The First Great Crime Thriller Changed Cinema Forever
Your favorite filmmaker’s favorite film.
There are few things more vulnerable than crafting a piece of art from start to finish, especially when you’re a first-time film director. Movies are often judged purely as products, and the blood, sweat, and tears behind the scenes can be ignored entirely. It can be demoralizing to watch the project you’ve focused on for years not reach an audience, enough to make you want to never do it again.
In 1955, a highly esteemed actor tried his hand behind the camera. The result is a lush, haunting thriller inspired by the silent film era. But a middling box office reception kept him from directing another film. However, like rock bands inspired by The Velvet Underground, this movie may not have found commercial success, but it managed to influence an entire generation of artists, from Spike Lee to the Coen Brothers to Ari Aster. It may not have sparked its own director’s career, but it will never be forgotten.
Robert Mitchum plays Harry Powell, a nefarious murderer posing as a preacher, in The Night of the Hunter.
You don’t really watch The Night of the Hunter; it’s more of an experience. Directed by Charles Laughton and based on a novel by Davis Grubb, the movie follows Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum), a serial murderer disguised as a preacher, as he tries to track down money left behind by a former cellmate. Every scene is carefully crafted and drips with terror, especially the now iconic “Battle of Love and Hate” scene that directly influenced Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing.
Mitchum’s Harry Powell is quietly horrific, an evil stepfather for the ages who feels no remorse about preaching alongside a woman only to murder her and send her body to the bottom of a lake. His targets, the children John (Billy Chapin) and Pearl (Sally Jane Bruce), aren’t plucky young heroes or victims of an oppressor, but something in between: scared kids who are doing what it takes to survive, even if it means growing up too fast.
The underwater shot of one of Harry’s victims has become one of the movie’s most iconic shots.
But by far the most enduring part of The Night of the Hunter is how it looks. Using the black-and-white format to its benefit, it plays on the concepts of light and dark and uses light in ways that are rarely seen today. From stark silhouettes to hazy, dreamlike sequences, the inspiration from the silent era is obvious: you could watch this movie on mute and not miss a single plot point.
There’s definitely no replicating the eerie tone of the original movie — a 1991 TV movie tried and failed — but its source material is getting adapted again, breathing new life into what was once just a cult classic. The Black Phone’s Scott Derrickson is currently developing the new adaptation, saying, “For those unfamiliar, Night of the Hunter was based on a novel that was much darker than the 1950s would allow.”
So while we’ll never see another movie directed by Charles Laughton, his fingerprints can be found all over cinema history, and now a new movie will portray what even he could. Sometimes, putting your art out there, even if it’s deemed a failure, can secure your legacy forever.
