541 The Night of the Hunter
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zedz
- Joined: Sun Nov 07, 2004 7:24 pm
Re: Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955)
What you describe as unevenness I see more as a conscious juggling with sharply contrasting moods and modes (comedy, horror, musical, fantasy, satire, pious melodrama, cartoon stylization), often with a deliberately jarring intent - we're never comfortably settled into exactly what kind of a film we're watching. It's one of the things that makes the film so unique and generates an overall mood unlike other Hollywood productions of this, or any other, era. I swallow it all whole, because that's the kind of outcome I'm always excited to experience.
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djproject
- Joined: Sat Oct 09, 2010 3:41 pm
- Location: Framingham, MA
- Contact:
Re: Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955)
I agree. And actually that was my point: because you have these varying moods and colours (so to speak), it makes it far more interesting. I used "uneven" as a something descriptive, not as a negative mark against it =].zedz wrote:What you describe as unevenness I see more as a conscious juggling with sharply contrasting moods and modes (comedy, horror, musical, fantasy, satire, pious melodrama, cartoon stylization), often with a deliberately jarring intent - we're never comfortably settled into exactly what kind of a film we're watching. It's one of the things that makes the film so unique and generates an overall mood unlike other Hollywood productions of this, or any other, era. I swallow it all whole, because that's the kind of outcome I'm always excited to experience.
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therewillbeblus
- Joined: Tue Dec 22, 2015 3:40 pm
Re: 541 The Night of the Hunter
Like most people, I'm a strong admirer of this abnormal treasure. Every time I see it, I can barely believe that it was made at all. The first act of the narrative is loosely constructed but tightly strung together with a sharpness that shatters expectations on multiple levels. Murder, lives disrupted, creepy hypocritical zealots talking to themselves, and in one of the most eerie and out-of-place moments a guard comes home to a sudden existential crisis after a hanging, watching his kids in bed and reflecting on questions unsaid, that people in the 50s were not supposed to ask. It's almost as if the film shops around genre, from horror, crime thriller, faith picture, and melodrama before finally settling on a twisted blend of all of them.
Faith is portrayed as both a saving grace and a dangerously sick tool for the kind of harm rooted in confident solipsism imposed on others. Mitchum's psychopath wavers between being in control and self-aware to completely removed from reality. As the story progresses, what Laughton decides to produce on the screen fails to fit into a clear picture of tone or purpose, which makes the film all the more unsettling. The way Mitchum chastises Shelly Winters for sexual urges at an expected time indicates an alien quality about him beyond a con artist. He actually believes his own warped paradox of faith and behavior, a consciousness to an internal logic that makes no sense to any objective party. Winters' catatonic response to the reveal of Mitchum's true self is so uncomfortably weak that the failure to protect herself and her children brainwashed by blind faith reduces the healthy coping mechanism to a death sentence for all she loves. It's a painfully debilitating scene in simultaneously destroying the promised safety of Christianity and parental protection, thus setting fire to the idea of the ideological family system.
The film transforms into a monster movie as Mitchum's villain emerges out of left field as if he has a God-given sensor for tracking prey, and then we shift into a fairy tale adventure film, before finding solace in a new family system and eventually a re-triggering of trauma which uncovers the weight of responsibility unfairly placed on the young boy by his father. He is granted reprieve and the narrative reaches a cyclical return to faith in religion and family, but along the way has grated it through the ringer. We have also seen something that the best melodramas of the period have granted us: the bitter truth that holding in one's feelings without a supported outlet for expression yields only pain in burden, distancing one from God rather than bringing them towards spiritual harmony.
I know people have a problem with the last act, and I used to myself, but the way Mitchum's ominous threat is deflated into a pathetic human being, rather than the foreign demon he had embodied, is a perfect ending that is not tidy as much as it is intelligent. In removing his power and harnessing it for those who live their lives under the spell of the principles of religious teachings divorced from rigidity, Laughton is able to grant the audience a bold interpretation to make on our own. Namely, that subscribing too tightly to instituted ideas can be dangerously weaponized against us, but separating oneself from blind constraints into a stance of welcoming these overarching ideas allows for the application of important moral paradigms with the flexibility to develop independently. It's the beginnings of identity reinforcement, initiated in a film that seems to be moving in countless directions at once, across a tonal bridge of chaos and comfort, hate and love.
Faith is portrayed as both a saving grace and a dangerously sick tool for the kind of harm rooted in confident solipsism imposed on others. Mitchum's psychopath wavers between being in control and self-aware to completely removed from reality. As the story progresses, what Laughton decides to produce on the screen fails to fit into a clear picture of tone or purpose, which makes the film all the more unsettling. The way Mitchum chastises Shelly Winters for sexual urges at an expected time indicates an alien quality about him beyond a con artist. He actually believes his own warped paradox of faith and behavior, a consciousness to an internal logic that makes no sense to any objective party. Winters' catatonic response to the reveal of Mitchum's true self is so uncomfortably weak that the failure to protect herself and her children brainwashed by blind faith reduces the healthy coping mechanism to a death sentence for all she loves. It's a painfully debilitating scene in simultaneously destroying the promised safety of Christianity and parental protection, thus setting fire to the idea of the ideological family system.
The film transforms into a monster movie as Mitchum's villain emerges out of left field as if he has a God-given sensor for tracking prey, and then we shift into a fairy tale adventure film, before finding solace in a new family system and eventually a re-triggering of trauma which uncovers the weight of responsibility unfairly placed on the young boy by his father. He is granted reprieve and the narrative reaches a cyclical return to faith in religion and family, but along the way has grated it through the ringer. We have also seen something that the best melodramas of the period have granted us: the bitter truth that holding in one's feelings without a supported outlet for expression yields only pain in burden, distancing one from God rather than bringing them towards spiritual harmony.
I know people have a problem with the last act, and I used to myself, but the way Mitchum's ominous threat is deflated into a pathetic human being, rather than the foreign demon he had embodied, is a perfect ending that is not tidy as much as it is intelligent. In removing his power and harnessing it for those who live their lives under the spell of the principles of religious teachings divorced from rigidity, Laughton is able to grant the audience a bold interpretation to make on our own. Namely, that subscribing too tightly to instituted ideas can be dangerously weaponized against us, but separating oneself from blind constraints into a stance of welcoming these overarching ideas allows for the application of important moral paradigms with the flexibility to develop independently. It's the beginnings of identity reinforcement, initiated in a film that seems to be moving in countless directions at once, across a tonal bridge of chaos and comfort, hate and love.