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Robert Mitchum as demented  “Preacher” Harry Powell in the only film directed by actor Charles Laughton, from 1955 The Night of the Hunter.

While chatting recently with an interviewee, the subject of classic movies came up, and he mentioned one that impressed him, but he couldn’t recall the name. With a few clues he provided, such as a creepy guy chasing after two kids on a river, I knew he was referring to The Night of the Hunter, the 1955 film starring Robert Mitchum as a serial killer with LOVE and HATE tattooed on the fingers of his right and left hand, respectively.

I vividly recall its effect on me after seeing it for the first time in the 1980s – it’s more than just another movie. It’s a work of art.

French director and film critic Francois Truffaut said of it, “It makes us fall in love again with an experimental cinema that truly experiments, and a cinema of discovery that, in fact, discovers”

And it’s the only film directed by esteemed British actor Charles Laughton. 

Part of the success of this film is in the work of cinematographer Stanley Cortez, who Laughton had worked with as an actor in several films, but who was probably best known for shooting Orson Welles’ follow-up to Citizen Kane, The Magnificnet Ambersons (1942).

Together they settled on a look and style that enhances the story.

It all began when Paul Gregory, a young New york-based talent agent who was unsatisfied with his job saw Charles Laughton appear on the Ed Sullivan show, reading from the Bible. The agent hurried to the theater were the show was filmed live and met Laughton as he left the theater. Gregory left the Algonquin Hotel that night, where Laughton was staying, with a contract written on hotel stationary. He booked LAughton for a series of dramatic readings as well as produced a series of Broadway plays, five of which Laughton directed.

What the two really wanted was a film for Gregory to produce and Laughton to direct. Gregory thought he had finally found it in 1953 when an agent sent him the galleys for a first-time novel by a West Virginia writer named Davis Grubb. It was about a Depression-era serial killer conman who posed as a preacher. Laughton also fell in love with The Night of the Hunter, the Southern Gothic novel that went on to be nominated for a National Book Award in 1955.

The production team even hired Davis Grubb to write the screenplay, which turned out to be a $30,000 mistake. They found the author to be too weird to work with, including his refusal to travel by anything but bicycle and train.

Next they turned to author and poet James Agee, who had written the text for the Depression-era masterpiece Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and was also credited for the screenplay of John Huston’s The African Queen. 

Gregory and Laughton did not know that Agee was in the final throes of alcoholism. The screenplay he turned in was unusable. Reports say that if filmed as presented, the movie would have been six hours long. Laughton used some of Agee’s screenplay but, technicaly, the shooting screenplay was written by him, yet Agee gets credit for the screenplay. 

Agee died in a taxicab on the way to a doctor’s appointment, age 45, two months before the release of The Night of the Hunter.

Originally, Laughton wanted to play the part of the evil preacher himself, but Gregory convinced him they would never get financing if he were both star and director.

Gary Cooper was first offered the role of Harry Powell, but Cooper thought playing someone so evil would hurt his career. Laurence Olivier was also considered, but, thankfully, Olivier was booked for two solid years.

Thankfully because they finally settled on Robert Mitchum. Laughton was quoted as saying he knew he had the right man when he described the character to Mitchum as “a diabolical shit” and Mitchum answered “Present.”

Laughton sent a copy of the book to Mitchum, he devoured it in an afternoon and immediately met with Laughton to discuss the character.

It is a role unlike any other Mitchum had played, and he seems to have been born to play it.

Laughton offered a key role, that of the heroic Rachel Cooper, to his wife Elsa Lanchester, but she knew her hypersensitive husband too well, and didn’t want to  be a part of the production. 

Laughton had a particular objective in mind for his first directorial effort – he wanted people to sit up and pay attention the way audiences used to for silent films.

To get in the mood for his first directorial effort, Laughton silent nitrate films, especially those of the pioneer filmmaker D.W. Griffith, where he came to have great respect for one of his biggest stars, Lillian Gish. She was given the key role of steadfast child protector Rachel Cooper, and, again, she is perfectly cast.

For the role of the doomed widow Willa Harper, Laughton wanted Betty Grable. Ann Baxter, Agnes Moorhead and Grace Kelly were also considered, but the role went to Shelley Winters, just a few years after her Oscar-nominated role as another doomed young woman, Alice Tripp in A Place in the Sun (adopted from Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy).  

There is a major flaw in the movie that I had not noticed until a most recent viewing. The whole premise of the story is based on Harry Powell sharing a prison cell with Ben Harper (Peter Graves), and hearing Harper talk in his sleep about $10,000 he robbed from a bank. Harper killed two men during the robbery, so he is on death row. Powell is doing 30 days for car theft. The 30 days would most likely have been done in county jail, not prison. That the two men should be in the same cell is highly unlikely, but is required for the plot to play out.

Once Powell is released, he heads for the town where Harper’s widow and two children, John and Pearl, live, believing that they are in possession of the $10,000. Willa and Powell are married, and undere his guidance, Willa becomes hyper-religious. She gets angry at John whenever he tells her that Powell has been questioning him about the $10,000. Powell has already explained that Harper told him in prison that he threw the money in the river.

But one night Willa comes home from her job at the local ice cream parlor too hear Powell in a mean tone question 5-year-old Pearl about the money.Now that he has been exposed as a fraud to his wife, he kills her and dumps her body and a Model T in the river, but tells everyone that Willa has left him with the children. Powell then begins to terrorize the children to get them to talk.

The kids escape on the river in a skiff, just two more wandering children during the Depression. The river scenes are beautifully shot.

By chance, while asleep the skiff drifts to the shore near the farm of Rachel Cooper, who has made it her mission to save lost children. She already has several under her care, and adds John and Pearl to her brood. When Powell finds them at Cooper’s farm and attempts to terrorize Cooper into releasing the children to him, he finds he has finally met his match.

Rachel Cooper has the last words: “Lord save little children. The wind blows, and the rains are cold. Yet they abide."

While The Night of the Hunter is widely recognized as a masterpiece, it was a financial failure at the box office. Laughton had been certain of its success, and its failure hurt him badly. He and Gregory had been planning to film Norman Mailer’s WW II novel The Naked and the Dead next, starring Mitchum and shot by Cortez, but the failure of Hunter scotched that. Gregory produced the 1958 movie, but without the team that made Hunter.  Laughton reportedly never recovered from the failure of his only directorial effort.