“Night of the Hunter” (1955) “Night of the Hunter” features one of the greatest film villains of all time, brought to life by the single finest performance in Robert Mitchum’s remarkable career. He plays Harry Powell, a very charismatic, very corrupt, preacher with a great deal of blood on his hands. Notably, this evil holy man is neither a lunatic or delusional; instead, this is an unusually literate exploration of “radical evil,” an evil conscious of its own wickedness, like Shakspere’s Iago, and not driven by any irrational need, justified by any hypocrisy, or reflecting any fanatical distortion of virtue. He just knows what he wants, doesnt care if he’s bad, and wastes no time on self-justification. The film is about Mitchum charming, deceiving, manipulating, and then murdering an innocent woman (Shelly Winters) and his cross-country pursuit of her two children with the same intent, all for the purpose of ill-gotten financial gain. Let’s face it, you can’t get much worse than that. There’s reason to suspect the character was shaped through Mitchum’s interpretations more than many other cases where actors sublimate themselves to bring a script to life. There are a couple of scenes where he talks with God about his misdeeds, and certainly this could be played in such a way that the preacher thought he was on a divine mission, but Mitchum’s interpretation is too mocking for that; he underlines the fact that he fails to recognize any significance in any entity outside himself — not the ever watchful eye of God, and significantly for the plot of the film, not the lives of little children. Mitchum’s knuckles are famously tattooed with H-A-T-E on one hand, L-O-V-E on the other, hinting at the film’s moral absolutes, but for Mitchum, love has no meaning. In this film, “love’s” moral expression must be provided by another character, Rachel Cooper, played by Lillan Gish, who — as Mitchum’s utter contrast and a woman of purest virtue, she defends the threatened children. Gish’s performance is so full conviction that she saves the character from descending into camp. And then there’s Peter Graves, whose greatest attribute across his more than 50-year-long career was maintaining some dignity no matter how embarrassing the material was — a highly professional C-lister. Here though, in a small part, he displays depth and pathos that he would never equal again. These amazing performances likely came about because their director was himself a legendary actor, Charles Laughton. This marked the beginning of Laughton’s directorial career. But panned by critics and a failure at the box office, it also marked the end of that same career, which is a tragedy, because time has been kind to this film — it is now recognized as among the finest ever made and a breakthrough moment in cinema. Critics and audiences were simply unprepared for the style. Though the plot indulged in some contrivances (the soon to be executed Graves shares tantalizing hints about hidden treasure to cell-mate Mitchum), there’s nothing especially unrealistic about it, and a number of the thriller-genre’s most cliched and melodramatic crutches are side-stepped to strengthen believable cause-and-effect (in the climax, Gish prioritizes protecting the children over punishing Mitchum; this is realistic but unusual in a thriller, and requires that Mitchum ultimately be captured off screen by lawmen who are never part of the script). The relative realism of the story was contrasted against Laughton’s style, he saw this battle between good and evil as expressing a dualism stark enough to take on aspects of a fairy tale, and so told his story is told mostly through the lens of expressionistic visual fantasy. The visual language of prosaic fairy tale fantasy dominated the first two thirds of the film, but the climax is one of darker-than-Val-Lewton shadows, and this is what everyone remembers the most — Mitchum invisible at the bottom of the stairs crooning, “Children…” and than leaping up — more like an predatory cat than a mortal man. Then, moments after Gish gets the better of him, we get a few seconds frozen on his face of his perfectly dumb, animalistic incomprehension. It’s that image of Mitchum’s face that burned itself into my brain. How many times has a villain scared you most, not when he jumps out and says BOO! but after he’s brought low? https://youtube/watch?v=e5AKK_om1VU
Posted on: Sat, 17 Jan 2015 21:23:07 +0000
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