1955 – The Night of the Hunter

It’s an American Southern-Gothic thriller, at times a horror film set during the Depression. It was directed by Charles Laughton in his only feature win (go out on top, I guess). Its screenplay was written by James Agee based on the same-named book by Davis Grubb, which itself was inspired by the serial killer Harry Powers (“The Bluebeard of Quiet Dell”) who was hanged in 1932. It stars Robert Mitchum as the preacher Harry Powell, Shelley Winters as Willa Harper, the woman he is misleading and features a great child performance by Billy Chapin as John Harper. I saw it on YouTube in their collection of free movies here (this seems to be new, but I don’t know if it is just for Germany).

In Berlin there is the legend of the “Hauptmann von Köpenick“. This was an ordinary shoemaker, who in 1906 dressed up as a military captain with a stolen uniform. He was able to convince a whole company of soldiers to accompany him to arrest the mayor of the town of Köpenick (incorporated into Berlin in 1920) and managed to rob the city treasury. There’s a whole secondary motive in that he wanted to get identification, because he was banished from the city, but that was never achieved, I think. On the way to the arrest he bought the soldiers beers and managed to rile them up against the innocent mayor. In fact, according to legend, many other officers joined them along the way on their crusade against the mayor. He wasn’t caught in the original coup, only 10 days later, because he had bragged to some of his friends about pulling this off.

The story has a mixed resonance in Germany. On the one hand, it is seen as a genius move. Nobody was actually harmed and it is seen more as a prank than an actual crime. In fact, he was later pardoned less than 2 years later by the Kaiser and he made some extra cash posing for postcards in his fake uniform until World War I. The 1956 movie with Heinz Rühmann also has a very satirical tone (though there is some biting critique described below in there). Even today, you find statues of the captain all around Köpenick and he’s mostly seen with red cheeks and a smile.

However, the legend also tells of a cautionary tale of blindly following a figure of authority. Especially after World War II, Germans had to reckon that “just following orders” is not actually a valid excuse and that figures of authority may be wrong or that some of them are not to be trusted. It is this legacy that is still alive in Berlin today as the Berliner Ensemble just started a series of monologues on the “Hauptmann von Köpenick“.

It’s this theme that this 1955 movie picks up. A con man, impersonating a preacher is a serial killer that steals the money of widows. It is not clear how many he has killed (6 or 12) by the time he arrives along the Ohio River in the midst of the Depression. In jail he meets a man sentenced to death in a robbery that left two dead, but the $10,000 he stole never appeared. After the hanging he befriends the widow and even marries her in the quest to find the money. The eldest son, who had to swear never to tell anybody where the money is, sees right through him, but he fails to convince anybody else. How could you doubt such a nice preacher that delivers such eloquent sermons out of nowhere?!?!?

And it’s the oozing charisma of Robert Mitchum that really draws you in. He manages to manipulate the mother into feeling guilty that she was the one who killed her husband, because she asked him for worldly possessions. Even when she finally accepts that her son was telling the truth, she first starts praying, so strong is the brainwashing the fake preacher did. Add to that the cinematography that Charles Laughton used throughout the movie, his explicit inspiration from German expressionism of the 1920s and it makes for a truly haunting movie. I kept thinking about certain scenes for hours, not because they were overly deep, but because they were so eerie. For example, there is a shot of a car on the bottom of the river with seaweed around it that is truly haunting, like a ghost. Or a shot where Harry Powell is framed against a bright background on a horse, inescapable, humming a melody that makes him so scary.

It’s a downright tragedy that the movie bombed and Charles Laughton saw himself as a failure and never directed or produced anything again. One and done with a masterpiece, I guess! The movie is over 70 years old and there are some dated resolutions, like the ending. But even there, it features a traumatic response by the son that wasn’t typical in movies of that time, so I can’t fully fault the resolution. It’s truly a great movie with some great performances, even the kids acted well, which was a novelty at the time. I can thoroughly recommend this thriller!