Sherry Chandler » Atwood on Night of the Hunter
Atwood on Night of the Hunter
Yesterday being a beautiful November day (perhaps sinisterly so), I took a lunch-time walk over to the University of Kentucky’s W. T. Young Library and checked out Margaret Atwoods’ Writing with Intent (Carroll & Graf, 2005), a collection of her occasional writings.
Running my eye down the Table of Contents, I was immediately drawn to the little essay entitled “Why I Love The Night of the Hunter, a Film by Charles Laughton.” I also love Night of the Hunter, both the film (one that scared the be-jesus out of me when I ran upon it unawares showing on an oldies station in Chicago) and the Davis Grubb novel on which it is based. I could have sworn I’d written about them here but I can’t find anything in the archive.
The novel was a best-seller in 1953 and a finalist for the National Book Award. The movie came out in 1955. I was eight and ten respectively, so perhaps it’s understandable that I didn’t discover the latter until I was in my thirties and the former year before last when I attended the Appalachian Writers Workshop at Hindman Settlement School. (Davis Grubb is a West Virginian.)
The film stars Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters, and Lillian Gish, with a small appearance by Peter Graves, and Billy Chapin and Sally Jane Bruce as the children at the center of the plot. The performances are stellar and it contains one of the eeriest duets of “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms” you’d ever imagine — a piece that showed up on the Oxford American sampler a few years ago.
Basic plot summaries at wikipedia, IMDb (where it gets an extraordinary 8.2 rating), and rogerebert.com.
Here are some of the things Atwood has to say about this film:
Within [its] double frame is the folkloric tale itself, with its ogre (played by Mitchum). His name is Harry, as in “old Harry,” vernacular for the devil. Cross Richard III with Milton’s Satan and enclose him in a Southern psychopath posing as a preacher, and this character is what you’d get. He cannot be explained by the Depression—he is simply radical evil—but, in Laughton’s hands, he’s a complex figure as well, one of those fast-talking con men who recur throughout American art, embraced by society, then torn apart by it. He’s a monster, but finally a sacrificial one.
…oozing sexual power from every pore but especially from his lower eyelids.
Well, that does it. I’ll never be able to watch a Mitchum performance in quite the same way again.
Still, it’s great writing about a great film and what more can any bookworm ask. I recommend that you read it in its four-page entirety.
I am looking forward to reading the rest of the essays, in which Atwood “tries” everything from Virginia Woolf to Elmore Leonard, with a few really hairy subjects like Mordecai Richter thrown in.
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1 Comment
1. MW replies at 1st December 2006, 7:06 pm :
I’m definitely going to have to read this. I never thought of Mitchum’s character in quite those terms. If anything, I just thought of him as being part a much creepier version of the Southern con-man, kind of like Twain’s Duke and Dauphin gone really wrong, and part something else entirely. But Atwood’s comparison of him to Milton’s Satan is probably even more accurate than that. Either way, he’s certainly a character who can be both somewhat beguiling, and absolutely repulsive at the same time.
As for the movie itself, I’d probably go so far as to say that it’s one of the best films from the 20th Century.
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