The Night of the Hunter (1955)
Too bad this is the only film that actor Charles Laughton ever directed, because this one is a winner! I thought I had seen all of this as a kid, but turns out I'd seen only the last third. I'm glad I watched it again because I missed a lot: There is no surprise from the start that Robert Mitchum is a murderer disguised as a traveling minister and that he preys on widows for their money, then murders them. He then comes across Shelley Winters, a recent widow with two children. The oldest, a boy, is on to Mitchum's game and so starts a cat-and-mouse between the children and the "minister" as he stalks them for hidden money that their late father left them.
MItchum has rarely been more menacing and there are many tension-filled scenes where you don't know what he's going to do with the children. Laughton chose (rightly in this case) to film this movie in black-and-white because I think color would have ruined the eeriness of scenes of the deep South, particularly where the children are floating in a small boat down the river, and many of the animals that prowl the shores come out to watch them. There is symbolism, both obvious and not, One instance is where their boat is seen floating, observed from above through a spider's web, and it seems as if they are drifting through and out of it, ala escaping the web of the minister. But are they? The framing is awesome also, something I rarely go on about in movies. There is a bit in the movie where someone is standing in front of the window of a diner named "Spoons" and they are blocking the first "s" and the second one is covered up by the frame. Whether intentional or not, it's still funny. There are also fades from dark and light (especially in the last fifteen minutes or so) that are superbly used. Lillian Gish bookends the movie as a force of good, an elderly woman who takes in orphans. She is well-read in the Bible but is not above putting a load of buckshot in an enemy.
Hard to impress how much I love this movie but I promise it's well-worth a viewing. You may or may not love it (some critics thought it was a bit ham-fisted) but give it try.
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