The Night of the Hunter

A fairytale for adults and their children

"Ah, little lad, you're staring at my fingers. Would you like me to tell you the little story of right-hand/left-hand? The story of good and evil?

H-A-T-E! It was with this left hand that old brother Cain struck the blow that laid his brother low.

L-O-V-E! You see these fingers, dear hearts? These fingers has veins that run straight to the soul of man. The right hand, friends, the hand of love.

Now watch, and I'll show you the story of life. Those fingers, dear hearts, is always a-warring and a-tugging, one agin t'other. Now watch 'em!

Old brother left hand, left hand he's a fighting, and it looks like love's a goner.

But wait a minute! Hot dog, love's a winning! Yessirree! It's love that's won, and old left hand hate is down for the count!"

And

"It´s a hard world for little things"





Jonathan Romney wrote:

"Set in the depression, the film begins with the psychopath Powell, a preacher against the flesh, totting up his victims. He's forever recounting the struggle of good and evil, using his tattooed knuckles as a rudimentary puppet-show. Tellingly, in his formula of "left-hand-right-hand", there's no "and" - they're more closely intertwined than even he guesses. There's a screaming Freudian eruption early on: as Powell watches a stripper on stage, swallowing his excited rage, his knife bursts out, slicing right through his pocket. We can guess that those white knuckles aren't just for storytelling.
Powell moves in on Willa (Shelley Winters), hoping to lay his hands on her recently executed husband's fortune. Marrying her, he promptly operates a merciless programme of sexual repression. She's soon preaching, too, gasping, "I feel clean now - my whole body's just a-quivering with cleanness." Her terrified children head off into the wilderness, surveyed, in the film's most dream-like sequence, by a nocturnal bestiary straight from Perrault. They're rescued by Lillian Gish's proverbial fairy godmother, the protector of all children and the very figure of tough love, with her soap, biblical parables and stern warnings against sex.
We never quite know where we are in this film. We think we're in the depression years, but it feels more like some postlapsarian desolation where children roam begging for potatoes. Nor are we sure exactly what kind of cinematic world we're in. Laughton prepared by watching the work of D W Griffith - hence the casting of Gish. But the film confronts Griffith's moral directness with the dense oneirism of German Expressionism. In his unnatural relationship to shadows and light, the preacher is a direct descendant of Murnau's Nosferatu. Young Billy sees the preacher's looming shadow on the bedroom wall: he looks out of the window, and Powell is standing beneath a lamppost, but in such a way that he couldn't possibly cast that shadow."

New Statesman; 04/02/99, vol.128 Iss.4430, p.38