He gives a broad, yet artfully controlled, performance that is different from anything else in his career. Mitchum himself has the time of his life seeing how far he can exaggerate his character and still make him believable.
Look at the way he tells the story of Good and Evil, using tattoos of love and hate on his fingers. Preacher delights in his own theatricality. The pictorial dichotomy of the film is matched by a contrast in the acting of Robert Mitchum (Preacher) and Lillian Gish (Miz Cooper). That long-lost first draft will be published by the University of Tennessee Press in the next year or so.) (In his first-draft script, Agee envisioned expressionistic devices that were never used in the film, such as a vibrating camera and “the groaning chordlike sound” of a steamboat whistle to convey Preacher’s murderous intention. In astonishing scenes sculpted in shadow and light, The Night of the Hunter belongs to Laughton’s cinematographer, Stanley Cortez. The film, however, diverges stylistically from the novel when it evokes the chilling geometry of German expressionism. His lyricism is cinematically captured in a sequence such as the children’s stylized journey down the Ohio River. The realism of Grubb’s novel is matched in pastoral scenes of soft, supple grays. Grubb even receives first position in the credits, ahead of screenwriter James Agee, who felt the order of names was just. But through his only film, he tells a simple story with elegant economy while creating complex patterns of image and sound.īased on Davis Grubb’s 1953 novel, the film adheres to the author’s Depression-era story, characters, and dialogue. The Night of the Hunter was Laughton's debut feature, and after it failed at the box office, he never directed another one. With each viewing I would see or hear something new, and so it was not about any one thing.
Night of the hunter screenwriter tv#
Years later, while writing a book about the film, I watched it again (and again) on both TV and the big screen. At that time, seeing the film enlarged in a darkened theater, it was all about the imagery: Preacher’s monstrous shadow on a bedroom wall or an underwater picture of serene and grisly death. This was before The Night of the Hunter’s entry into the National Film Registry and Bob Gitt’s loving, impeccable restoration. As part of the Southern Illinois Film Society, I insisted that we rent Charles Laughton’s film, even though my colleague Keith Vyse said nobody would show up. I was in college when I first saw The Night of the Hunter on the big screen. The boy’s hopeless isolation was more terrifying in its everyday reality than any late show Dracula, Mummy, or Wolf Man. At that time, it was all about the boy: John Harper, just my age, the only one in his whole town who knows that Preacher Harry Powell is a fraud and a threat. I was ten years old when I first saw The Night of the Hunter on TV, on The Late Show.
JEFFREY COUCHMAN – Author ( “The Night of the Hunter”: A Biography of a Film)
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