Episode 34: The Night of the Hunter
Justin:
To put it frankly, Charles Laughton’s first and only directorial effort, THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER, has balls.
To spell it out a little bit further, it just feels to me like this movie comes out swinging and doesn’t hold back a single punch through its 90-some minute runtime. It presents a handsome leading man that we’d normally want to root for, a preacher no less, but lets us know right away that he talks to God as if the Almighty is guiding him in his murderous ways, and that he is unafraid of leaving innocent bodies in his wake. It presents a lead female protagonist, a helpless widow with two kids, her husband hanged for a robbery and murder, but then offs her before the halfway point of the film! And it often ends up mostly focused on two small children, now orphans, in their quest for survival, a seemingly impossible task when the aforementioned serial killer keeps popping up unannounced.
Laughton loves throwing out shocking and scandalous suggestions about women, marriage, and religion (and sometimes all three at the same time). I also loved it for its audacity to put a certain small-town caricature on notice as the resident mother hen of gossip Icey Spoon is presented as maybe the worst person in a movie that features multiple murderers. I was impressed by its stunning visuals, its perfect villainous score whenever Harry Powell approaches, and its willingness to jump from horror to thriller to comedy and back again while keeping a solid plot moving forward. I was not as impressed with how it dropped the ball on some characters (what was Uncle Birdie’s purpose again?) and created some others that I’m still not sure what they were even around for (here’s looking at you, Ruby) or how the plot device that literally kept the entire movie moving forward (the stolen $10,000) concludes its journey by being tossed about in a strange flashback-induced fit by our heroic little boy, John.
What I’m really saying here is that this is a strange movie and one that I loved about 80% of. Ultimately, I’ll never hear a certain hymn the same again or think of Radio Raheem without also thinking about Harry Powell. THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER is a largely forgotten classic that deserves to be seen for its courage and willingness to take a risk, something that ought to be inspiring to filmmakers all over the place, and one that I hope is leaned on (pun intended) for years to come.
