall Flagg and Mother Abigail. Like, a really bold unbroken line. I haven’t found any online corroboration of this theory of mine (most references to The Night of the Hunter’s influences stay within the realm of cinema) but if I were the kind of person who edited Wikipedia, I might try to slip it in. Mitchum and Gish really turn in the standout performances in the movie, too.

I can’t argue with the historical significance of the film. It’s a very personal vision that was entirely at odds with what was fashionable in filmmaking at the time, it adapts a popular novel which in turn was based on a true story, and in addition to the involvement of Laughton and Mitchum and Gish you also get performances by Shelley Winters and Peter Graves, all worthy of curated preservation.

This movie would have made an amazing graphic novel. I think a lot of the shot compositions would work even better as tableau images, and it could have been even more stylized given the simple freedom to do more on paper than can be realistically filmed in the physical world. And the dialogue just might flow better as words on a page rather than coming out of the mouths of human beings …

OK, I’m verging away from compliments and into criticism here, so I may as well abandon the pretense. I didn’t particularly like this movie, and that was all the more emphatically disappointing because I had such high hopes. Not only is it on the 1001 list, but it’s also entered in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress, and when the Criterion DVD came out a couple years ago, one of my go-to pop culture outlets gave it a gushingly good review. I’d been meaning to see it ever since.

It created a very interesting juxtaposition, watching this movie within days of watching Cloverfield, for a couple of reasons. One is the notion of artifice. Cloverfield invokes the fantasy of a giant rampaging monstrosity and an abandoned New York City, and relies on a well-meaning but kind of dim character doggedly capturing the entire adventure on a camcorder. But somehow it works and it all hangs together, creating this insistent hyper-reality. Maybe I’m just more forgiving of genre stories to begin with; in for a penny in for a pound and if I’m willing to accept a colossal amphibious mutant as the big bad guy, I can roll with the rest of it. The Night of the Hunter is supposed to be more realistic, in terms of its subject matter, at least. The only monster in sight is a hypocritically Bible-quoting misogynist murderer. But, to me, the whole enterprise just has a thudding artificiality to it. There are outdoor scenes clearly shot on soundstages, and intercut with close-ups of live animals which only call undue attention to the fakery. The dialogue, as I alluded to above, is so stilted, and the characters often behave in ways that defy common sense and logic.

Mitchum’s performance here is widely praised and probably the most famous element of the movie, and I found it to be one of the more enjoyable aspects of the viewing experience, but I also thought it was pretty hit or miss. It has a reputation for being chilling and disturbing, and it is that … sometimes. But at other times it’s very hammy, which I think is supposed to indicate to the audience that Harry Powell is a charlatan putting on false piety. The problem is that almost nobody else in the movie sees through this, which beggars belief.

There are some indelible images throughout, too, but to my great frustration they kept getting undercut. When Powell’s shadow falls through the bedroom window and obliterates young John Harper’s own silhouette, it’s an impeccably executed moment. But then John looks out the upstairs window and sees Powell standing on the ground in front of the streetlamp, which only reminds the viewer that for Powell’s shadow to have been cast through the window as it was, he’d have to be 12 feet tall or the streetlamp would have to stand only two feet off the ground, neither of which is true. Or later, after Powell has murdered John’s mother Willa, there is a gorgeous tracking shot through the water, showing the bound corpse of the woman submerged in a roadster, her hair undulating in the current along with the reeds growing up from the riverbed. Then a fish hook catches on the frame of the car, and the next shot is of old Uncle Birdie fishing in a boat above. And then we get an overhead shot looking down at the skiff on the river, to see what Birdie sees: Willa and her car underwater. Perfectly visible under crystal clear water that is supposed to be the Ohio River but is obviously a stage-dressed tank.

The word “lyrical” seems to be applied to The Night of the Hunter with regularity, along with “dreamlike” and I get that that’s the intent throughout the movie, I just think it falls short, technically. For me, emotional abstractions and dreams are not places where you can see the seams of construction. There’s a difference between presenting something new which does not resemble anything recognizable in the real world, and presenting something artificially assembled with visible component parts. I’m not sure I’m doing a fantastic job explaining where the line is separating acceptable and unacceptable departures between a film world and believability, but some things work and some things don’t and a lot of The Night of the Hunter just didn’t, for me.

Another notion to compare and contrast with Cloverfield is fear. The Night of the Hunter has a reputation as being one of the scariest movies of all time, and some people even go so far as to call it a horror-thriller. Are you kidding me (he said with flat affect, denying the need for a question mark). At best, I would say it is a movie which inspires great discomfort. And maybe I’m in a uniquely disadvantaged position to judge, having just come off a binge of horror flicks, but here we are. There is a very, very effective sequence where John and his sister Pearl are fleeing from Powell, and both the stakes and the tension are high and everything works thrillingly. My heart wasn’t pounding quite the way it did watching Cloverfield, but I was fully emotionally invested (also, it’s been a while since I’ve talked about Everything Is Different Now and my low threshold for abiding the thought of children in peril, but yes, that). Weirdly, though, that sequence comes about two-thirds of the way through the movie, which had me wondering where the story would go from there. The answer turns out to be a lot of meandering, introductions of new characters, a highly unsatisfactory ending to the exploits of Harry Powell, and a fair amount of speechifying about the resilience of children.

Ultimately, The Night of the Hunter is a sleepy movie about a creepy guy who is really more of a buffoon than anything, until it’s not really about him anymore. It has some memorable expressionist-inspired imagery, and some forgettable imagery. It has some impressive displays of on-screen charisma, and some painfully wooden frame-occupiers. And I haven’t even touched on the whole undercurrent of sexual dysfunction and the story’s bizarre indecisiveness as to whether Powell is a psychopath who thinks he’s on a holy mission to kill impure (read: all) women, or just a greedy thug looking to get his hands on the thousands of dollars another felon stole and hid. Or maybe I just did. At any rate, it’s good but not great, interesting and significant but not essential. So say I, in my minority and contrarian opinion!