Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter is so loaded with neurotic symbology that you can attach nearly any meaning to it, and that’s the source of its uneasy, primordial power. In 1955, it might’ve been logical to assume that Laughton and critic turned screenwriter James Agee, working from David Grubb’s novel, were intending the film as an allegory for McCarthyism. After all, the villain, Reverend Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum), cannily exploits people’s panic in order to line his pockets, turning them on one another so as to distract them from the true evildoings being committed.
Like those in the grip of the second Red Scare, most of Harry’s victims are easily exploited because they willingly forfeit individual judgment in the presence of reassuringly unquestioned leadership. As in other McCarthyism parables (most obviously Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers), only the children and the outcasts are able to see through the subterfuge of an encroaching menace. Everyone else is too well-practiced in subsuming rational thought for the sake of protocol.
Set in West Virginia at the height of the Great Depression, the film could just as easily be taken as a macabre, satirical celebration of the New Deal, as its eventual hero, Rachel Cooper (Lillian Gish), is revealed to be a little old spitfire who believes in the Lord as well as providing the rootless young children around her with the opportunities to learn trades that imbue them with hope of social betterment. Almost 70 years after its initial release, The Night of the Hunter still resonates in a corporatized culture that prizes banally encouraging self-marketing jargon as distraction from the gradual, legally sanctioned demise of the New Deal’s benefits.
The commonality in these interpretations is the expression of a profound distrust of authority. The Night of the Hunter is part of a movement of American films that were subversively concerned with the stifling properties of a mainstream culture that values consumerism and puritanical good behavior, as defined by empowered white people, at the expense of even rudimentary empathy. The film is a nightmarish coming-of-age story that concerns a child who learns that adults (and, by extension, their rules) are fallible and given to pronounced malevolence. John Harper (Billy Chapin) has barely processed the death of his murdering bank-robber father (Peter Graves) when he’s accosted by Harry over the whereabouts of his father’s hidden loot. John quickly sees Harry for the madman he is, but John’s mother, Willa (Shelly Winters), disastrously sees in the preacher a vessel for personal redemption.
The imagery heightens our impression of John and his little sister Pearl’s (Sally Jane Bruce) feelings of exclusion from society following the boy’s rude social awakening. Nearly every shot communicates a sense that the actors are pointedly divorced from their surroundings. Floating along the Ohio River on the run from Harry after he’s murdered their mother, John and Pearl can often be seen in the frame’s middle ground while wild animals are framed with striking clarity uncomfortably close in the foreground. Stanley Cortez’s cinematography evokes the surreal quality of Grimm fairy tales and the grammar of the silent films that inspired Laughton, but it most urgently affirms the children’s newly untethered emotional state.
This sense of exclusion from “proper society” is also prominent in the film’s strongest image. Right before Willa blurts out to Harry that she knows what he’s up to, and thus incurring her death, we see them in their bedroom from a distance, and only their bedroom, which is shaped like a steeple in a ghoulish joke that seems to have almost certainly informed Brian De Palma’s Carrie. The rest of the frame is lit pitch black, allowing us to explicitly discern that we’re watching a scene that was filmed on a set, which only intensifies our sense of Willa’s entrapment and fragility. When we later chillingly see the hair of Willa’s corpse floating up toward the sun from the bottom of the river, we suspect that she’s ironically attained the freedom she sought.
Like Willa, Harry’s also entrapped in a puritanical prison. The iconic “LOVE” and “HATE” tattoos on his fingers are the subject of a variety of surprisingly explicit double entendres that revolve around his simultaneous revulsion and excitement with the opposite sex. He’s a Jungian device that symbolizes the urges that are being repressed by collective society—particularly the sexually frustrated women, who often admittedly get the short end of Laughton’s empathetic imagination. Harry’s often shot as a dream figure, a looming Big Bad Wolf who’s capable of descending on the children at any time, and, as in a dream, there are times when Harry should be able to catch the children, but can’t for reasons of perhaps divine intervention. Like a boogeyman, Harry’s power derives from the fear of the conformist populace, whenever he’s confronted, particularly by Rachel, he’s revealed to be a clod.
These associations of suppressed, confused yearning become more explicit in the context of Laughton’s own closeted sexuality, as well as his fascination with the Bible, and all its accompanying potentials for forgiveness and stark punishment, and with the Southern gothic tradition with which The Night of the Hunter most certainly belongs. But Mitchum’s performance prevents us from dispassionately engaging with Harry merely as an assemblage of diverting and revelatory signifiers, as he’s too lively and uncontainable for that. The actor plays Harry not exactly as an evil deity, but as a self-entitled child who feels that he should have whatever he wants because he makes a pretense of being in the “god business” with the reverend shtick. Mitchum lets you see Harry’s absurdity, and thus his humanity, which only allows him to grow larger in your thoughts as a figure of terror, an agent of unquantifiable reckoning who reveals that faith is only as noble, or as diseased, as its practitioner.
Image/Sound
The Night of the Hunter becomes just the latest 4K upgrade “get” for Kino Lorber, replacing what was one of Criterion’s most iconic selections, at least from a presentation standpoint. But, as rich as the upgrade is in many ways, some fans of the film may find room for argument in the new transfer’s chosen aspect ratio. Whereas Criterion kept the aperture quite wide open at 1.66:1, Kino’s upgrade instead chooses to tighten the frame up considerably at 1.85:1.
A side-by-side comparison of the two reveals few scenes majorly impacted by the removal of information at the top and bottom of the frame, but at least a few shots are somewhat diminished by the change in ratio. Most notably, one memorable shot shows two paper dolls that Pearl has cut from her father’s stolen loot floating along the ground near an unseeing Harry’s feet. It’s one of a few hundred poetic touches whipped up by the filmmakers, but in this presentation, you only see the dolls scooting along the walkway for a few seconds due to their positioning in the frame. Those lost moments are very much in the minority but worth noting for those unconvinced that 1.85:1 is the intended aspect ratio.
Aside from that, the justly celebrated black-and-white cinematography has likely never looked better than it does in this new HDR/Dolby Vision master—or more menacing. Shadows and pitch-black negative space in such tableaux as Willa and Harry’s marital suite or the house’s cavernous cellar assume the feel of a nightmare manifested into uncanny reality.
The disc also comes with three audio options: the original mono and a simulated 5.1 surround, which are both incredibly rich, as well as an isolated score option that gives Walter Schumann’s lush, complex, and haunting score a chance to really shine.
Extras
And here’s where we come to the conclusion that true fans of the film will likely end up with two copies of it on their shelf, as Kino’s extras can’t help but pale in comparison to the treasure trove that Criterion lined up on its previous editions, which included full documentaries, a four-man commentary lineup, new and archival interviews, galleries, and two and a half hours’ worth of outtakes and behind-the-scenes footage. Ironically, the Kino edition’s best extra—critic Tim Lucas’s new commentary track—makes repeated references to that last feature. Lucas’s track is deeply researched and moves at a mostly breathtaking clip (the film’s dense content but brief running time presents a formidable challenge to anyone attempting a real-time analysis), and delves deeply into both the production of the film as well as its themes and subtexts. Beyond that, though, there’s only a trio of new featurettes featuring cinematographer Ernest Dickerson, actress Kathy Carver, and artist Joe Coleman, of whom only Carver has an explicit connection to the film itself. (Carver was Sally Jane Bruce’s stand-in, while Dickerson once met Stanley Cortez as he was being admitted into the ASC.) While not paltry, Kino’s slate remains wanting.
Overall
Kino’s 4K release of one of the all-time greatest of films is both eye-popping in its visual presentation (aside from that debatable aspect ratio) and underwhelming in its bonus features.
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