list/discuss/rate - your recently watched movies

"NIGHT OF THE HUNTER.

 

Knobs has watched it yet again.

Eloquence, reverence,sadness,deliberate early film days (D.W.Griffith) style;   this film has it all.

Very likely the very best US film EVER made and its based on a very simple story AND it was directed by actor Charles Laughton who never directed again (since the movie -sorta like "Its A Wonderful Life" - bombed terribly on release. The true magician here being  James Agree (screenplay) but that is another story in itself.

There is definite magic here - the cinematography by Stanley Cortez (fresh off  Magnificent Ambersons) with amazing black & white sharpness, the haunting soundtrack , the old-world religion turned bitter (something you rarely see on film), the incredible, unforgettable performance by Robert Mitchum as the piety-oozing, sadistic YET ridiculous widow-murderer "preacher" man.

And of course the gorgeous ,luminous,  moving centerpiece - everything leading up to that most gentle, visually stunning  river sequence where the tired children in their fragile , tiny skiff are taken by the gentle,moonlit current of the uncaring river slowly drifting past night animals, trembling rabbits,frog,fragile spider web (okay, webs are not fragile. Fox you,c**t.) - are they keeping vigil? or are they (Nature) indifferent to the children's plight ?- creatures , like the children, just trying to survive in this hard world.
In the original book  Grubb wrote: "They blew along like brown leaves in the wind.".

And when the girl begins her little "makeshift" childsong - singing to no one in the middle of the farmland-riverside-wilderness (for her brother has fallen asleep) your heart just breaks; "Once upon a time, there was a pretty fly, and he had a wife,this pretty fly, and one day she flew away,and one day his pretty fly children flew away too, into the sky, into the moon."



The Night Of The Hunter is a masterwork of symbolism, a poignant southern gothic which many call  (and I cant understand this) one of the greatest HORROR films ever made. If its a horror film, have you ever seen a horror film "monster" riduculed as the  outwardly formidable  preacher Harry Powell is when the old  lady (Lillian Gish)confronts him with a shotgun and he goes off, at once buffoonish, whooping like a suddenly-nerved fowl?

A film shot on low budget - the obviously painted back-drops just add to the immense  magical sense of this somehow being a child's sad,sad dream. A film like no other.

American as anything.

It is the depression. West Virginia.  Parentless children go begging for raw potatoes, perverted religion preys....beware of false prophets.

Helpless, helpless. We , everyone of us, drift down the same river, above and below us the waters , indifferent. Is there any reason to the flow, any guidance whatsoever?