Buzz Writing

That venerable actor Charles Laughton directed only one movie, The Night Of The Hunter (1955) but that movie has become a classic and its stature grows every year. Laughton, with the help of his cinematographer Stanley Cortez, crafted a nightmarish modern fairy-tale that married the Brothers Grimm with German Expressionism to create unforgettable images which influence cinema to this day. Laughton’s movie is not realistic at all but it creates its own reality that in turn increases the terror as the movie goes along. Amongst many wonderfully framed compositions watch out in particular for a scene in which one of the main characters sits in a car drowned underwater.

Robert Mitchum, in one of his best performances, plays a phony preacher, with the words “H-A-T-E” tattoed on one set of knuckles and “L-O-V-E” on the other. The “preacher” has come into town trying to find out where a stash of stolen money is hidden and he is determined to get the location out of the two little children, the only two people who know where the money is. And so the nightmare begins. Within the context of the movie, future two-time Academy Award winner Shelley Winters played the mother of the children with understated brilliance. In Black & White.