I never seem to get tired of watching The Night of the Hunter. A confrontation between Good and Evil (if there is nothing new here) in a pastoral
setting of infinite plains and laborious harvests, of farms and rivers and churches; The all-American country people, as if stepped out from within American Gothic, the quintessential painting by Grant Wood. Good and Evil are in collision here, as it is in Melville, Tolkien or the book of Genesis. In The Night of the Hunter, Evil is in pure form, and does not appear to have derived from injustice, misery or disintegration: it is just a part of the reality of this (sorrow) world. Robert Mitchum is a psychopath, armed with his Bible and his knife, and there is no point in seeking an explanation to his criminal behaviour. An explanation simply does not exist, or at least the story ignores it: the guy is just like that. It is his character or his nature. This is perceived by the viewer straight away, in his opening monologue, when he is seen religiously hallucinating,
after committing a first murder: while driving his roofless car across the
plains, speaking to God who is supposedly hanging up there in the sky, attentively listening to his reasons. This is a creepy dialogue, not unlike that of Norman Bates with his mother, in another film, back in 1955 still to be done.
The Mitchum character is the complex (as it is uncomprehensible) expression of Evil. What is Good, then? Well, Good
is simply those people living and working in that West Virginia
depicted in the movie, traversing the Depression era; those people who go to the Church with faith or faithless, who work, small talk or celebrate, all under the torrid sun of the near Midwest Sky. In particular Willa Harper (Shelley Winters)'s children (two of the most formidable child actors ever to be seen on a movie screen), they are "Good", what constitutes it. Innocence, faith, will. Good: running away across the
fields, and throughout the night, sleeping in abandoned farms, or sliding on lakes in silent night boats. While fleeing from that terryfing Leaning on the Everlasting Arm, the murderous reverend's refrain.
We find moments of somewhat eerie poetry in Night of the Hunter. Like that in which brother and sister escape by the skin of their teeth from Mitchum, pushing the boat a second before the killer reverend can throw his heavy body onto it. After that, Laughton will give us a few magical minutes of inner childhood fears, of dreams and music: The boat moving in the solitude of the starry night, the helplessness of the children, their innocence and their will. A Mark Twain moment, if slightly gothic.
Something essential in this amazing (and solitary) film by Charles Laughton: Good here knows how to defend itself. Maybe because being "good" is hard selfless work, a tough exercise of self-discipline, especially in the Depression, in those difficult times when Evil inevitably grows and expands. Lillian Gish welcomes the runaway children, already orphans by then, and stands up for them, as well as for a moral space (hers) faithfully built-up and which she believes fair; She does so with her Bible and her sermons, with her stories and songs. But also with energy and courage, and with a rifle larger than herself.
