The Night of the Hunter

I saw this classic 1955 movie for the first time last week. Charles Laughton directed Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters and Lillian Gish in a highly stylized parable set along the Ohio River during the Depression. Filmed in black and white with dream like sets and lighting, populated by Norman Rockwell characters with serious Freudian complexes, the cinematography is done in a style that brings to mind the photographs of Baltimore’s A. Aubrey Bodine. Robert Mitchum’s creepy character, “Preacher” Harry Powell, dispatches his victims with a switchblade knife. Its sexual symbolism is so obvious that at times it was hard at times to suppress a laugh. To paraphrase Freud: “Sometimes a switchblade is just a switchblade.” The showdown between Mitchum’s murderous con man and Lillian Gish’s resolute, shotgun wielding maternal protector of orphans, who cannot be conned or cowed, caps a great film.