The Night of the Hunter (1955)

The only film directed by the great English actor Charles Laughton, "The Night of the Hunter" is a brilliant allegory about the battle between good and evil. The film failed upon its release but is now considered a classic. Robert Mitchum has never been better as the malevolent "preacher" who marries the hapless Shelley Winters. Mitchum had been in prison with Winters husband and knows there is money to be had from a robbery the deceased husband committed, but where is it? Though Shelley falls under Mitchum"s twisted religious zeal, her children a little boy and girl instinctively know this man is bad, bad, bad. Spoiler alert: Shelley Comes to a watery end and the children must flee from Mitchum who has discovered the money is hidden in little Pearl's doll. After an arduous journey ...

Laughton crafts a nightmarish fairytale that stands up now as a true masterpiece.

A religious maniac marries an idiotic widow and mother of two children in the hope of finding out where the $10,000 is hidden that the now executed husband and father garnered from a robbery.

Upon release back in 1955, the critics of the time kicked this first directorial effort from Charles Laughton to such a degree he never directed again. Watching the film now and observing the tide of praise for it as each year goes by, one can only hope that those critics were rounded up and sent to a faraway island to learn about how to view with open heart.

The Night Of The Hunter is to me quite simply one of the greatest films ever laid down on the screen. Firstly you have to ask yourself exactly what genre...

Continuing with my quest to establish where or not Charles Laughton ever made a bad movie, I recently came, again, to this - one of my all time favourite films. I remember cowering behind the sofa as a child when this film came on television late in the evening. It all centres around a robber who has hidden $10,000 somewhere. His jailbird pal "Powell" (Robert Mitchum) is out, masquerading as a puritanical preacher, and determined to befriend the man's family and to scoop the loot. Shelley Winters is the naive, now widow, "Willa" who falls hook, line and sinker for the wiles and charms of this shrewd and duplicitous man - and that does not go at all well for her! Soon the children "John" (Billy Chapin) and his sister "Pearl" (Sally Jane Bruce) are in mortal peril. Can they escape his clutch...