![]() And if you went to it at an indie cinema in the days when such institutions functioned, and you went expecting the usual tickle or tear provoked by the era’s conventional Hollywood product, you might well come away chastened and unnerved. For kids it is a kind of snare: If you see it before you are, say, 15 or so, some of its images will stick in your brain, and you will find them very, very hard to dislodge. Two audiences kept The Night of the Hunter alive after its dismal first release: kids who saw it by chance in the days when old movies were a staple of late-night TV, and revival-house film buffs. I groan in silent sympathy with the students. When I tell them, in the discussion afterward, that this movie was such a gigantic box-office flop that Laughton could never arrange financing for another film, the groan of mingled horror and disbelief that rises from the group regularly gets me upset all over again at the foolish way the world wastes talent. I’ve screened The Night of the Hunter several times for classes of young acting students in their late teens and early 20s. How could anyone have a blankly puzzled reaction to this rich, extraordinary, deeply disturbing film, now widely acclaimed as a masterpiece? The answer, of course, is that it was rich, extraordinary, and deeply disturbing-too much to take in at a first viewing, too unlike other films of its time in both style and content, too skillful at promoting disquiet to be swallowed with the same ease as the standard-pattern works around it. Watching The Night of the Hunter today, you may find that last sentence very hard to comprehend. ![]() And the world greeted the result of Laughton’s venture, initially, with blank puzzlement. It was hard to see what in it might interest the actor the world had seen as Inspector Javert, Captain Bligh, and the Hunchback of Notre Dame and the director of a Broadway production of Shaw’s Don Juan in Hell. Davis Grubb’s then brand-new novel, The Night of the Hunter, was a thriller set in the poverty-ridden Appalachia of the Great Depression, a story of murder and menace set among down-home folk who pick at country banjos and espouse Baptist or evangelical splinter groups. It was well within reason for him to try his hand at filmmaking.īut the film he chose to start with was, for many observers, a head-scratcher. He had acted opposite countless eminent colleagues, and had worked with every artist of note from Hitchcock to Bertolt Brecht. ![]() Latterly he had shown considerable skill as a stage director, and his penchant for giving solo readings of Shakespeare and other great poets had made him a notable presence on the American lecture circuit. By that time, Laughton had been one of the English-speaking world’s preeminent actors for three decades, a familiar figure both onstage and on the screen. There was perhaps no great surprise in this. In 1955, Charles Laughton directed a movie. ![]()
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