One Shot Wonder

If nothing else Charles Laughton’s brilliant, haunting film The Night Of The Hunter is proof that it’s never too late to try something new. The legendary stage and screen actor was fifty-five when he finally moved behind the camera. And though it would take decades for his achievement to be properly appreciated, in doing so he delivered one of the undisputed classics of American cinema. 

Laughton’s early career had been a string of astonishing triumphs. He’d been a relatively late starter, arriving at  RADA in his mid-20s, but a crescendo of memorable theatrical performances had swiftly established him as one of the most skilled and versatile stage actors of his generation. In Hollywood, he won an Academy Award for his role in The Private Life Of Henry VIII (1933).

But by the early 1950s, his career seemed to have plateaued, the earlier towering performances having given way to the likes of Abbot & Costello Meet Captain Kidd (1952). He had begun to find performing, particularly with the intensity and commitment that he demanded of himself, increasingly exhausting, and had settled into a career of live book readings, deploying his astonishing voice, which could turn from mellifluous to sinister on a hairpin, as well as teaching small groups of young actors.

But in 1953 his manager, Paul Gregory, sent him the galleys of a new novel by advertising man and first-time novelist Davis Grubb, with the suggestion that he, perhaps, direct. Grubb’s novel, The Night Of The Hunter, was a strange tale – gothic and lyrical in equal measure – about a brother and sister pursued by a murderous preacher who is in search of $10,000, the spoils of a bank robbery. 

Laughton was immediately intrigued. He hired The African Queen screenwriter James Agee to adapt the novel for the big screen. Agee, a troubled man, a depressive and an alcoholic, turned in a 350-page screenplay, vastly overlong, and packed with incidental asides that Laughton thought detracted from the simplicity of the story. He began to cut and rewrite Agee’s script. 

Agee would not live to see the film’s release, and argument still rages about how much of the final script was Agee’s work and how much Laughton’s.

In both the book and screenplay Preacher (as he is referred to in the screenplay) is a terrifying picture of wickedness, made worse by the cloying hypocrisy of his religious garb. He is monstrous and frightening, but also utterly compelling. Laughton quickly realised that the success of the film would depend on his casting, and that to captivate audiences, whoever played him would have to bring more than just menace. 

He had briefly considered taking the role himself, before pondering Gary Cooper for the role. (It’s a fascinating idea, Cooper playing wildly against the white hat type on which he had built his career.) But finally, in a stroke of genius, he settled on one of the most prolific and, after a drugs bust five years previously, controversial actors of the age: Robert Mitchum. 

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“The character is a bit different,” Laughton had told Robert Mitchum when he offered him the role of homicidal preacher Harry Powell. “He’s a terrible, evil . . . shit of a man.”

“Present,” Mitchum had replied.

Mitchum was the perfect choice, and the performance he gives is pretty much unarguably the greatest of his career. His Preacher is certainly sinister and terrifying. But he also gives the character one of its most utterly unexpected qualities, an occasional kind of slapstick humour and buffoonery that really shouldn’t work. That it does, and brilliantly, is a small miracle in a film full of them.

Laughton rounded out the cast with experienced Hollywood faces. For the role of the children’s doomed mother Willa, Laughton had set his heart on Betty Grable, but cast Shelley Winters, a former student of his, at the last minute when Grable turned out to be unavailable. (Mitchum was unimpressed: “She looks and sounds about as much a wasted West Virginia girl as I do,” he unkindly remarked. “The only thing she’ll do convincingly is float in the water with her throat cut.”) 

Laughton had recently rewatched the works of D.W. Griffith and had been dazzled by the work of Lillian Gish, who he cast as Rachel Cooper, the plain-spoken woman who becomes the children’s saviour. Though overshadowed by Mitchum’s thespian fireworks, her performance is in many ways equally astonishing, managing to bring a believable kindness and decency to the film, while staying just the right side of icky sentimentality.

As important as the cast was Laughton’s choice of director of photography. Stanley Cortez was one of the industry’s most experienced and creative cameramen, and in neophyte Laughton, he found a kindred spirit, a collaborator willing to push the boundaries and break the rules.

“Apart from Ambersons the most exciting experience I have had in cinema was with Charles Laughton on Night Of The Hunter,” Cortez would later say. “Every day I consider something new about light, that incredible thing that can’t be described. Of the directors I’ve worked with, only two have understood it: Orson Welles and Charles Laughton.”

Cortez would work with production designer Hilyard Brown to deliver a succession of stunning, bewitching images. Heavily influenced by German expressionist cinema, Laughton, Brown and Cortez would eschew realism in favour of dream-like imagery – the shadow of Harry Powell falling across young John’s bedroom wall; Willa’s bedroom transformed into a kind of chapel by ingenious framing; the unforgettable image of the children’s mother dead at the bottom of the river, her hair swaying in the current – all adding to the outstanding visual style.

Working on a tight budget of $700,000 Laughton shot almost solely on soundstages. His directing style was informal and, in an age when directors still tended towards the Stroheim-esque autocratic, refreshingly collaborative. He never called ‘action’ or cut, instead simply rolling the camera and letting the actors find their performances at their own speed. “He was sort of the head of family when we were on set, which is as it should be. As a director, he was so grateful he went into ecstasy whenever he enjoyed a scene,” Mitchum later said. “He was adored.”

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“When I first went to the movies, audiences sat in their seats straight. Now they slump down with their heads back, or eat candy and popcorn,” Laughton had said when he announced he was to direct The Night Of The Hunter. “I want them to sit up straight again.” 

Sadly audiences didn’t sit straight, or slump. Mostly they didn’t turn up. The Night Of The Hunter was released in the Summer of 1955  to reviews that ranged from the (mostly) baffled to (occasionally) hostile. Nobody knew quite what to make of it, and they weren’t helped by United Artists’ marketing campaign, which sold the movie as an out-and-out thriller with the poster tagline: The wedding night, the anticipation, the kiss, the knife BUT ABOVE ALL THE SUSPENSE! 

The received wisdom is that Laughton was so wounded by the film’s reception that he forswore film directing for the rest of his life: the critics stood guilty of killing one of cinema’s great, unrealised talents.

It might not be the whole story. Perhaps, deep down, Laughton thought something his natural modesty would never allow him to say: that The Night Of The Hunter was an almost perfect film and that he had achieved everything he had set out to. Like Welles after Citizen Kane, to direct anything else was to risk not living up to its promise.

Whatever the reason, Laughton soon abandoned plans to shoot an adaptation of Norman Mailer’s war novel The Naked And The Dead, returning to his life of live book readings and teaching, and making the occasional film appearances. He died in 1962, aged 63. 

But in the succeeding decades, The Night Of The Hunter’s reputation began to grow. It became a cult movie with the advent of VHS in the 1970s and 80s. By the 1990s it was an acknowledged masterpiece, and its influence can be seen in the work of contemporary directors, from Terence Malick to the Coen Brothers and Martin Scorsese. Even Spike Lee paid homage to Laughton in Do The Right Thing, with Mookie wearing ‘Love’ and ‘Hate’ knuckle rings and quoting from the film.

Part fairy tale, part horror movie, part thriller, Charles Laughton’s The Night Of The Hunter is unique. It’s a towering, timeless achievement that ranks among the handful of Hollywood films that can genuinely be called masterpieces. As Miss Rachel says of the children at the end of the movie, it abides.