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Night of the Hunter, a Southern Gothic Grotesquerie





Last Summer Penguin launched their Modern Classics Crime and Espionage series, and there are now twenty-nine titles in the collection. The livery features the same green as that of their Penguin Crime series, launched 75 years ago, though they are in the larger and less elegantly proportioned, less pocket and bag friendly B1 paperback format. The new series uses the same colour-scheme as the Romek Marber covers of the 1960s, black, green, and white only (with an occasional splash of red to denote blood), but are less stark, making use of collage and photography, as well as illustration . To give an even more vintage feel, one that reflects the eras in which the novels were written (none later than the 1970s) a typewriter font, FF Elementis, is used. The covers are all beautiful but there is one drastic difference between Marber’s covers and those of the new editions, which is that the latter are beshitten by blurb. It's puzzling why Penguin choose to deface in this way pieces of graphic art that they have gone to the trouble of commissioning and paying a design studio to produce; Iit's doubtful that it affects sales and some series, such as the Penguin Street Art series, have avoided this fate.




Penguin's new edition of Night of the Hunter


Many in the series have been adapted into films, some of them classic film noirs such as Eric Ambler’s Journey into Fear, Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, and Dorothy B Hughes’s In a Lonely Place. Included in the series is the 1953 novel Night of the Hunter by David Grubb, which I chose as I was planning on revisiting Charles Laughton’s 1955 film adaptation after more than twenty years. I can’t remember which long-gone rep cinema in London at which I saw it, but images and whole scenes had, unusually, stayed vividly with me over the years. The blurb-dropping on the front cover’s collage is a piece of hyperbole from the New York Times about the book’s “astonishing verbal magic”. Grubb’s novel was a finalist for the National Book Award and was a best-seller, but despite the cult status of the film, Grubb is a forgotten figure.



Romek Marber's cover design for The Pledge



Rather than dealing in ‘verbal magic’, Grubb strives for literary effect with sub-Faulknerian  orotundities, and the figurative language of the novel, often invoking women and Grubb’s notion of femininity,  is sometimes bathetic, inapposite or overblown: “…now the land was alive and the air ripe and musky with the spring river smell like the ripe, passionate sweat of a country waitress”, or “..the foolish, womanly hoot of the little steamboat” and ”…great gusts of rain that raced like sheep dogs”. Yet overall, the novel is enjoyable, gripping and suspenseful, with dialogue so good that Laughton was able to keep most of it verbatim for his film adaptation.


Grubb also pulled off the feat of making good as compelling as evil without a descent into mawkishness or sentimentality, in the selfless love of the doughty Rachel Cooper. In her essay on goodness in literature, Toni Morrison pointed out the ofttimes comedy of fictionally depicted goodness, how it is mocked, and the difficulty of its effective portrayal. If there’s something in that, and there are countless texts in both adult and children’s literature that suggest there isn’t, then she missed the larger point that evil – though romanticised in some works, and often compelling – is much more a matter of comedy, mockery and punishment in fiction than goodness, seemingly having completely forgotten writers such as Waugh, Dahl, Austen and Dickens, and a whole genre, satire, the “vehicle for the denunciation and correction of vice”.


The novel’s villain, Harry Powell is, despite being a serial killer, a figure of contempt and fun: physically unprepossessing, a ranting religious maniac and a woman-hating, probably impotent pervert: a celebrated scene shows him get an erstazt switchblade erection, the blade of his flick-knife cutting through his trouser leg, as he disgustedly watches a burlesque show.


The plot of Night of the Hunter is simple enough and identical in film and novel. Ben Harper (Peter Yates), robs a bank, shooting one of the tellers dead. He returns home and has just enough time to hide the bankroll of $10, 000 in the belly of his daughter Pearl’s (Sally Jane Bruce) doll, ‘Miss Jenny’, swearing her and her older brother John (Billy Chapin) to secrecy before being arrested. As he awaits execution, he is joined in his cell by Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum), sentenced to 30 days for driving a stolen car, although he is in reality an undetected serial killer of widows (who he met through lonely hearts columns).


Powell, a bogus preacher but genuine religious maniac and psychopath, who has ‘love ‘and ‘hate’ tattooed on his left and right hands respectively, tries to wheedle the whereabouts of the money from Harper before his execution, but to no avail. On his release, Powell goes to Harper’s small West Virginia hometown, Cresap’s Landing, to preach, and seduce his widow, Willa (Shelley Winters). They marry, but on the wedding night, instead of dancing the newlywed’s bed spring jig she was expecting, Willa is subjected to a dementedly misogynist, flesh-hating sermon, and the union remains unconsummated. John blurts out that the children know the whereabouts of the money, and one night Willa returns home from her work at a café and overhears Powell aggressively trying to get the information out of Pearl. That night, he slits Willa’s throat and dumps the body at the wheel of her his Model T in the river, telling the townsfolk that she has run away. The children flee downriver on their father’s skiff and wash up at the riverside smallholding of Rachel Cooper (Lillian Gish), a widow who takes in orphans and runaways, bringing them up as her own. Powell tracks them down but is chased off by ‘Miz Cooper’ with a shotgun. He returns that night, and she shoots him in the shoulder. He retreats to the barn, is arrested, and narrowly escapes being lynched whilst in custody.



Night of the Hunter's expressionist bedroom scene


Both book and film have been taken as condemnations of the church and religious hypocrisy, yet, as the preacher is both bogus and insane, neither work as a critique of religion. The story is an allegory about the battle between good and evil, a story of sexual mania and misogyny, told through the binaries of innocence and experience, love and hate, fantasy and reality. If Willa represents the realm of illusion, credulity, and dream, Powell represents the irruption of a bladed and butchering reality principle into life.  It is also a novel about the corrupting powers of both money and poverty; the realities of poverty and grim exigencies of the depression are much more pronounced in the novel where, unlike in the film (in which nothing looks particularly ugly or squalid or dirty or poor) Grubb sharply depicts the effects and the look of rural indigence. In the novel everyone is obsessed with the $10, 000 dollars, including Willa. In Laughton’s movie, the MacGuffin/doll serves a similarly suspense and tension creating function as Stevie’s package containing a bomb in Hitchcock’s Sabotage,1936. Grubb repeatedly calls our attention to it, but it is a flaw of the novel that at around its final quarter the money simply disappears from the narrative; we never find out what becomes of it, and must assume it is returned.


There are by necessity elisions, contractions, and condensations in the film, but no actual narrative departures from the book. The backstory of Gish’s character is missing, as is the episode in which she travels to visit her son, now come up in the world and distant with her, and her snooty daughter-in-law. Icey Spoon, Willa’s boss, is a character almost as distasteful as Powell: she pesters and emotionally blackmails Willa into marrying Powell for reasons of social conformity, yet she later leads the hysterical mob to the courthouse to lynch him. It’s the same sinister smalltown conformity that Shirley Jackson satirises in her short horror story, The Lottery. Night of the Hunter is perfect reading for older children, and the film perfect young-teen viewing, (despite it getting an adult rating on its release in the UK). Imperiled-children narratives will be perennially popular with kids because they have all at some point – and, alas, to wildly differing degrees – felt themselves imperiled by adults, wishing to escape them and see them punished (if not killed).


Famously, Night of the Hunter was the only film that Charles Laughton directed. One of the great actors of his generation (Mutiny on the Bounty, 1935; Jamaica Inn, 1939; The Hunchback of Notre Dame, 1938), he didn’t intend the film to be his last. He’d planned to follow it with an adaptation of Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, but was so dispirited by the negative reviews, including a devastating one from the sneering and ever-bitchy Bosley Crowther of the New York Times, that he gave up on the idea. It didn’t help that it was released in the same year as the controversial ‘issue’ films The Blackboard Jungle and Rebel Without a Cause. The shoot was unusually good-natured and collegial – cinematographer Stanley Cortez described it as “a joy” – and possibly because of Laughton’s lack of experience and willingness to learn, uncommonly collaborative.



"Where's the money hid, you little bitch?"


Laughton and Grubb got on well, but Laughton wanted someone with more film experience, and Grubb in any case was too strange and uncommunicative a man to work with. He hired James Agee (The African Queen, 1951), a supposedly ‘functioning’ alcoholic at the time. Agee submitted a bizarre, bloated and unfilmable 300-page script, that Laughton radically cut down, without, however, taking any writing credit.


Night of the Hunter opens with the binaries-announcing blast of the preacher’s discordant, angrily stabbing, staccato theme-tune followed by a  lullaby, Dream, Little One, Dream, then, startlingly, with the face of Lillian Gish and those of ‘her’ children constellated like stars in the sky as she reads to them, to us, from the bible, cautioning them, and us, to “beware of false prophets who come to you sheep’s clothing”.


A similar homily from Gish closes the film, too, when she tells us that “… children are man at his strongest, They abide. They endure”, but it is saved from sentimentality by the strength of Gish’s performance, her character's stern goodness, and the faint intrusion of the preacher’s menacing theme tune, which doesn't, however, ruin its bedtimestory sense of closure. We are then magic-carpeted through time and space to a child finding one of Powell’s victims dead in a cellar, to Mitchum pootling along a country road in his Model T wondering aloud to himself a how many “whores and bitches” he’s murdered so far, then to the court where he’s been arraigned for driving a stolen a car.


Laughton regularly screened silent films by Pabst, Murnau and Griffiths for cast and crew before production, and Laughton’s cinematographer Stanley Cortez (The Magnificent Ambersons, 1942; Shock Corridor, 1963) was influenced by Griffiths, with his slow tracking shots and crisp, highly defined photography; the influence of silent film is also there in set design, its narrative propelling and expository mis en scene, and in its acting style. Griffiths is there, too, in those more brightly lit scenes of a bucolic America, a pastoral idyll in which the children appear alone, and in the close-ups of Gish, in which she looks straight into the camera. There is even an iris fade that closes down on a boy on a basement window, though like some other quirks of the film, it was a makeshift necessitated by a tiny budget, as they had no zoom lens. This moving back and forth between darkness and light, idyll and menace, mimics the disconcerting and confused alternation between good and evil that structures life.



Shelley Winters in Odds Against Tomorrow


The film’s modernistic, novelistic, abrupt shifts from register to register, style to style, is the thing that makes it so unique, so ahead of its time, and contributes to its overall feeling of artificiality, something stemming perhaps from Laughton’s long association with Berthold Brecht. Cortez and the set designer Hilyard Brown set out to achieve a child’s perspective in scenes of looming and towering and outsize scale, scenes which often have the look of a child’s picture book come to life, particularly in the use of silhouettes, redolent of moving paper cut-outs. Mitchum performs the film’s allegory in little with the celebrated scene in which he has his two tattooed hands fight to the death, with good hypocritically triumphant (though predictive of his fate).


The most artificial-looking scene, shot completely on a sound stage, is that of the children’s voyage downriver on the skiff, which has an oneiric, surrealistic feel, with screen-filling close ups of spiderwebs, birds, rabbits and owls, a child’s benign story book familiars, with the implication of child-animal complicity, that the creatures are somehow watching over them. The water glitters sidereally, and the preacher is seen in silhouette astride a horse in the distance, all to Pearl’s otherworldly, cracked and quavering singing of a sinister lullaby.


However original, this odd scene grates on some, and I can be included amongst them, but I suspect the antipathy to this scene affects adults only.  Such artificiality does help give the film a timeless, folkloric feel; the influence of German Expressionist set design and lighting is most obvious in the pantomimic scene of Willa’s murder that takes place in a stylised hotel room that is part-coffin, part-chapel, a halo of light around her pillowed head as she awaits the blade.




Lillian Gish keeping guard, the Big Bad Wolf in the background



Cortez had just finished work on the morally brutal Black Tuesday (1954) - with an authentically psychotic lead performance from Edward G Robinson - on which he’d experimented with Kodak’s new Tri-Ex film. Black Tuesday is perhaps visually the darkest film ever made, barely lit, it looks as if Franz Kline might have been artistic director.  On Night of the Hunter, it helped Cortez achieve opaline, glowing whites and contrasting deep, rich and velvety blacks, sometimes lighting a scene with just a single candle (something Kubrick later experimented with on Barry Lyndon, 1975). Despite its expressionistic black and white lighting and the centrality of a crime, Night of the Hunter isn’t really a film noir – not that such taxonomies are really that important - because of its lack of moral ambiguity and fatalism, its closure and hope, its stylistic heterogeneity, the centrality of children to the narrative, and its element of black humour, courtesy mostly of Robert Mitchum’s mannered performance.


Harry Powell in the novel is scrawny, physically pathetic, unappealing and weasel-faced, something that highlights Willa’s desperation and gullibility. Mitchum on the other hand was one of Hollywood’s most desirable men, a pin-up, and beard-splitter of no small repute. His honeyed drawl and somnolent flesh-appraising eyes here become unctuous and minatory, more killer than lover. He clearly takes a wicked pleasure in the part, one that he jumped at and thought was made for him, relishing such lines as “you’re the spawn of the devil’s own strumpet”. It is not a naturalistic performance and its mannered emphaticness was no doubt influenced by the regular diet of silent movies Laughton fed the cast, and was a departure from Mitchum's usual laconic nonchalance.


There are elements that compensate for Mitchum’s brawn and good looks, bringing him closer to the wretchedness of the novel's Powell, such as when he contorts his body to make it more awkward looking, and in scenes in which he plays the buffoon, loping away whooping when threatened with the shotgun, or pratfalling on a jar whilst looking for the children in the cellar, or flailing helplessly and squealing childishly when John traps his finger in the cellar door. His clownishness, his defeat by children and an old lady, also undermine the sexual allure he normally brough to his roles.


Lillian Gish, DW Griffiths’ muse, the ‘Queen of the close-up’, helped develop the gestuary of silent film out of its theatricality, just as Griffiths, in the same films, invented the grammar of the cinema with which we’re now so familiar. She made dozens of films with Griffiths, starting in 1912, including the epochal Broken Blossoms, 1919, Birth of a Nation, 1915, and Intolerance, 1916. Her performance in Night of the Hunter is a masterclass in subtlety and nuance, imperceptible expressive exaggeration, and the emotional power of eye and face. Both Grubb and Laughton convincingly and touchingly depict the growing love between Miz Cooper and the traumatised and withdrawn John, and the latter's coming back alive emotionally.


Mitchum had a long filmography too, over a 100 films stretching back to 1943 and reaching right up to the 1990s, and few actors have given so many stellar performances in so many classic films, including the best of all noirs, Jacques Tournier’s Out of the Past, 1947, (AKA, Build my Gallows High), and along with Edward G Robinson, Robert Ryan and Humphrey Bogart, he was one of the male faces that defined film noir. Highlights are his later performances in Peter Yates’s half-forgotten and underrated masterpiece The Friends of Eddie Coyle, 1973, and Paul Schrader’s half-forgotten and underrated masterpiece The Yakuza, 1974.


 But, if one was forced to choose one, the standout performance of his career was surely in J Lee Thompson’s Cape Fear, 1962, as Max Cady.  Another misogynistic psychopath, this time set on revenge on the man who helped put him in prison for 8 years (Gregory Peck) by raping his pre-teen daughter. You could see his performance as Harry Powell as a kind of rehearsal for Cady, an atavistic personification of male violence and sexual evil. However, this is a naturalistic performance, swaggering, sleazy, arrogant and frightening, unleavened by any whimsy, impishness or humour and, although another imperiled child narrative, definitely one for adults only.



Mitchum and Gregory Peck in Cape Fear


Shelley Winters too, as Willa, landed a role perfect for her. She had a quality of incipient hysteria and somehow seductive vulgarity that made her perfect for this role, as she was for Lolita’s pretentious and manstarved mother in Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 adaptation of Nabokov’s novel. She too had a long filmography going back to 1943, highlights being two outstanding noirs, Cry of the City (1948), with Richard Conte, and the unforgettably bleak but poetic Odds Against Tomorrow (1959), the only film noir starring a black actor, Harry Belafonte. The most celebrated, iconic image from Night of the Hunter is Winters dead at the wheel of the Model T with her long hair being pulled along, dancing with the current alongside the reeds (although the body was a wax model of Winters). Brash and gobby in real life, she had been Marilyn Monroe’s flatmate in the 40s; a self-confessed ‘party girl’, it was Winters who coined the phrase ‘FMN pumps’. It’s a shame, because she was really a very good, nuanced actress, that she’ll probably remain best known for her comically maudlin demise in The Poseidon Adventure (1972).


 Mitchum too had his forgettable duds, the somnambulistic Thunder Road, 1958, in which all the actors seem to be on the nod, The Last Tycoon, 1976, and artistic reverse-Midas Michael Winner’s awful remake of The Big Sleep come to mind. He was always self-deprecating about his acting, commenting that he came from the ‘Smirnoff School’, but in fact he initiated a whole new ‘cool’, understated style of acting in the 40s, which was hugely influential. An intellectual prodigy as a child, Mitchum had an instinctive antipathy to authority (he once shat in his teacher’s hat), and left home at 14 to be ‘ride the rails’ as a hobo during the Depression. In 1948, not for the first time, he was busted, this time for marijuana possession (a lifelong habit that went as far as him cultivating his own crop in the 70s), and the publicity sealed his reputation as ‘Hollywood’s bad boy’. An erudite, voracious reader, he and Laughton got on so famously partly due to a shared enthusiasm for literature.


Night of the Hunter is an entertaining thriller distracting enough to while away a couple of too-lazy-for-literature afternoons, one that effectively evokes the landscape of rural West Virginia and gives us a vivid picture of small-town life in the Depression era South in which Grubb had grown up, but it is let down by occasional stylistic lapses and a not wholly convincing attempt at stream of consciousness at its close. Its comforting Manicheanism is more suitable for the young. The film is a more complex and intricate artwork, partly due to composer Walter Schumann’s refined and variegated use of music, an integral and considered element of the narrative. Grubb’s novel was published in the same year as Flannery O’ Connor’s landmark story A Good Man is Hard to Find, a more philosophically sophisticated, troubling, if not traumatic, study of the haunting inscrutability of evil. The value of the novel value lies more in its basis for Laughton’s unique film, one containing images and scenes of such arresting power and insinuating beauty that they remain with you for a lifetime.





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