Preacher Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum) is the very picture of charm. He’s tall and handsome, with an easy smile and a soft voice. When he sings hymns it’s with a heavenly baritone, and when he preaches it’s with real conviction and fire. He has the word LOVE tattooed on the knuckles of his right hand and HATE on the left, and without much prompting he’ll use them to deliver an animated sermon about the triumph of the former over the latter. Everyone who meets him immediately knows him as a man of God, which is exactly what Powell intends.
And once he’s earned the trust of a lonely widow, he slits her throat, takes her money and moves on to the next town.
Powell, the antagonist of Charles Laughton’s “The Night of the Hunter” (1955), isn’t enhanced by makeup or special effects like other movie monsters, which is the point. His undeniable charisma is what makes him so terrifying and his brand of evil so seductive. In the film’s battle of good against evil, only the truly innocent oppose Powell: two young children standing alone against a monster.
Those children are John Harper (Billy Chapin) and his little sister Pearl (Sally Jane Bruce), whose father, Ben, was recently hanged after killing two men during a bank robbery. Before his arrest, Ben hid the money and made the children promise they would never reveal its location—even to their own mother, Willa (Shelley Winters)—so that they will have it when they are older. Powell learns about the hidden money while sharing a cell with Ben, and when he’s released he makes his way to the Harper home to find it.
Powell quickly impresses Willa and the rest of the town. It’s not just that he’s handsome and charming, but that he quietly, insidiously gives license to their darkest impulses. For town busybody Icey Spoon (Evelyn Varden), who sees sex as a necessary evil and believes women can’t raise children without a man, Powell is the embodiment of her judgmental, censorious form of Christianity. With Willa, Powell validates her self-loathing and sexual shame, putting her in his thrall as she strives to be “clean” enough to deserve him.
Only John sees him for what he really is, sizing up that Powell is there for the money shortly after meeting him. A game of wits between man and boy ensues until, following a dreadful crescendo of violence, John and Pearl run away, riding a tiny skiff upriver. The story takes place in the heart of the Depression and there are few safe harbors to be found (and plenty of other lost children wandering the roads). But eventually John and Pearl take shelter with Rachel Cooper (former silent film starlet Lillian Gish), a pious woman looking after several other orphans.
Rachel is the light to Powell’s darkness, and like her sinister counterpart she doesn’t look quite how you would expect. She’s brusque and unsentimental, living a simple life on the farm where she expects her wards to earn their keep through labor. But when she tells the children Bible stories in the evening it’s with a warm, genuine passion, not Powell’s self-aggrandizing theatricality. Beneath her rough exterior she is kind, generous, forgiving and courageous. In her unlikely form, Powell’s evil finally meets its match.
Based on the noir novel by Davis Grubb and with a screenplay by James Agee, “The Night of the Hunter” was Laughton’s only directorial effort, its box office failure scaring studios away from developing any of his other projects. Best known as an actor, Laughton demonstrates a diabolical skill for creating tension and crafting haunting images, which is why later viewers hailed the film as one of the best ever made.
Raised by a devout Catholic mother, Laughton attended Stonyhurst College, a Jesuit school in Lancashire. He had complicated feelings about religion. His friend Paul Gregory, who produced “The Night of the Hunter,” once said: “He was torn. He wanted not to be Catholic, yet when he was dying, he was surrounded by religious symbols.” That ambivalence haunts “The Night of the Hunter,” in which faith is a means of both manipulation and salvation.
Film noir, as the name implies, typically sticks to the shadows, which is likely why some reviewers fault “The Night of the Hunter’s” tonal shifts from bleak terror to the gentle harmony of Rachel’s home. But that strikes me as very Catholic. The world is frightening and it’s often the most innocent who suffer: As Rachel says, “It’s a hard world for little things.” But grace persists and we hope that, like the wrestling hands in Powell’s sermon, love will ultimately win the day.
“The Night of the Hunter” is streaming on Prime Video and Tubi.
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