The Friends of the Cinematheque program continues at the Seoul Cinematheque until the end of the month, featuring a large selection of great films. This included a number of films that are being presented with new 35 mm prints. These include Milos Forman’s AMADEUS (1984), a number of John Ford classics — THE IRON HORSE (1924), STEAMBOAT ROUND THE BEND (1935), DRUMS ALONG THE MOHAWK (1939), THE GRAPES OF WRATH (1940), HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY (1941), MY DARLING CLEMENTINE (1946), THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE (1962) — and the lone directorial effort of the actor Charles Laughton, THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER (1955). I was able to see the later on Wednesday, and it is a film that is truly unforgettable when seen on the big screen. It is showing again next Tuesday, February 9th at 1:00 pm, and if you have any interest in this movie, seeing this 35 mm restoration is the way to experience it. The film itself is both one of the best shot works ever to come out of Hollywood as well as one of the most bizarre stories to emerge from the studio system.

The narrative is both part film noir and part fairy tale, a very odd combination. The film begins with the character Harry Powell, played by the great Robert Mitchum, a preacher who is also a serial killer of widows. In jail for a car theft, Powell meets Ben Harper, a man who killed two men in a bank robbery in order to steal 10,000 dollars for his children, John and Pearl. Before being captured, Harper left the money with his children, and Powell travels to the town after Harper’s execution to try to obtain the money. He marries Harper’s widow (played by Shelley Winters in another superb performance) and starts his pursuit, but he does not fool young John. After Powell murders their mother, the children escape up river and are taken in by Mrs. Cooper (played by the silent star Lillian Gish), an authentically Christian woman who protects the children against Powell. This plot summary, however, cannot really convey the uniqueness of the film and the truly fantastic nature of the tale. It is an incredibly stylized picture, and I can certainly imagine some viewers thinking it is simply terrible and even laughable. The ending is also very odd in tone and can leave an audience puzzled. But for lovers of cinematography and the simple visual power of the film medium, THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER is matched by very few Hollywood movies.

As mentioned, this is Laughton’s only film as a film director, one of the most amazing one and done filmmaking careers. Although Laughton was an actor, this is by no means a character based drama: its power is visual. Credit here has to go partly to the great cinematographer Stanley Cortez (who earlier shot Orson Welles’ THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS and later Sam Fuller’s SHOCK CORRIDOR and THE NAKED KISS). The images are so powerful and memorable that it feels more like a tone poem than a conventional drama. This is especially the case in an extended stretch in which the children are traveling up river.

Eventually, they arrive at a small farmhouse, but from the loft they see Powell menacingly appear on horseback (a forced perspective shot using a smaller actor).

Perhaps Laughton and Cortez’s finest achievement comes near the end of the film, as Mitchum and Gish finally are confronting each other, a standoff in which they sing the same Biblical song in unison. A young girl Gish cares for enters the scene with a candle, the glare of which obscures Mitchum. When Gish blows out the candle, he has disappeared.

I first saw this scene before I had viewed THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER; it is featured in the great documentary VISIONS OF LIGHT: THE ART OF CINEMATOGRAPHY (1992), and rightfully so: few shots in history use light as effectively.

But beyond the poetic quality of the visuals, the story (written by the film critic James Agee) also has a nightmarish, surrealist quality that moves the picture into horror film territory. It is not by accident that Martin Scorsese’s horror remake of the 1962 thriller CAPE FEAR draws on THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER just as strongly (and it should be noted that Scorsese’s The Film Foundation helped restore this new print). The character of Powell, especially as played by Mitchum, has a demonic aspect, but is also very much grounded in the sexual pathology of religious repression. His misogyny is deeply connected to his vision of religion, which he expounds in an opening monologue to God that is both perverse and yet strangely accurate in describing how many people of religion view the world:

“Not that you mind the killings, your book is full of killings. But there are things you do hate Lord. Perfume-smelling things, lacy things, things with curly hair.”

Powell’s hatred of women is such that he cannot stand to touch them physically; his only contact is to stab them with his knife (no need to be a Freud scholar to interpret this). But what is more disturbing is the strange power Powell has over women. His ability to convince Mrs. Harper that she deserves to feel ashamed of her sexuality, and her acceptance of her own murder, are as strong an indictment of patriarchal authority as one can find in 50s Hollywood. This power over women extends to the neighbour Mrs. Spoon, the young child Pearl, and the young girl Ruby. It is only Mrs. Cooper who is able to confront this destructive force that is both highly sexualized and yet also punishes women for their sexual desire. Taken as any kind of realist story will only lead one to ridicule such obvious symbolism. One needs to approach this as a dark fairy tale, in which the forces of good are able, at least temporarily, to fend off those of evil. It is to the film’s credit that this evil is not simply abstract and unspecified; rather, it is clearly shown to be the predatory masculinity and perverted religiosity all too often celebrated in American cinema.

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