This is a tuly excellent classic movie. My entire family enjoyed it! Great dramatic performances from Robert Mitchum and Shelly Winters. I am so glad that movies like this are still in circulation , I just can't stomach much of what is on the silver screen today! This movie is a keeper!

NIGHT OF THE HUNTER is an excellent film. Set in depression era West Virginia it is based on an prize winning novel of the same name that was inspired by a real life murderer who lived in that area. The surreal beginning and the fluffy ending in a cozy cottage at Christmas seem like the stuff of fairy tales but in between all is pure nightmare.

Robert Mitchum is both chilling and spellbinding as a criminal/preacher who marries the gullible widow of an executed cellmate in hopes he can force her two young children to tell him where their dad hid the proceeds from his final bank robbery. Shelly Winters plays the doomed widow well and in a manner very reminiscent of her performance in A PLACE IN THE SUN. Silent screen beauty Lillian Gish has the third starring role as a brusque but saintly, elderly foster mother who ultimately becomes a savior. The two child actors playing John and Pearl do amazing jobs and have lots of screen time in which they prove they can do more than look scared. The rest of the cast of supporting actors all bring a certain creepy small town flavor to their assorted roles.

The movie is heavily laden with symbols some of which are a bit obvious but fit the overall style of the film. The story wavers a bit during a trial and mob scene late in the film but redeems itself again by the movie's fable like closing scene. Vocal music is used to good effect several times throughout the movie though I was not fond of the overdone instrumental music that seemed to be the murderous preacher's theme. This movie is genuinely unsettling despite the reassuring ending and should appeal to most fans of psychological horror.

A family man steals money after a robbery and hides it with his kids without their mother knowing. He makes them promise not to tell. In jail he reveals to a self appointed evangelical Minster Powell (Robert Mitchum) that he still has the loot before he is hanged. The Minister marries into the family after wooing the widow to try to get the kids to reveal the whereabouts of the money. He even resorts to murder. Eventually the kids escape and he chases after them for a final showdown in the home of an elderly foster carer.

The Night of the Hunter is basically a vehicle to watch Robert Mitchum play a very scary psycho. There is a classic scene where Powell wrestles with his own hands to tell a biblical story of the struggle between love and hate. Watching the widow deteriorate while at his command is also shocking. Overall this is powerful storytelling through and through and Mitchum turns into one the darkest of characters ever to loom upon the silver screen.

Robert Mitchum has played some pretty creepy characters, but no one rivals Harry Powell from "The Night of the Hunter." He is marvelous throughout the film. Powell is a disturbed "preacher" who happens to speak to God. He believes God is helping him rid the world of the horrible and foul female. Yes, he hates women. He hates them so much, he murders them for money.

Shelley Winters is superb as the widowed Willa Harper, whose husband happens to meet Powell in prison. Convinced by the town to marry such a great catch, Willa slowly devolves into Powell's slave abiding by his every wish. As if God sent him to her to make her pure again, she believes him--hook, line and sinker! ; )

The movie gets a little strange at the middle and takes a rather unforeseen direction. Although I feel the beginning is clearly better than the latter portion of the film, I do also appreciate it in its entirety.

An excellent movie that classic fans need to see!

The story may be simple - two children, John and Pearl, are pursued by the evil 'Preacher' who killed their mother and is after the money their father stole - but there is nothing in cinema to compare to The Night of the Hunter. Both Robert Mitchum's stunning extroverted performance and the film itself were shamelessly plundered by De Niro and Scorsese for their all but inept remake of Cape Fear, but this is the genuine article. A flop in its day and plagued with censorship problems (it was banned outright in Memphis and some of the more stridently Catholic countries), Laughton's perverse fairytale of innocence and evil is far more disturbing and affecting in its subversion than modern shock tactics could ever be.

The pacing and construction are almost akin to a vintage Disney animated feature, and just as primal albeit far more explicit. Disney would never have addressed the dark undercurrents as directly as Laughton, with the traditional safeguards of family, religion and small-town values soundly undermined. Here Mitchum's preacher plays the two children against each other and their mother (the most chilling line in the film is when Mitchum tells the boy "Well, it doesn't matter. It's me your mother believes") while the very forces that bay for his blood at the end are the same that all but forced Shelley Winters' widow and Mitchum's psychopath together.

Here people are to be judged by their actions rather than their apparent position, with the matchless Gish as the Mother Goose with her brood of the waifs and strays of the Depression showing that the forces of good needn't be wishy-washy or wimpishly self-righteous. When she says "I'm a strong tree with branches for many birds. I'm good for something in this old world and I know it," you believe it. Through her generous performance the film radiates a faith in the power of goodness and the endurance of children ("Children are men at their strongest. They abide," notes Gish) that provides a direct link between Laughton's film and D.W. Griffith and ultimately heals the boy's deep wounds.

While Pearl is oblivious to what goes on around her, the boy is clearly seriously scarred by the responsibility of it all (when Gish takes out her Bible, he skulks away, and, in the film's most masterly touch, his reaction to the arrest of Mitchum's preacher is identical to his reaction to the arrest of his father. There are moments in his relationship with Gish as he edges back to trust and innocence that are among the most intensely moving in all cinema.

One of the most sensual films ever made, Night of the Hunter is also surprisingly frank in its sexual analogies. It is made clear that the children's parents' relationship was primarily sexual, with Winters' sexuality, both humiliated and rejected by the Preacher, transformed into a disturbingly blind religious devotion. Like Lucifer, a fallen angel who has made a mockery of the religion he once proposed to serve into something "the Almighty and me worked out betwixt us," to Mitchum's Preacher Powell sexuality is violence, his switchblade bursting through his pocket like an erection.

It's often what happens on the sidelines that sets it so apart: the hangman coming back from executing the children's father to watch his own children, Pearl innocently repeating the hanging song the other children have been taunting them with at the beginning, the comforting singing coming from the nearby farmhouse as the children sleep in the barn only to be awoken by the Preacher's threatening rendition of 'Leaning on the Everlasting Arms' (later reclaimed by Gish) in the distance.

Not nearly enough has been written about Walter Schumann's truly extraordinary score. The nocturnal journey downriver under the watchful gaze of animals benefits enormously from a simple narrative song, while the score's shifting menace, melancholy and warmth both embraces the visual and psychological aspects of the film to perfection. One of the great neglected works of the 50s, it cries out for a recording.

There is a visual mastery here that recalls Griffith at the height of his powers, with a magnificent use of light and shade (when John talks of bad men, he unwittingly summons the menacing shadow of the Preacher on his bedroom wall) and a brilliant use of sets that are at one moment realistic and the next highly stylised, often both within the same shot thanks to Stanley Cortez' remarkable cinematography. Laughton may never have directed another film, but he packed more into this one than most other directors can manage in their entire career.

Sadly, no extras apart from a trailer on the DVD - and even that has had the original captions removed.