![]() Both Grubb and Agee grew up in the Ohio valley during the Depression, which is where and when the film is set. The film was adapted from a novel by Davis Grubb, and was written by James Agee, the author of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and A Death In The Family, and of the film The African Queen. A script like this probably wouldn't get to first base in Hollywood today: it would be considered too wordy. For many films, the scenario serves only as a skeleton upon which the director hangs his own ideas and effects, but almost every image in this film - every rabbit, owl and so forth - was thoroughly described in the scenario. It is also a writers' film, another reason I chose it for a literary festival. This film and its director appear made for each other - paradoxical, because The Night Of The Hunter is such a profoundly American film. European critics in particular have delved into its filmic influences, supplied Freudian analyses (frail mothers, sons and their torn loyalties to fathers, whether dead, fake, or ideal - vide the portrait of Abraham Lincoln tucked into the trial scene), and made Bettleheimian references to its fairy-tale depth-psychology, not to mention the depth-psychology of Laughton himself. The film came out in the same year as The Blackboard Jungle and Rebel Without A Cause, so did not have the impact it deserved, although it has gathered a serious following since. Surely it's his sympathy with the material that enabled him to extract such extraordinary performances from the cast - Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters, and Lillian Gish in particular. A bleak romantic trapped in an odd body, he often played monsters, which doubtless informed his direction of The Night Of The Hunter - as did his interest in art and his wide literary and biblical background. It was directed by Charles Laughton, who had a noteworthy stage career in London and made many English films before joining the European exiles who illuminated Hollywood from the thirties to the fifties. My second reason was that The Word is an English event, and this film has an English connection. The underwater Shelley Winters, for instance, in her aspect of wrecked mermaid, has made several disguised appearances in my own writing. So gripping was it that it warped my young brain, and several of its images have haunted me ever since. What was on the screen was the secondary action, and it's a tribute to The Night Of The Hunter that I can't remember which boyfriend I saw it with. That was in 1955, when I was a teenager and the theatres were blue with smoke: your boyfriend held his cigarette in one hand and attempted to sneak the other into your Peter Pan bra. First, it's among those films that made an indelible impression on me when it came out. I 'm incapable of choosing my single favourite anything, so I picked The Night Of The Hunter for other reasons.
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