I was on BBC Radio 4's
Film Programme today, discussing the re-release of
The Night Of The
Hunter with host Francine Stock and the estimable Nick James, editor
of Sight and Sound. you can listen to the show on BBC IPlayer (
link here), and you'll also hear a fine interview with Thelma Schoonmaker, about editing
Wolf Of Wall Street and digital vs. film editing in general, as well as with that film's co-star Jonah Hill. Ours was a lively discussion, the only
negative being we all admire the film, so there wasn't the usual diagreement which might have
made it a bit edgier! Much of the best talk, as it so often does, took place before the tape
was rolling, or had to be lost for space considerations, so I thought
I'd just make a few general points about the film.
I know it isn't
everyone's cup of tea even today, when it's considered a work of
genius—some people find Robert Mitchum's performance theatrical and
over the top, and many find the mix of noirish expressionism and
fairy tale oddly disconcerting in a Southern Gothic thriller.
At the time it must have, as I said on the show, confused people: look at the poster left and ask yourself if you're getting a thriller, a romance, or a western?
I had
some of those feelings myself when I first saw the film, but was won
over the way great films often do: by getting you to suspend your
disbelief, and accept the story the way it is told, the way it
appears, on film, as film. And this is where Laughton is so good.
There are borrowings, from Griffith as much as Expressionism, from
the Grimm Brothers as much as film noir, but it drags you into that
world and gives you a child's perspective of it. We are all children
in the cinema anyway, and Laughton reminds us of that.
I mention Mitchum's
performance, which I think reflects Laughton's own bombast and
flamboyance. I'd recalled his Rembrandt, who as played by Laughton
became a two-fisted bar-room brawler, a he-man figure who would put
Pollock to shame.
Laughton was lucky, because Mitchum brought his own
brooding sexuality to a role built on fear and hatred of that
sexuality, and he played it with a cunning that worked against the
somewhat passive character we remember from film noir, from
Out Of
The Past, helpless in the web of the spider woman.
But Loughton as a
theatre director specialised in getting to the disturbed underneath
an actor's surface: just before he made his only film as a director,
he was coming off a great success with
The Caine Mutiny
Court-Martial, in which Lloyd Nolan, no method actor, played Captain
Queeg. I think Mitchum took the freedom Laughton offered and ran with
it.
We talked a lot about
influences, which got lost apart from my mention of Flannery
O'Connor, Wise Blood, and John Huston. But you can't have children on the river without
Huckleberry Finn springing up, and it's hard to have any southern
fiction in the 20th century without the cadence and tone
of Faulkner seeping through. You see Davis Grubb in Harper Lee, for
example, and you see Hazel Motes in Harry Powell. There's a lot of
Erskine Caldwell (Tobacco Road) too, and at the other end of the
spectrum, you might note the epigraphs from Moby Dick which Grubb
used in the novel, and think of Melville's other great novel, this
one set on a river boat: The Confidence Man: His Masquerade. Which
describes Powell perfectly. It's significant too that the film is set
specifically on the Ohio River, which marks the northern boundary of
the South.
We talked about the
influence of this film,
and I tried to make the wider point of the
steamy South as a natural setting for noirish tales of greed and
passion. We should have mentioned
Winter's Bone, based on Daniel
Woodrell's fine novel, in which the dead body underwater plays such a
part. You can see the effects of Laughton's style perhaps in David
Lynch or Jim Jarmusch. And I see a lot of Mitchum and a bit of
Laughton in
The Beguiled; not that Don Siegel strove for much in the
way of expressionism, but you can compare Eastwood the seducer to
Mitchum working on Ruby, the eldest and most vulnerable of Lilian
Gish's strays. That scene is shot in an ice cream parlor: even the
sign above their heads seems lascivious in context, and Gloria
Castilo could be auditioning for
Baby Doll or
Lolita. In many ways
she is the central character in terms of the film's morality: she is
the one Lilian Gish may save from the fear of his own need for love.
More doubling: of
course Ruby is the opposite reflection of Pearl, whose name recalls
Hester Prynne's illegitimate but pure daughter in
The Scarlet Letter.
I'd mentioned how perfect Sally Jane Bruce is for the role: her's is
a doll-like face, Elizabeth McGovern or Molly Ringwald, and of course
her doll is central to the story. A few other cast notes: Shelley
Winters was in Laughton's acting class in Los Angeles, one senses he
knew what he was getting from her. James Gleason, who is so good as
Uncle Birdie, actually replaced Emmett Lynn in the role. And Peter
Graves is excellent as Ben Harper; he's playing the same sort of
character he played in
Wagonmaster, only softened by his children, as
you might expect in a fairy tale.
And of course there is
Lilian Gish, who nearly turns the film into a fairy tale by herself.
She brings the echo of the silents, of Griffith, and of a certain
timelessness that invites the viewer to accept the tale the same way
he would accept her bible reading at the start.
It is, for adults, a
tale of the vicious repression of sexuality to God and to Mammon,
something Gish rises above. I still recall vividly Gish coming on
stage at the Dominion Theatre after a screening of
The Wind, and that
same ageless presence was still there.Stanley
The work of
Stanley Cortez,
the cinematographer, is magnficient. Cortez, born Stanlislaus Krantz, was the brother of the heartthrob Ricardo Cortez, one of the best of the homegrown Valentinos. Stanley didn't shoot many 'big'
films, but made them count when he did (
Magnificent Ambersons being
the best-remembered). He has a catalogue of odd B movies to his
credit, but he achieved something memorable here
. And the set designer, Hilyard Brown, did
Creature From The
Black Lagoon, and what else is this film but that one with the
monster being a human?
And finally, may favourite of all the photos I found while I was writing this piece: Laughton, Winters and Gish out for dinner in Hollywood, 1955. Why are these people smiling? Or trying to smile?
As movie posters go, the one for The Graduate, with Dustin Hoffman's Benji staring in stunned bewilderment at Anne Bancroft's outstretched black-stockinged leg, Mrs. Robinson's temptation, is one of the best. Simple, effective, even haunting, it encapsulates the thrust of the film and reveals much about both characters.
But I was still trying to figure out the cat until it came to me: Cougar!
Clint Eastwood's heavily masculine approach to the film, yet the panel were incapable of suggesting any real virtue in the film, though they clearly wanted to. It looked very pretty, the dresses were far too nice for the situation (girls' school, Civil War, hard times) and the only black character, the maid Hattie, had been written out of the story, so all the cooking and cleaning and ironing happened as if by magic, as it would if you were Sofia Coppola or you were making another movie set in Versailles. So none of the Saturday Reviewers actually liked the film, but they were too polite in this cae to say so. Only Tom Sutcliffe, the host, appeared to have seen the original, and he was being very cautious about endorsing Clintonian misogyny.
You can fool Sight & Sound but you can't fool the Writers' Guild. The reviewer ended by praising the wonderful bits of ambiguity Coppola had inserted. Like the amputation of McBurney's leg. Were they punishing him or saving his life? Oh now there's one that never occurred to Siegel. Nor demanning him, symbolically. Sheesh. They just weren't sensitive enough to make a small masterpiece some big name could come along and remake.
