The Night of the Hunter

Robert Mitchum (Cape Fear, Out of the Past) was a tough sonuvabitch.  He’s one of the greatest all time badass actors that made you think twice about sayin’ some shit to his face.  And possibly his best role was the Reverend Harry Powell form The Night of the Hunter.

So Peter Graves (Biography, Airplane!) is sitting in jail because he killed some people and robbed them of $10,000.  His cellmate is Powell who’s there because he stole a car.  But Powell is pretty crazy.  He talks to God a lot and thinks that he’s doing his work.  On his fingers right below the knuckles he has the words “hate” written on one hand and “love” on the other. 

Graves starts talking in his sleep about the money that he stole and that he’s hidden it somewhere.  Powell tries to coax it out of him but doesn’t get anywhere.  Graves is sentenced to death by the state but Powell won’t let the money thing go so he goes to Graves’ town and tries to find where it is.  He meets up with Graves’ family and even goes as far as marrying his widow and taking care of their children so he can get this money.

This is one of the creepiest goddamn films I’ve ever seen.  There are a lot of shots of shadows and eerie looking wide shots with a ton of black space around the edges like you’re looking at a framed photograph.  When it’s night time it looks and feels like an entirely different world than when it’s day.  It’s almost like heaven and hell or good and evil.  Most of the evil stuff happens at night.  There’s also a lot of Mitchum with this absolutely evil stare.  But you don’t know if he really believes all of this stuff he spews about God and religion or if it’s all a cover. 

The scene where Powell tells the story of right hand, left hand is a classic.  He talks about man and the soul and how love conquers over hate.  But the way Powell tells the story and just the way he talks in general it’s like he’s preaching all the time.  The people who he’s telling the story to, including Graves’ children, look like they’re kind of enjoying it but it also kind of looks like their terrified and don’t quite know how to react.  At the end of the story one woman says that she never heard it told so well but there’s clearly something wrong with this guy.  You feel like he could lose it at any minute and cut someone up with the switchblade that he carries with him at all times if that person says the wrong thing to him.  But he’s more cunning than that.  He’s a plotter and a manipulator that has discipline to stick to his plan which makes him incredibly dangerous.

When Powell finally gets the children alone he grills them on where the money is hid.  The scene escalates quickly because Powell gets impatient after asking them again and again.  He calls them lambs at first but then calls Graves’ daughter (who’s just a little girl) a “poor, silly, disgusting little wretch”.  He pulls out his knife and implies that he’ll use it on them if they don’t confess the hiding place.  And then a moment later he tells Graves’ son in a pretty casual manner that he’ll slit his throat and “leave him to drip like a hog hung up in butcher time” if he doesn’t tell.   

Don’t let the Bible scripture intro to the movie fool you ‘cause this is a dark film man.  So many movies try so hard to be scary or convey a creepy feeling but don’t succeed because it feels contrived.  The foreboding atmosphere and feeling like these people live in a sort of hellish alternate world comes through in spades.  But it’s really just one fucked up dude bringing terror to a small town in the U.S.  It shows us that things can change in an instant and that before you know it you could find yourself up against a guy with a knife and a demonic sense of self-entitlement, superiority and justice.  Or maybe it’s just a real cool movie with Robert fucking Mitchum as a crazy preacher who carries a switchblade and is willing to murder anyone that gets in the way of what he wants.  Either way The Night of the Hunter is a must see for anyone who’s into badass shit.