Night of the Hunter (1955, Charles Laughton)

After the cops nab father Peter Graves (star of Parts: The Clonus Horror), false priest Robert Mitchum moves in and takes care of mother Shelley Winters, then starts working on the kids to reveal their bank robber dad’s missing loot until they escape downriver and find a protector in Lillian Gish. I wasn’t getting the fantasy storybook quality of this movie when I watched it thirty years ago on TCM, just the plot and some odd moments, such as Mitchum popping up like a cartoon to get shot by Gish at the end. Terrence Rafferty: [Screenwriter James] Agee was steeped not only in the right kind of southern sensibility but also in the work of the silent-film pioneer D. W. Griffith, which Laughton, with near miraculous intuition, believed should be the touchstone for the telling of the story; Griffith was the master of heightened, poetic melodrama, and that’s what Laughton wanted for The Night of the Hunter. He screened as many of Griffith’s movies as he could dig up at the Museum of Modern…