A child’s demon: Robert Mitchum in The Night of the Hunter

We are so used to loving the lyric uniqueness of The Night of the Hunter (1955) and the big bad greatness of Robert Mitchum, and such willing believers in the hope that two misunderstood actors could still slip a masterpiece into the world, that you might go through life knowing nothing of this:

“Another night he had taken a young mountain whore drunk to his room in a cheap boarding house in Cincinnati and she had passed out naked on the bed and he had taken out the knife and stood by the bed with it unopened in his hand for a while, looking at her and waiting for the Word and when it did not come he pressed the button and the steel tongue licked out, and bending by the bed on the worn rug he delicately scratched a cross in the girl’s belly beneath the navel and left her there with that brand so frail and faint upon the flesh that it did not even bleed; and when she woke in the morning alone she did not even notice it, so lovingly and with so practical and surgical a precision had he wrought it there.”

That is Davis Grubb’s novel, and it is enough to let you feel the lack of a certain light-handedness in the film. And much as I cherish the memory of Robert Mitchum, as well as the occasion provided by The Night of the Hunter to say to all the idiots, look, he was an actor, you have to wonder whether Mitchum had it in him to play that reverie, leaving the cross “so frail and faint” that not even the whore noticed it. For if there are silent communions between Grubb’s Harry Powell and God, could Mitchum’s Powell ever let anything stay quiet or inward? That’s an odd question, surely, for Mitchum in his own metier – Out of the Past (1947), say, or The Lusty Men (19 52) – was the unspoken actor. He could look, and leave us to notice. But maybe Charles Laughton had arranged the air of his Hunter so that everything had to be loud – like thunder in a play?

Asked to reconsider Charles Laughton’s one and only film, I don’t want to go back on my old assurance – let alone disown its marvels. For I recall, in the 70s, in the United States, having to struggle with the natives to persuade them that this was one of their own great things. A lot of smart people then felt it was an aberration, a rather overwrought kids’ film. Yet I give some thanks that I was not exposed to cinematographer Stanley Cortez’s hound-of-hell night as a child. There are things still to support Pauline Kael’s belief that it is “one of the most frightening movies ever made”. I am thinking of the crucial instant in the night escape, when John and Pearl – tiny in their rowing boat – are about to push off as the demented Powell appears, only a few steps away on the shore. The boat starts to glide and his monstrous reach is stopped only by the quicksand they were too light to sink in. He plunges, the boat clears; but the first time I saw the film I shuddered at the foul grasp so narrowly escaped. And I was 20 or so then. There may have been children marked forever. Except that, at the time of its opening, Kael recalls only a dozen or so seats filled in a theatre made for 2000. The Night of the Hunter was a disaster when it was made, for it was closer in mood to Ugetsu Monogatari (1953) than to the hit flicks of its year – Blackboard Jungle, Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing, Love Me or Leave Me and even Rebel without a Cause.

Where did such an aberration come from? It’s tempting to answer, and hope, that the fairytale vision, the pattern of innocence and menace, had always been there in Charles Laughton’s soul. But then we’d have to remind ourselves of how often, and with what relish, Laughton had played hideous threats worse than Mitchum’s Powell – or monsters held in their own glow of sentimentality. He was a figure of fun by 1955: he had to mix in a Herod and a Henry VIII with the Captain Kidd who met Abbott and Costello. He rarely dominated big pictures as he had in the 30s. He was large, slow, not always well, and often broke. That he had big, vague dreams still is hardly doubted: you can feel that in Advise & Consent (1962) as much as in the odd, fatigued Lear he did at Stratford in 1959 (with Ian Holm as his Fool). But he was also a gentle, aimless man, a bear waiting to be prodded. Paul Gregory was that prod.

In 1950, when he introduced himself to Laughton, Gregory was 30 years old, uncommonly handsome, and an agent at MCA. The looks are not just gossip, for Simon Callow in his fond meditation on Laughton believed that the actor – already 51 – may have been infatuated with Gregory. They do not seem to have been lovers, but something like love, or the hope of rescue, may have prompted the great actor whose reputation was in decline. And Gregory was full of bright ideas – he won Laughton over by seeming so intellectual and artistic.

It was Gregory who saw how close to uncastable Laughton had become in conventional works, and who developed the strategy of one-man shows or readings that might earn a fortune. In time, Gregory gave up his agency job to concentrate on being Laughton’s manager. And so – from I951 onwards, with Cedric Hardwicke, Charles Boyer and Agnes Moorehead – Laughton toured in a version of ‘Don Juan in Hell’ from Shaw’s Man and Superman. That was followed by Stephen Vincent Benet’s John Brown’s Body and Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny Court Martial, both of which Laughton directed and did not act in.

Gregory had given Laughton confidence, for the actor had never before directed. (Famously, his doubts had ruined von Sternberg’s Claudius project.) And it was Gregory who read the novel The Night of the Hunter and recommended it as a movie when the book proved a strong seller in 1953. I wish I knew more about Davis Grubb. He was born in Moundsville, West Virginia (an Ohio River town mentioned in the book and the movie) in 1919. He wrote several novels, though this one was the most popular. Callow says: “It has not, according to those who know, ‘worn well’.” That’s a reference to Charles Higham’s earlier book on Laughton, which goes on to say: “It can now be seen to belong to that odd, hybrid ‘lyrical’ genre that included works like Dark of the Moon and Finian’s Rainbow on the stage. The author aimed at a kind of folksy poetic approach which never quite comes off: a cross between Thomas Wolfe and Sherwood Anderson… “

I hope the extract quoted at the start of this essay casts some doubt on that verdict. Davis Grubb writes very carefully – sometimes a touch studiously – but the poetics do not seem laid on. Rather, compared with the tone of the movie (and its sweeping magical realism), there is something both grave and natural in Davis Grubb. Consider the scene, in novel and film, where the fleeing children shelter in a barn loft, and John is woken by the sound of Powell coming through the night, singing. In the movie the barn is a cut-out shape in the foreground, and our eyes go to the far horizon where Powell comes up like a Lotte Reiniger silhouette. It is a great, Grimm scene, presaged by the dissolves that haul the crescent moon higher in the sky, and hugely assisted by the sound of Mitchum singing, a big-chested baritone in a far room of the house of childhood. But Davis Grubb is pretty good, too:

“John had not been sleeping more than an instant until he heard it – faint yet distinct on the barely stirring air. He opened his eyes. The moon had not moved: it stood where it had been when his eyes had closed: half obscured by the beam and pulley which jutted over the aperture. Pearl had not heard, did not stir, asleep in untroubled conscience with her thumb between her pouting lips and the doll cuddled sweetly in the cradle of her arms… It was as clear and distinct now as if the tiny voice were in the mountain of hay at her elbow, and then suddenly in the distance John saw him on the road, emerging suddenly from behind a tall growth of redbud half a mile away: a man on a huge field horse, moving slowly and yet with a dreadful plodding deliberation up the feathery dust of the river road.”

Maybe the most notable thing about this passage is that it comes from an adult book about a child, whereas Laughton elected to make a film as seen and felt from a child’s point of view. But that was not his first plan. Laughton and Gregory asked the film critic James Agee to do a script from Grubb’s novel. To this day, erroneously, that ‘script’ is part of the Agee legend. In 1954 Agee was 44, and only a year away from death. Having served for much of the 40s as film reviewer at Time and The Nation, he had slipped into screen writing by way of his friendship with John Huston. Agee worked hard on The African Queen (1951) – so hard he had a heart attack to go with chain-smoking and a bottle of whisky a day. He was replaced by Peter Viertel, but esteemed still by Huston for insisting on “the right, even the obligation, to write and to fuck as much as he can and in the ways he prefers to.”

Agee was given the awesome deal of $30,000 for ten weeks’ work on The Night of the Hunter. As if sensing a last chance, he moved into the Chateau Marmont hotel and turned the 206-page novel into a 350-page script, full of material about the Depression and its impact on the Ohio River country. His work had been complicated and intensified by a hectic love affair with Tamara Comstock. Laughton was horribly disappointed by the result so he set it aside and began work on a new script of his own that used only a few of Agee’s ideas. Instead, it held to the novel’s shape; Laughton may even have enlisted Grubb’s help. The schedule was delayed and the precarious venture was put in some jeopardy with its financier, United Artists.

Even so, Gregory had worked a modest miracle: a novice director was allowed $700,000 to make an arty project with a good deal of location work. Getting Robert Mitchum as Harry Powell was as vital to the deal as holding Mitchum’s creative attention was to the spirit of the film. For already he was among the most indifferent or casual of stars, the proud possessor of the wisdom that all he did was walk through one picture after another, letting himself be photographed. Of course, Mitchum took high risks as Harry Powell (not least in revealing that he could bring an intelligence and caring to bear), and he always said he was adventurous for Charles Laughton’s sake. I heard him once in an interview (with his old friend, Niven Busch) where he said he loved working with Laughton, but he never went deeper than that into Powell’s nature.

Of course, he didn’t need to. Powell is more than the regular Mitchum – given to lengthy, theatrical speeches, moaning like an animal, arching a comic eye at God and generally being extravagant – but in Laughton’s concept he is a distorted ogre (half nemesis, half buffoon) as seen by the children. The most remarkable thing about the movie may be that Mitchum – a master of the hard-boiled – so easily catches the flamboyance and fragrance of gothic fairytale. But just because he stands for the children’s dread of Powell – the grasp pursuing them – he does not have to ask himself, or show us, much about Davis Grubb’s more inward Powell.

Simon Callow notes that Laughton confessed to Mitchum his own homosexuality (he may not have needed to), and wonders – hopefully, perhaps whether he touched some such buried instinct in the frequently surly and very male Mitchum. One never knows, but I find it more likely that Mitchum – intrigued by the part and impressed by Laughton – offered something like a gay comic style in his Powell. In other words, is there something a little swish in this great performance, a gloss that keeps Grubb’s more mysterious man at a distance? This may seem churlish – for Mitchum is extraordinary in the film – but I wonder if Robert Ryan, say, might have been truer to Grubb’s figure?

Mitchum is so handsome, rather dandyish in his dress, sleek, well spoken and polished – he never gets the shabby, weatherbeaten quality of a real rural wanderer. Grubb’s Powell is less rhetorical, more hurt, and more inwardly wicked in that he finds no comfort in acting out or showing off. Mitchum does not quite seem wicked or past hope – couldn’t he go into burlesque, or some other Church, with a chance of being a spellbinder? Yes, Mitchum took a chance with the role, but he showed off like crazy. There was actually a moment in the shooting when Lillian Gish saw the concealed charm he was unloading, and asked Laughton if he shouldn’t be more unequivocally evil. The director is supposed to have answered that he didn’t want to destroy Mitchum’s career. That may be just a movie-set anecdote, but it could also be a sign of the playfulness in Mitchum’s Powell, or the way he is only a child’s demon.

More damaging to the film’s dramatic potential, I think, is Lillian Gish’s serene fairy godmother Rachel, so sturdily pure, so much a mistress of Bible and rifle that no hunting rogue has a chance at the little ones once they are in her protection. Laughton fell in love with Gish, he said, as he studied Griffith’s films in preparing for The Night of the Hunter. But he was looking at the young woman, a classically threatened figure whose nobility and courage run the risk of death itself. Griffith did not have much time for real, middle-aged women – except as examples of bourgeois hypocrisy. There are glimpses of Griffith in The Night of the Hunter: repeated shots of the mother hen and her chicks scampering along the river bank, reflected in the water. But the strangeness of Ohio Valley life, its sense of isolation, comes from Grubb’s novel, or from movies about the 30s, just as Cortez’s album-ready photography derives from Germanic imagery of the 20s.

Cortez excels in the ordeal of the children, even if so many shots – like that of Willa dead in the car on the river bed – feel like set pieces. But once the children have been taken in by Rachel, does anyone doubt their safety? For Rachel is a child’s perfect adult: strong, secure, removing all need for responsibility, yet actually child-like herself. The film is so much more worrying when it has adults who are foolish, nasty and vulnerable – like Willa, Icey (Evelyn Varden) and Walt (Don Beddoe), arguably the best thing in the film, and the hapless Birdie (James Gleason). These are adults who cannot reassure the children. Yet at the end of everything, we are asked to swallow the bromide – that little ones abide.

Did Laughton want to believe that? Surely he was too wise and wounded a man to fall for the simplicity. Was he driven to it, out of fatigue, as a way of ending the film and settling the dark magic it had brought into being? I don’t know the answers, but after years of admiration – and a proper reading of Davis Grubb – I begin to see shortcomings in the Laughton film. Yes, it can knock your eyes out. Yes, there is nothing like it. But even when your eyes yield, your mind can find things to worry about, and the greatest of these may be the novel’s secret bond between the figure of Powell and the boy John. It’s worth adding that, though Laughton’s film sides so totally with the little ones, the director could scarcely bring himself to talk to the child actors. That hurt shows in the wary eyes of Billy Chapin.

The Night of the Hunter flopped. François Truffaut, in Paris, was one of the few people who liked it. But before the failure Gregory and Laughton had bought the film rights to Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead. Laughton and Mailer discussed it together. A whole script was done – surely worth seeing now, for it may have been The Thin Red Line before its time. But when Hunter failed the money vanished. Laughton would never direct again. Which may not be the worst thing in the world, for we treasure The Night of the Hunter as a solitary excursion.