The Night of the Hunter
1955, directed by Charles Laughton
Seventy years after The Night of the Hunter was made, its portrait of the United States is as accurate as ever. The idea that a career criminal could lie his way into the hearts of small-town America under cover of religion was plausible enough back then, but today the story is all too familiar, right down to the particular mix of cruelty, greed, misogyny, and vulgar charisma that Harry Powell displays. The portrait is not limited to him. Mrs. Spoon, Birdie Steptoe, and Rachel Cooper also represent enduring parts of America’s social fabric, but the most typically American detail is the famous pair of words “LOVE” and “HATE” tattooed onto the preacher’s knuckles. The opposition between these two words says more about the United States than we might realize.
Harry Powell’s embrace of these words reflects a culture that is quick to judge and quick to reduce reality to binary contests. The tattoos on the fronts of his fists weaponize the words, and when he comes to town he stages a wrestling match between his own two hands. It’s no accident that the words are made to correspond to right and left, the usual labels for opposite political ideologies. The film itself can be seen as a contest between two opposite ways of thinking – Harry Powell’s theocracy versus Rachel Cooper’s humanity – but in the end it goes a long way toward dispelling the usual opposition between right and left. At the peak of McCarthyism, The Night of the Hunter must have aimed to stitch a divided nation back together.
Powell’s left hand is marked “HATE” and his right hand “LOVE”. Ironically, this fits the ancient trope of the evil left hand and the good right hand, but it reverses the stereotypical correlation of hate with right-wing politics and love with liberalism. The political spectrum however needn’t align itself that way. The Night of the Hunter makes an appeal for love that respects a conservative disposition, but which ultimately breaks down the distinction between conservative and liberal.
According to their most basic definitions, conservatism is a desire for stasis while liberalism seeks change. In theory, the same person might be conservative under favorable circumstances and liberal when rapid advancements are desired. In reality, the two ends of the spectrum appeal to different personality types, one tending to look to the past and the other to the future. Harry Powell may fit the type of a right-wing populist, but the film’s sympathy is unequivocally with Rachel Cooper, who in many respects is an avatar of traditionalism. She’s constantly citing Christian scripture, and she opens the film with a Sunday school sermon. The casting of Lillian Gish is an unmistakable link to the past, not only because her stardom dates back to the 1910s, but because she’s known for her roles in D.W. Griffith’s films with old-fashioned epithets like “The Young Mother”, “The Little Lady”, or “Susie May Trueheart”. There’s an inside joke toward the end when Ruby brings home a fan magazine called “Modern Movie” and Cooper looks at it like some foreign object.
Charles Laughton prepared for The Night of the Hunter by screening early silent films, especially Griffith’s. Homages to silent cinema are everywhere: artificial backgrounds, chiaroscuro lighting, cross-cutting, irising, and the riot scene near the end. The bedrooms in the Harper and Cooper houses are styled like the jail cell in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and Mitchum’s acting turns full-on Expressionist in the murder scene. The imitation of silent movies was not merely a stylistic decision, it’s part of a consistent effort to honor the past, the way a conservative might wish to do.
The most palpable evocation of the past is the childlike point of view. It’s not only that the story follows John and Pearl Harper, though that’s a large part of it. The Night of the Hunter opens with Lillian Gish’s speech: “Now, you remember, children, how I told you last Sunday about the good Lord going up into the mountain….” Until the faces of her five pupils appear in the starry sky, it sounds as if she’s addressing the viewer, casting us in the position of children. Accordingly, the story as a whole has the flavor of a fairy tale. The same pattern of opposites that will play into the argument against binary thinking also describes the simplicity of a child’s outlook. The cinematography tends toward high contrast; the story alternates between day and night; and there’s a pronounced line between right and wrong.
John and Pearl’s journey down the Ohio River is illustrated like a children’s picture book. A series of animals is foregrounded on the riverbank, set to Pearl’s fairy-tale song and a lullaby. A spider web and a frog match the “pretty fly” in the lyrics, hinting at the predator following the children, and a tortoise and two hares allude to Aesop’s fable, foreshadowing the race that John will find himself in when he spies the horseback preacher trotting steadily along their route. Animals complement the lullaby too: a caged bird accompanies “Birds will sing in yonder willow,” and when the song reaches “Rest here on my breast” the panning camera lands on a cow’s udder. Meanwhile the film cuts back and forth from the picturebook fantasy to realistic plot developments (the Spoons reading a postcard from Harry Powell) or a reminder of the Great Depression (children lining up for potatoes), continuing the film’s pattern of contrasts.
A child’s point of view represents a psychological past, an often idealized memory. It’s not necessarily the same past that a conservative consciously aspires to, but it can play an unconscious part in the orientation of desire toward another mythical past. However, as much as childhood itself points to the past, actual children represent society’s future. When John and Ms. Cooper exchange Christmas presents at the end, he gives her an apple and she gives him a watch. One points to the past, the first gift in the Bible, and the other is a token of future time. The Night of the Hunter does not denigrate either past-orientation or future-orientation. Either can be distorted by sentimentalism, but there is obvious social value both in learning from the past and in preparing for the future. Lillian Gish’s character may be old-fashioned, but the film presents her with utmost respect as a source of wisdom.
Rachel Cooper gets the first and last lines of dialogue, bracketing the film with references to children (“Now, you remember, children…” and “They abide and they endure”), but to be more precise the very first and last words “now” and “endure” refer to time itself. Together they fit the classic model of narrative filmmaking by starting with linear time (“now”) and ending with eternal time (“endure”), but in this case there’s a second progression with political consequence, a progression from narrow to broad. “Now” expresses the narrowest slice of time, a flag for selfish or absolute thinking. It’s not only Rachel Cooper’s first word but also the second word out of Harry Powell’s mouth: “Well now, what’s it to be, Lord?” To speak of enduring, on the other hand, hints at the eternal and transcends a binary view of time. It reflects care for past, present, and future.
The result of this distinction shows in the difference between Harry Powell and Rachel Cooper. We might be tempted to reduce his religion to hypocrisy, but the movie suggests that his brand of Christianity, which the lynch mob against him also shares, is the logical result of a wish to enforce morality. Reducing life to good and evil or love and hate leads to self-righteousness and cruelty. Rachel Cooper, on the other hand, shakes her head wistfully at an unmarried couple, saying their love will probably bring her another mouth to feed. Unlike Powell, she sees people charitably as beings who can’t help straying from a proper path.
In such a thorough portrait of American society, with so many of its vices accounted for, there’s one glaring omission. There’s no hint of racism, and African Americans are nowhere to be seen. This is particularly strange in a story that seems consciously situated in the tradition of river narratives like Huckleberry Finn, where racism plays a large part. Maybe the subject would have been too provocative in a film that hoped to pry conservatives gently away from the absolutist thinking that leads to racism. Instead, The Night of the Hunter adopts a surprising strategy, making the United States a modern-day Africa. We hear three stories set in Africa: John’s tale of a kidnapped African king, the adoption of Moses, and the Holy Family’s flight to Egypt. Each of these stories is related to John and Pearl’s circumstance, and the Ohio River (which flows to a town named Cairo) is like the Nile. When John and Pearl stop in the middle of their journey, the farmhouse and barn are shot against a glowing night sky like pyramids rising from a desert. Knowing that a myth holds particular power for people who prefer to seek refuge in the past, The Night of the Hunter quietly adjusts the myth of American civilization, tracing its roots back to Africa. This is certainly not the film’s main focus, but it’s another sign of its synthesis between progressive values and conservative thinking.
CONNECTIONS:
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari – Expressionist rooms with peaked ceilings (jail cell / bedrooms)
I Walked with a Zombie – Effort at gentle persuasion against racism; Expressionist cinematography
The Hand of the Devil – Image of a hand or hands alluding to the right vs. left division of the political spectrum
The Third Man – Conscious effort to cast the viewer in a childlike point of view; villain introduced in an overhead shot
Tokyo Story – Gift of a watch near the end as a token of the recipient’s time ahead
The Music Room – Study of the roots of conservative thinking
Winter Light – Contrast between two different versions of Christianity
Alphaville – Critique of oppositional thinking and its effect on society
Veronika Voss – Use of silent film devices to conjure a distant historical past
REFERENCE:
Laughton’s study of Griffith is reported by second unit director Terry Sanders, with further commentary from Preston Neal Jones: Clubb, Issa; Rosas, John Paul (2010), “The Making of The Night of the Hunter”, The Night of the Hunter (DVD), United States: Criterion Collection, ISBN 9781604653502