A Girl Named Wolf

I love “Night of The Hunter” (Charles Laughton, 1955). It’s such a brilliant, bizarre mish-mash of influences, like a cross between a Flannery O’Connor novel, “The Wizard of Oz,” and “M.” Extremely self-conscious American Gothic film noir on steroids.

Robert Mitchum plays the charismatic psycho to perfection. The film comes with all the film noir goodies: jagged shadows, German Expressionist masks framing shots, leitmotif-punctuated melodrama (Widowed mother in candy shop: “I don’t want a husband!” - cue menacing music and close-up of angrily approaching steam train bearing a charming but murderous preacher-cum-serial-widow-killer…and we cut back and forth between these several times!)  shady, flawed characters and, well, an unhealthy dose of misogyny, but also some strikingly juxtaposed naiveté, child-like surrealism and decidedly syrupy touches that are quite uncharacteristic to the genre. One of my favorites is the scene of the children rowing down the river, passing tiny animals like toads, rabbits and tortoises magnified to monstrous proportions.  And here’s the famous scene, later riffed on by Spike Lee in “Do The Right Thing” (not to mention Nick Cave’s allusion in “The Mercy Seat”), in which Mitchum’s character tells the story of Good and Evil. You can’t quite see the full effect here, but the name of the candy store,”Spoons,” written on the window, casts a distorted shadow on the wall that says “Spooks.” Neato. Not exactly subtle, but pretty cool if  you ask me.