Charles Laughton - The Night of the Hunter (1955)

Harry Powell, a religious fanatic shares a cell with condemned killer Ben Harper and tries to get him to reveal the whereabouts of the $10,000 he stole. But only Ben's children John and Pearl know where the money is. After Ben is executed, Preacher courts Ben's widow, Willa and she agrees to marry him. But she later catches him trying to force Pearl to reveal the whereabouts of the money. A true American masterpiece.

Tras cometer un atraco, un padre confía el botín a sus dos hijos pequeños, antes de ser detenido. Esperando su ejecución, comparte celda con un siniestro predicador que oye en sueños la historia del dinero. Comienza así una fascinante y terrorífica persecución que cautiva sin descanso por la fuerza de sus imágenes y la potencia del relato. Un maravilloso cuento cinematográfico de una capacidad hipnótica visual nunca superada. Considerada en la actualidad como una indiscutible obra maestra.

My rip from the original MGM DVD. High quality encode with meGUI.




Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter is one of the greatest American films, but has never received the attention it deserves because of its lack of the proper trappings. Many "great movies" are by great directors, but Laughton directed only this one film, which was a critical and commercial failure long overshadowed by his acting career. Many great movies use actors who come draped in respectability and prestige, but Robert Mitchum has always been a raffish outsider. And many great movies are realistic, but Night of the Hunter is an expressionistic oddity, telling its chilling story through visual fantasy. People don't know how to categorize it, so they leave it off their lists.





Yet what a compelling, frightening and beautiful film it is! And how well it has survived its period. Many films from the mid-1950s, even the good ones, seem somewhat dated now, but by setting his story in an invented movie world outside conventional realism, Laughton gave it a timelessness. Yes, the movie takes place in a small town on the banks of a river. But the town looks as artificial as a Christmas card scene, the family's house with its strange angles inside and out looks too small to live in, and the river becomes a set so obviously artificial it could have been built for a completely stylized studio film like Kwaidan.




Charles Laughton showed here that he had an original eye and a taste for material that stretched the conventions of the movies. It is risky to combine horror and humor, and foolhardy to approach them through expressionism. For his first film, Laughton made a film like no other before or since, and with such confidence it seemed to draw on a lifetime of work. Critics were baffled by it, the public rejected it, and the studio had a much more expensive Mitchum picture (Not as a Stranger) it wanted to promote instead. But nobody who has seen The Night of the Hunter has forgotten it, or Mitchum's voice coiling down those basement stairs: "Chillll…dren?"



No deja de resultar sorprendente que un actor británico que detestaba cordialmente a los niños optase para su debut en la dirección por la adaptación de un texto profundamente americano y con protagonistas infantiles. Es algo extraño, pero toda la película lo es realmente. The night of the hunter es una obra insólita dentro de los convencionales cánones de producción del Hollywood de los años cincuenta, que mostraba una cierta preferencia por los grandes presupuestos y el delirio kitsch del cine de "tetas y togas".

La película juega constantemente con la idea de un enfrentamiento entre el mal absoluto y la sufrida bondad. Robert Mitchum es la encarnación física de la perversidad, sin ninguna clase de matices, pero la poderosa presencia del genial actor, que disfrutó de lo lindo con su personaje, hace de él un ser maliciosamente atractivo. Enfrente está Lillian Gish, figura maternal a la que es imposible resistirse; es un árbol firme con ramas para muchos pájaros, bondadosa y con inacabable capacidad de entrega. El personaje de Shelley Winters, por el contrario, carece de voluntad y en ello radica su perdición.

Indispensables complementos son el excepcional trabajo fotográfico de Stanley Cortez que arranca al blanco y negro todas sus posibilidades y la música de Walter Schumann, evocadora y potente, que subraya con exquisitez los momentos más emotivos.

Script/Guión: James Agee (Novel: David Grubb)
Music/Sonido: Walter Schumann
Cinematography/Fotografía: Stanley Cortez (B&W)
Cast/Reparto: Robert Mitchum, Billy Chapin, Sally Ann Bruce, Shelley Winters, Lillian Gish, Peter Graves, Evely Varden, James Gleason