{"id":18873,"date":"2026-08-16T20:00:50","date_gmt":"2026-08-17T00:00:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/?p=18873"},"modified":"2026-08-15T16:39:46","modified_gmt":"2026-08-15T20:39:46","slug":"night-of-the-hunter-1955-charles-laughton","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/archives\/18873","title":{"rendered":"Night of the Hunter (1955, Charles Laughton)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>After the cops nab father Peter Graves (star of <em>Parts: The Clonus Horror<\/em>), false priest Robert Mitchum moves in and takes care of mother Shelley Winters, then starts working on the kids to reveal their bank robber dad&#8217;s missing loot until they escape downriver and find a protector in Lillian Gish.  I wasn&#8217;t getting the fantasy storybook quality of this movie when I watched it thirty years ago on TCM, just the plot and some odd moments, such as Mitchum popping up like a cartoon to get shot by Gish at the end.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/journal\/image26\/hunter7.jpeg\"><\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/journal\/image26\/hunter8.jpeg\"><\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/journal\/image26\/hunter9.jpeg\"><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.criterion.com\/current\/posts\/1657-the-night-of-the-hunter-holy-terror\">Terrence Rafferty:<\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>[Screenwriter James] Agee was steeped not only in the right kind of southern sensibility but also in the work of the silent-film pioneer D. W. Griffith, which Laughton, with near miraculous intuition, believed should be the touchstone for the telling of the story; Griffith was the master of heightened, poetic melodrama, and that\u2019s what Laughton wanted for <em>The Night of the Hunter<\/em>. He screened as many of Griffith\u2019s movies as he could dig up at the Museum of Modern Art, and hired the terrific cinematographer Stanley Cortez, who had done brilliantly imaginative work in black and white on Orson Welles\u2019s second film, <em><a href=\"\/journal\/archives\/56\">The Magnificent Ambersons<\/a><\/em>. The black-and-white imagery of <em>The Night of the Hunter<\/em> is in a different, more deliberately archaic style from that of the Welles film, keyed to the basic emotions of love and fear, just as the great silent movies were.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/journal\/image26\/hunter4.jpeg\"><\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/journal\/image26\/hunter6.jpeg\"><\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/journal\/image26\/hunter5.jpeg\"><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.criterion.com\/current\/posts\/909-the-night-of-the-hunter\">David Ehrenstein:<\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote><p><em>The Night of the Hunter<\/em> has the feel and the force of an American folk fable; yet, it\u2019s a curious and highly eccentric sort of folk fable, mixing, as it does, rural humor with gothic humor, biblical quotation and Freudian symbolism, and everyday realities with a near-mythic confrontation between the forces of good and evil. &#8230; It may be frightening, but not in the melodramatic manner of a conventional thriller. Its story is told from a child\u2019s viewpoint, yet it has nothing in common with the likes of Disney or Spielberg. Then, there is its style to contend with\u2014an incredible mixture of naturalistic three-dimensional space on view one moment, replaced by theatrical two-dimensional images the next. It is clear what the film is aiming at: images from our nightmares, brought into the lucid light of day.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><em>Only instance in history of an adult in a movie believing a kid over another adult:<\/em><br \/>\n<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/journal\/image26\/hunter1.jpeg\"><\/p>\n<p><em>Bad shadow:<\/em><br \/>\n<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/journal\/image26\/hunter3.jpeg\"><\/p>\n<p><em>Good shadow:<\/em><br \/>\n<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/journal\/image26\/hunter2.jpeg\"><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>After the cops nab father Peter Graves (star of Parts: The Clonus Horror), false priest Robert Mitchum moves in and takes care of mother Shelley Winters, then starts working on the kids to reveal their bank robber dad&#8217;s missing loot until they escape downriver and find a protector in Lillian Gish. I wasn&#8217;t getting the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[342,488,767,1914,2820,3386],"class_list":["post-18873","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie","tag-1950s","tag-charles-laughton","tag-cinematography","tag-great-depression","tag-heist","tag-lillian-gish"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18873","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18873"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18873\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18932,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18873\/revisions\/18932"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18873"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18873"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18873"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}