The Night of the Hunter with Robert Mitchum: DVD Cover

    The Night of the Hunter Director: Charles Laughton Cast: Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters, Lillian Gish, Billy Chapin

    DVD - Black & White / Pan & Scan / Dolby 5.1 / Mono Learn more

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    • DVD Release Date: 01/25/2000
    • Original Release: 1955
    • Rating: Not Rated

    Viewer Rating: (6 ratings)

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    • Overview
    • Editorial Reviews
    • Scenes
    • Customer Reviews
    • Cast & Crew
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    Features

    Collectable booklet; Original theatrical trailer

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    Scene Index

    Side #1 --
    1. Logos/Title/Credits [1:38]
    2. False Prophet [3:39]
    3. Father/Thief/Killer [2:39]
    4. Prying Cell Mate [2:42]
    5. Thoughtful Hangman [1:39]
    6. Innocent Victims [1:58]
    7. Night Story/Stalker [1:26]
    8. Uncle Birdie's Snort [2:33]
    9. A War of Love & Hate [2:19]
    10. "Fudge" at a picnic [4:08]
    11. Evil Stepfather [3:20]
    12. Lustless Honeymoon [3:08]
    13. All Fired Up [1:59]
    14. Stuffed Doll [2:52]
    15. Secrets & Lies [2:09]
    16. "Lord Have Mercy!" [2:44]
    17. Sorrowful Hate [2:42]
    18. Hidden & Found [4:35]
    19. Torment & Telling [3:16]
    20. Trapped Cellar Rat [2:12]
    21. River of Salvation [4:17]
    22. Hot on the Trail [1:51]
    23. "Hush My Little One" [3:31]
    24. No Time for Sleep [3:43]
    25. Saved & Scrubbed [3:55]
    26. The Story of Moses [2:52]
    27. Ruby & the Preacher [3:04]
    28. Good Against Evil [3:02]
    29. The Night Hunter [4:14]
    30. "Take It Back!" [1:29]
    31. "Lynch Him!" [2:51]
    32. A Happy Time/The End [3:50]

    Scene Index

    Editorial Reviews

    Part melodrama, part horror movie, part fairy tale, Night of the Hunter unfolds like a fever dream in an American landscape both nightmarish and magical. This almost unbearably suspenseful tale -- the only solo screenplay that critic James Agee ever wrote and the only film that actor Charles Laughton (Ruggles of Redgap) ever directed -- is a cinematic experience unlike any other. Robert Mitchum gives his most indelible performance here as a psychotic preacher with "love" and "hate" tattooed on each of his hands. After charming a small-town widow into marrying him, he proceeds to terrorize her children in order to get hold of the money left to them by their dead father. The peerless Lillian Gish is moving and magnificent as the elderly woman who becomes the children's physical and spiritual guardian. Photographed by Stanley Cortez (The Magnificent Ambersons) with shimmering light and deep shadows that eloquently express the story's themes of good and evil, sin and redemption, Night of the Hunter is a beautiful, startling, and unforgettable film. Kryssa Schemmerling, Barnes & Noble

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    Customer Reviews

    Night of the Hunterby Anonymous

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    August 21, 2005: "The Night of the Hunter" is one of the utterly unique experiences the movies can offer, a wild concoction of fantastic, expressionistic, even surrealistic imagery. The only film directed by legendary actor Charles Laughton is a primal fable about two children, John and Pearl, menaced by a crazed preacher Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum) who marries their mother Willa Harper (Shelley Winters) as part of his plan to coax (or force) their secret from them: where they've hidden the stash of stolen money their father left with them before he was arrested. The American Gothic, Biblical tale of seduction, sin and corruption was based on a novel by Davis Grubb and adapted for the screen by famed writer-author James Agee (and Laughton, but without screen credit). Although recognized today as one of the greatest American films of all time, the imaginatively-chilling, experimental, sophisticated work was originally a critical and commercial failure, both ignored and misunderstood at the time of its release in 1955. From its start, the film is designed to have the special feeling of a child's nightmare, including the difficulty of keeping a secret, and a magical journey to safety—all told from a child's point of view. It also accentuates the contrasting, elemental dualities within the film: heaven and earth (or under-the-earth), male and female, light and dark, good and evil, knowingness and innocence, and other polarizations including equating the preacher with the devil. "The Night of the Hunter" is part fairy tale and part bogeyman thriller--a juicy allegory of evil, greed and innocence, told with an eerie visual poetry. Drawing on sources as diverse as rural American fable, this is a strange, tense and at times dream-like film that sends a shiver down the spine. In one of the film's greatest visual sequences, the children, Pearl and John, float softly down a moonlit river, bound for an unseen providence. Laughton and cinematographer Stanley Cortez (who also shot Orson Welles' "The Magnificent Ambersons" in 1942), film the children from the riverbank, placing a series of images--a frog, a spider's web, two rabbits--boldly in the foreground. In other sections, "The Night of the Hunter" borrows its visual motifs from the silent films of D.W. Griffith and the German Expressionist cinema of the '20s. Laughton plays with the long, slanted shadows of film noir, and in Willa Harper's A-shaped bedroom creates a Gothic chamber with showers of celestial light. Described by Laughton as a "nightmarish Mother Goose", this profoundly disturbing psychodrama marked both the beginning and the end of his career as a director. Driven by a performance by Mitchum that goes a long way to defining on-screen evil, both tone and tale are absolutely compelling throughout. Laughton's picture looks different from other noir films of the period--though Alfred Hitchcock's "Strangers on a Train" (1951) with its unusual camera angles, and Stanley Kubrick's "The Killing" (1956), with its multiplane staging (with props located between the characters and the camera), use similar ideas. However, his characters ARE different. In 1955, critics complained the film was self-consciously arty and too vague because of all the symbols. The resulting box office was so dismal that the depressed Laughton quit working on his second film, an adaptation of "The Naked and the Dead", and never...

    Night of the Hunterby Anonymous

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    May 20, 2005: I expected something great of this film and came away from it feeling that Laughton failed utterly in an apparent attempt to create an iconic masterpiece along the lines of Citizen Kane or The Grapes of Wrath. 'Hunter' is not literary, beautiful to look at, scary, well-acted or fun in any way. It's not surprising to learn that Laughton hated child actors because the kids in this film were absolutely wooden, as if they were miserable on the set. The adult performers don't fare much better; many of their lines are delivered as if in a first reading of the script with no director present. Lillian Gish is obviously meant to be the glue of "legitimacy" that keeps this hodge-podge of influences from Welles to Steinbeck, Faulkner, John Ford and Tennessee Williams lurching to a conclusion. Bob Mitchum reliably provides the juice -- perhaps it's understandable after all that Laughton gave short shrift everywhere else...


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