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  Average Rating for The Night Of The Hunter [1955] - 4 out of 5

  
  (based on 1 user reviews)
• The Night Of The Hunter [1955]

  Edward Howard 11 October 2007

  

  In actor Charles Laughton's one film as director, he ably blends elements of film noir, horror, fairy tales, and religious allegory into one of the most unique films ever to come out of Hollywood. Robert Mitchum is uncanny as the evil preacher Harry Powell, who travels the country looking for widows to rob and murder so he can continue preaching "God's word." When he arrives in a small town, looking for the widow of a man he met in prison, in search of the $10,000 he believes she has, the town embraces him as a true man of God and eagerly sets about getting him hitched to the young widow (Shelley Winters). This is a terrifying role for Mitchum, who inhabits his crazed preacher with a mix of creepiness and lunacy, exuding oily charm when he needs it, but otherwise speechifying with a self-righteous smoothness that always conceals a threat.
  
  Mitchum's character is an avatar of Puritanical sexual repression and religious hypocricy, a theme that Laughton returns to again and again in this film. Mitchum's sexual intimidation of Winters on their wedding night is frightening enough, but he really dominates in the scenes with her children, who are at the film's core. Indeed, in the second half, after Mitchum murders Winters and the two children escape, the film unexpectedly changes tone and becomes something quite different, a kind of grim fairy tale as viewed through the kids' eyes. Ultimately, the film is an archetypical showdown, a collision of two opposing religious views -- the sexually repressive, moralist authoritarian versus the loving, nurturing, forgiving realist. This is the central conflict at the heart of Laughton's film, though it's by no means the only theme explored in this unmatched classic. By fearlessly blending genres and even inventing a few of his own, Laughton crafted an enduring masterwork of the American cinema.

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Robert Mitchum appears as a psychopathic woman-hater in this gripping film based on a story by Davis Grubb.

Robert Mitchum stars in this thriller set in the 1930s in the rural American South. Psychopathic preacher Harry Powell (Mitchum) is arrested for a minor offence in a small West Virginian town. His cellmate, Ben Harper (Peter Graves), who faces the death penalty, confides that he has hidden $10,000 from a bank robbery. When Powell is released Harper has already been hanged, so the preacher tracks down his widow and children in an attempt to get his hands on the loot.