The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, April 20-26
The Night of the Hunter (1955)
Directed by Charles Laughton
There are several feats of transformation accomplished by The Night of the Hunter, which can perhaps help explain the film’s longevity. We never tire of stories where one face contains another: so the frog is a prince, the king a beast, and a loiterer in sandals happens to be the son of God. In the screenplay by James Agee and Laughton, a real-life murderer of several widows becomes the maniac Reverend Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum), whose crimes are without number, and whose obsession with women is as great as his disgust for them. After Powell marries and kills their mother, little John and Pearl escape to the river. The river at night is a wonderland of owls and rabbits, toads and drowned maidens—and a region perfectly synonymous with the Scriptures, which an older woman, Rachel Cooper (Lillian Gish) reads to her charges, children orphaned or abandoned in the Depression. John and Pearl join Rachel’s household—a branch of social services by another, more conservative name, but Powell comes sniffing after. He’s a greedy and seductive devil—and then, suddenly, he’s one half of a duet: a hymn he sings with Rachel, the two keeping a vigil over the children, each on a different side of the fence. Thus a simple villain becomes a necessary force, just like the sentimentality of townsfolk becomes violence, the film’s Expressionist shadowplay (shot by Stanley Cortez) becomes the American South, and so on, until the end of days. It’s a movie to watch, maybe, once every decade, as one’s face changes, and doesn’t. Elina Mishuris (April 23, 2:30pm at the Metrograph’s “Fassbinder’s Top 10”)