Night of the Hunter with the Lamp Off
I had put off The Night of the Hunter for years because I knew the image of Robert Mitchum’s knuckles, LOVE on one hand and HATE on the other, and I assumed I therefore knew the film. I did not. The first act is stranger, slower and far more beautiful than I had any idea of.
It opens with an old woman telling a Bible story to children whose faces float against a starry sky, which is as odd as it sounds and sets the tone: this is a fable, lit and shot like one. Then we are in the Depression, in a small river town. A father, desperate, robs a bank and hides the money, and only his two children know where. He goes to prison and shares a cell with Mitchum’s preacher, who talks to God in the dark and listens very carefully to what his cellmate says in his sleep. The first act ends with the preacher walking into the town where the widow and her children live. I will go no further.
What I did not expect was the look of it. Laughton and his cinematographer shot it like a silent film, all hard shadows and painted skies and rooms that are too tall. There is a shot of a bedroom that becomes a church steeple with a change of light that I rewound twice. Mitchum is terrifying because he is charming; he sings a hymn in a deep, pleasant voice and you want to trust him.
The children, especially the boy, are remarkable, and Shelley Winters as the widow is heartbreaking in a way that sneaks up on you. There is also a kind of mid-century American gothic humor in it, in the gossiping townsfolk and the ice-cream parlor, that keeps it from being merely grim.
I watched it with the lamp off because the room was cold and I did not want to get up. That turned out to be the right decision for the film but the wrong one for my nerves. I went to bed and lay awake for a while listening to the house. A good start to the dark half of the year.