A corpse drifts to the bottom of a river in The Night of the Hunter
Chris Forrester considers the powerful legacy of 1955’s The Night of the Hunter, a nightmare-fueled noir with far-reaching iconography and themes.
There are films you can almost see without seeing. Famous images, lines of dialogue, and plot points from films likeStar Wars(Lucas, 1977),The Wizard of Oz(Fleming, 1939), andThe Shining(Kubrick, 1980) are so culturally ubiquitous that even without direct exposure, the average film-watcher can recognize their influence elsewhere; the shower scene fromPsycho(Hitchco*ck, 1960), for instance, has been invoked everywhere fromThe SimpsonstoPhantom of the Paradise(De Palma, 1974). Often, this ceaseless referencing is the product of popular films’ outsized influence — the way they seep into the culture such that their images become shorthand for a certain kind of zeitgeisty-ness. But not always.
Elsewhere, particularly in cases where the film being referenced is more significant as the work of a legendary filmmaker than as an especially prominent cultural text, borrowed images speak more to the cinephilia of certain filmmakers and the influence of certain films and artists on that cinephilia than on the zeitgeist specifically. InShutter Island(2010), Martin Scorsese references Powell and Pressburger’sThe Red Shoes(1948): a sobbing Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) pulling the red slippers from his drowned child in the former echoes the heartbroken Julian (Marius Goring) removing the red shoes from a dying Vicky (Moira Shearer).
One case, of the latter variety, in which the film’s abundant echoes across decades of cinema feel especially significant isThe Night of the Hunter(Laughton, 1955), such a failure upon release that its filmmaker never directed again and now so beloved that few films seem more “seen without being seen.” You’ve seen it inDo the Right Thing(Lee, 1989) when Radio Raheem flashes brass knuckles that spell LOVE on one hand and HATE on the other; inCape Fear(Scorsese, 1991) in the religious tattoos that adorn De Niro’s (playing a character originated byThe Night of the Hunterantagonist Robert Mitchum) predatory ex-convict; inThe Big Lebowski(Coens, 1998) when The Dude proclaims that “The Dude abides,” a reference toThe Night of the Hunter’s final line “they abide and they endure.”
It’s a film so iconic, so bristling with unforgettable, singular images that it seems referenced even when it’s (probably) not: in the floating head against a night sky of the Princess Irulan inDune(Lynch, 1984); in any scene where geometrical shadows create frames-within-frames; the slow movement of bodies underwater invoking something between life and death or characters being dwarfed against the starry expanse of the night sky.Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters’ virtuosic set design might not deliberately echo Laughton, but I think ofThe Night of the Hunteranyways in every scene where the walls of a built set are framed by a sea of inky blackness.
The Night of the Hunter’s referenceability is a useful juncture point between its now deserving significance as a cultural text and its sheer quality as a film, both facets owing a great deal to its peerless visual style. It is not a given that a film often referenced is therefore good, or even independently good (Pulp Fiction, for example, is alluded to time and again and yet remains a flat, lousy provocation), but in this case both inspirer and inspiree mutually confer the legitimacy of its merit. The great strength ofThe Night of the Hunteris its ability to translate the “nightmarish Mother Goose story” (as Laughton dubbed it) trappings of its source material into a distinct visual style that unifies its disparate genre roots in noir, children’s film, and Southern Gothic aesthetics by way of a lyrically expressive style inspired by silent classics.
A predator lurks in the shadows in The Night of the Hunter
Laughton approached the film as a veteran actor, theater director, and, yes, filmmaker. Often mistakenly cited as Laughton’s sole directorial effort,The Night of the Hunterwas rather his sole and final solo directorial credit, his first having beenThe Man on the Eiffel Tower(Meredith, 1950), for which he went uncredited. He was sent a copy of the book by the Broadway and eventual Hollywood producer (this would become his first film) Paul Gregory, who was sent it by a literary agent, and, loving it, immediately contacted the author Davis Grubb to plan a film adaptation. Notably, Grubb had been an art student in college and sketched out ideas based on the pair’s discussion, many of which became a part of the film’s storyboard.
Wanting to “restore the power of silent films to the talkies,” Laughton studied silent classics by D.W. Griffith and Rex Ingram (Lilian Gish, who played Rachel Cooper in the film also starred in Griffith’sIntoleranceandThe Birth of a Nation), viewing them on their original nitrate prints and clearly internalizing a very lucid sense for the power of their imagery and the techniques of their making. Noting the expressive, often almost sculptural usage of light and painterly sense of composition that defineThe Night of the Hunter’s images, it’s easy to imagine not only the raw power of silent cinema that Laughton wanted to translate into his own work, but also why audiences at the time were alienated — here was a film that looked and moved like films hadn’t in decades.
Contemporaneous reviews called it “pretentious” (Life) and “a choppily-edited, foggy melodrama peopled with foggy characters” (Harrison’s Reports). Others objected to its portrayal of a serial killing preacher — the film was banned in Memphis, Tennessee, and rated “adults only” in Great Britain. Only years later did critics and audiences alike seeThe Night of the Hunterfor what it was: a stone-cold masterpiece.
Thinking ofThe Night of the Hunterin terms of its visual impact on other filmmakers, there’s a striking echo to be observed between its unseen presence in films by Scorsese, Spielberg, the Coens, even Ari Aster, and the influence of silent cinema on Laughton’s own filmmaking choices. The same is true of any great classic inspired by what came before it and inspiring to what came after, but it feels more plainly obvious here —The Night of the Hunteris, among other things, a conduit between the old and the new; a linkage between the founders of the cinematic language as we know it, and the present as we live it.
The Night of the Hunter screens May 11 at 4pm at IU Cinema as part of Critics’ Pics: Selections from AFI and Sight & Sound.
