![]() Laughton, in his midfifties at the time of filming, had been a very famous actor on the stage and screen in his native England for nearly three decades, and a prominent (usually flamboyant) character actor in Hollywood since the thirties. The river sequence is the centerpiece of The Night of the Hunter, and the clearest indication of Laughton’s extraordinary visual gifts, but the film is stuffed with beauties: a superb ghostly image of the children’s murdered mother (Shelley Winters), her body lifeless under the water of that same indifferent river and her blonde hair trailing upward toward the light an extreme long shot of the preacher on horseback, silhouetted against the first faint light of dawn as John watches from a hayloft and whispers to himself, “Don’t he never sleep?” a wonderful scary-comic scene, expressionistically lit, of Powell scrambling up cellar stairs in pursuit of the escaping children. When John and Pearl are sleeping, in their fragile craft on the river and with the night animals keeping vigil, you feel as if you were inside their heads, dreaming a child’s dreams, part blind terror and part sweet hope. Toward the end of the film, the children’s savior, an old woman (Lillian Gish) who gathers in the many orphans the river washes up, looks into the camera and says, “It’s a hard world for little things.” In The Night of the Hunter, all the little things, human and otherwise, know too well and too soon how hard the world is. In flight, John and Pearl just go where the gentle current takes them, sleeping when they can and meandering past other small creatures, who seem to be watching over them anxiously from the riverbank: owls, rabbits, frogs, even spiders. These Depression-era West Virginia kids, John Harper (Billy Chapin) and his little sister, Pearl (Sally Jane Bruce), orphaned by the recent death of both their parents, light out on the river in a tiny boat to escape the grasping hands of their stepfather, one Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum). ![]() It’s about those venerable American subjects fear, sex, money, and religion, and for the beleaguered children who are its heroes, salvation comes at the end of a long, drifting journey down a river: our old native idea of finding the way to someplace better. T he Night of the Hunter (1955)-the first film directed by Charles Laughton and also, sadly, the last-is among the greatest horror movies ever made, and perhaps, of that select company, the most irreducibly American in spirit.
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