The Night of the Hunter
Director: Charles Laughton Run Time: 92 min. Format: 35mm Rating: NR Release Year: 1955
Starring: James Gleason, Lillian Gish, Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters
A sociopathic preacher stalks innocent farm children in Charles Laughton’s THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER.
A 35mm presentation.
Bringing Davis Grubb’s novel to the big screen, actor Charles Laughton made his only directorial feature with The Night of the Hunter. All shadows and light, the film is a beautiful juxtaposition of love and hate, quiet moment with bursts of violence, and at its most fundamental, a representation of the struggle between good and evil. And evil enters into the world of a desperate family in the form of the religious fanatic with sociopathic tendencies Harry Powell (played to eerie perfection by Robert Mitchum). A serial murderer who marries for money and then kills his brides, he marries a gullible widow (Shelley Winters) for the $10,000 her deceased husband stole. His plan gets complicated when neither of her two children will disclose the whereabouts of the fortune, they head up river to escape the preacher…but he’s always close behind.
Part of Nitehawk’s fall CRIME series.