The Night of the Hunter Screening

If you are around don't miss the screening of The Night of the Hunter at the museum of modern art tomorrow in the afternoon. If nothing goes wrong I will probably be there. That will make it my most-watched film ever breaking the previous record held by DDLJ (three times). I am of course talking about watching in a theatre, not on TV or DVD.

Now that I am on the topic, a few words about the bfi classics book on the film written by Simon Callow which I read recently. Callow is the author of well-received biographical studies of Charles Laughton and Orson Welles which makes him well-placed to write a book on the film, since it famously remained the first and the last directorial effort of Laughton. It also took Welles' overheated expressionist style to new extremes and in completely new directions. (Stanley Cortez, the cinematographer of the film, had earlier worked with Welles on The Magnificent Ambersons, which actually I have not yet seen.)

The book is slightly disappointing because it doesn't really say much about the utterly singular style of the film, at least not much that is not already known. How did German Expressionism, Biblical allegory, Grimm fairy tales, Orson Welles, film noir and folkloric rural Americana come together in the same film? It does try to find its origins in the life and career of two main actors behind the film - Charles Laughton and James Agee who adapted the screenplay from the original novel by Davis Grubb. But like most of the biographical studies the stylistic choices are never convincingly explained.

The book in the end scores where it recounts the interesting production history, specially the pre-production. James Agee was an acclaimed writer and film critic but had a limited script writing experience. He had collaborated with John Huston on the script for The African Queen. When he got a chance to work on the script for this film he was already struggling with alcoholism. When he was done he ended up with a 350 page unfilmable mammoth. As the legend goes the producer of the film Paul Gregory, who was a good friend of Laughton and had difficult relationship with Agee, said that he threw the script back to him and Laughton had to rewrite the entire script on his own from scratch. This Callow says is not true. It is true that the script that Agee wrote was highly overwritten and had a lot more than what could be put into a feature film but it was finally the script that was made into the film. From his stage work Laughton had a long experience of script-editing and he used this experience to whittle down the script to a manageable size. For a long time the first draft of the script was thought to have been lost, but was discovered a couple of years back and it confirmed what Callow says in the book. (Callow wrote this book before the discovery of the draft.) Callow also excerpts a moving correspondence between Agee and Laughton. After Agee perhaps realized his folly he wrote to Laughton asking him to remove his name from the film's credit sequence and acknowledging the extra work that Laughton had to do on the script. Agee was in the last stages of his alcoholism. He would soon die of complications related to alcohol abuse a few months before the film was released. The film's credit sequence retained his name. (It is in sharp contrast to other controversies regarding the authorship of the film in which principals fight for their share of the fame. Most prominent and long-lasting perhaps being that of the authorship of Citizen Kane.)

The book praises Laughton's talents profusely. Callow says he was that rare type, an actor who was also a great creative artist. He also highlights his relationship with the official church (he was extremely hostile to it), his struggles with his own homosexuality and his love of children. He wanted to become a father but his wife refused to have any children after she discovered his homosexuality. He spent much of his later life lecturing children on classic literature and mythology, some of that went into the character of Lillian Gish too. Callow also briefly discusses the careers of Robert Mitchum, Lillian Gish and Shelley Winters. Mitchum, I have always thought, was far luckier than he was talented. He is, of course, extra ordinary in this film. And so is the entire supporting cast. Even when the acting is a little awkward, as is the case with the young girl playing Pearl, it looks more like a bad and awkward nightmare, which it actually is. He also talks about the haunting music score by Walter Schumann, which is superlative too. I wish he had discussed the individual scenes in more detail like the haunting scene inside the lake or the boat-scene with the two kids, or the strange Caligari-sque set-design. He touches on all these topics but doesn't say anything new or special.

Recently a lot of archival material including the initial rushes and outtakes about the film have been discovered and it is being preserved in film museums. Fans of the film have been clamouring and petitioning for a DVD release with all the new material but so far it remains out of sight. It is available on a bare-bones dvd which is better than nothing at all but it remains beyond debate and argument that it is one film which deserves a very special treatment. A review of the book from the complete review with more links at the bottom. An interview with Paul Gregory with a nice picture of Laughton here.