Kinematoscope

When we toss the term "film noir" around, we largely think of attitude- the gumshoe, the gangster, the wiseguy smirking under the brim of a hat. Sure, there are shadows involved, but it's mainly a plot and character-centered reference.

But really it's a loosely defined movement that stemmed from German Expressionism, and few so-called noirs embody those roots more than 1955's The Night Of The Hunter. There's no big city shadows, whiskey-soaked private eyes, or femme fatales involved- it even has religious themes at its core- but it's noir without the cynicism and the sex appeal all the same.

The Key Players:

This would be the only credited directorial effort of Charles Laughton, an Oscar-winning actor perhaps most famous for starring in Mutiny on the Bounty, plus we saw him as Gracchus in Spartacus.

Remember Robert Mitchum from the very first countdown entry, Out Of The Past? What a journey it's been.

Child stars Billy Chapin and Sally Jane Bruce would abandon the business by the end of the 50s to do normal person things instead, no doubt.

Silent film legend Lillian Gish would cement her status with key roles here and in Duel in the Sun after earlier playing muse for D. W. Griffith's masterpieces (though Birth Of A Nation has aged badly, for obvious reasons).

Elsewhere, Shelly Winters (A Place In The Sun, The Poseidon Adventure) gets second billing despite little screentime, and Peter Graves pops up in a minor role once more.



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The Story:

The film opens with an oddly disembodied Gish reading Bible verses to some children's oddly disembodied heads, against a backdrop of stars. What?

Soon we see some children discover a dead body in a basement, and then we meet the killer- a "preacher" named Harry Powell (Mitchum), who talks to God as he drives along, and can't remember whether it's six or twelve widows he's killed so far. He's pulled over and soon sentenced to 30 days in jail for driving a stolen car.

Next, small town crook Ben Harper (Graves), arrives home just ahead of the police to find his children John (Chapin) and little Pearl (Bruce) playing on the lawn. He hides the $10,000 that he killed two men to steal, and makes them promise not to reveal where it is, even to their mother, Willa (Winters). The family looks on as he's dragged off to jail in turn, and sentenced to hang.

Harper and Powell are of course cellmates, and the sadistic preacher learns of the hidden money (though not where it is) when Harper talks during his sleep. After his release and Harper's hanging, he heads to the small town to put the moves on the widow and try and hit it rich- the townsfolk and Willa are impressed by a debonair, seeming man of the cloth, but young John is suspicious.

Claiming to have been the prison chaplin instead of a fellow inmate, he tells Willa that her late husband confessed to throwing that $10,000 in the creek to be rid of it- this confirms John's suspicions, and a war between them begins- Powell asks over and over about the money, and John's mother won't believe that's he after it until she overhears Powell badgering Pearl for it (by now we know that it's stuffed inside Pearl's doll, which she constantly carries around).

Willa puts it together just in time to get stabbed and dumped in the river- the children set off in a schiff downstream, and a weeklong chase is on- the children beg food from houses along the bank and float on, as the creepy, hymn-singing preacher rides a stolen horse in pursuit.

They're taken in by a woman named Rachel Cooper (Gish) that already cares for three other orphans- she's a stridently devout in her purposes as our maniacal preacher, and clearly these two are headed for a showdown.

The Artistry:

For a movie I had heard nothing about, The Night Of The Hunter has a lot going for it- even a few surprisingly pervasive reference points. Mitchum's psychotic preacher has the words "LOVE" and "HATE" tatooed on his fingers, and uses them to tell a simplistic parable- so now you know where that comes from.

Laughton clearly went all out in making his directorial debut: there are elaborately framed shots over people's shoulders, indulgent singalong portions, and thematically heavy moments- Bruce sings an original song about children being caught in a web as the boat is framed by a cobweb- this after we see every animal under the sun on the way downriver.

But it's not distracting- the first half of The Night Of The Hunter drags quite a bit, but once the chase starts there's no pausing for breath. And Mitchum's absolutely commited performance deserves a lot of the credit- part charm, part rage, and a wonderful baritone singing voice. He and Chapin have a wonderful standoff each time they share the screen.

Gish knocks it out of the park as well, while Winters has a thankless part and the other child actors are a non-factor.

Mostly it's a sort of lyricism in the design of the film that makes it rise above it's heavy-handed religious talk and thematic straightforward (Gish even talks right to the camera at the end). Songs that drift in and out, the preacher on horseback framed black on the horizon, and so on.

THE ENDING! SPOILERS!

After a great scene in which Powell tries to wait them outside of Cooper's farmhouse, she wings him with a shotgun and calls the police when he hides in the barn. John has a brief flashback to his own father's arrest when the cops cuff Powell in a very similar fashion, but he's quickly taken away, and in turn sentenced to hang.

The children stay with Cooper, who muses about how resilient children can be as the film ends on Christmas day.

END SPOILERS


Overall: Should It Be Higher, Lower?

Higher- I expected little, but it even got a hymn stuck in my head. A hymn! (see below)

The Legacy:

Though it would flop commercially and critically upon release (a chagrined Laughton would never direct again), the film's melding of German Expressionism with a thoroughly American tale of terror has influenced many of today's autuers and gained the film a considerable cult following. It's in the NFR, of course, and on lists as disparate as Empire's Greatest of all time and Bravo's scariest movie moments.

And of course TV Tropes has the list of knuckle-tattoo references, my favorite being Sideshow Bob from the Simpsons with his "LUV" and "HĀT" tattoos.

The Best Video Of It On YouTube:

Maybe one of my favorite scenes of the countdown thus far, as Mitchum sings his creepy calling song "Leaning On The Everlasting Arms" as he lurks outside the farm. Gish, brandishing a shotgun in a rocking chair in an image I swear I've seen many other places, joins in- to devout to resist the hymn despite the singer.



Leftover Thoughts:

-In Grubb's novel, the fake preacher is supposedly an allegory for the corrupting influence of religion. In the film he was mostly just a psycho.

-For some reason this 1955 film has a facebook page.


Coming Up...

178. Les Diaboliques

177. Grave Of The Fireflies

176. The Gold Rush

And now, after falling asleep during the middle four or five times and having to try again (what? It’s very long), it’s time for 1960’s Spartacus. It has something for everyone- romance, blood, epic battles, political machinations, and crucifixions. Exciting, right? If you have three hours and sixteen minutes to spare, grab a copy and follow along at home!

The Key Players:

Our director is a 30-year-old Stanley Kubrick- after churning out more accessible studio fare for most of the 50’s (most notably Paths Of Glory), Kubrick was brought on to replace Anthony Mann after star and producer Kirk Douglas didn’t like the cut of his jib. This would be Kubrick’s last, reportedly frustrating attempt to cowtow to the demands of a producing studio before embarking upon his twiceish-a-decade schedule of creating masterpieces with complete creative control. This is the first of a whopping EIGHT Kubrick films that we’ll be chit-chatting about on the countdown.

Douglas, meanwhile, has come a long way from his first countdown appearance. Legend has it that he decided to finance Spartacus himself after being passed over for Ben-Hur, in favor of Charlton Heston. A thrice-Oscar-nominated screen legend, Douglas played everything from a brooding Vincent Van Gogh (Lust For Life) to the plucky comic relief in a Disney film (20,000 Leagues Under The Sea) to our titular hero.

Laurence Olivier, one of the Greatest Actors of the Twentieth Century (or so they say), with fourteen Oscar nominations, two wins (for directing 1948’s Hamlet, and a best actor statue for taking his own direction so well), and two honorary little gold men to boot. With twice as many credits on the stage as on screen, he was generally regarded as the foremost authority on interpretations of his homeboy Shakespeare.

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The epic cast is rounded out by all-stars of the day, including Jean Simmons, Charles Laughton, Tony Curtis, and Peter Ustinov (who inexplicably, to this reviewer at least, won Best Supporting Actor for playing a hapless slave trader in this film, becoming the only actor in a Kubrick feature to win one).



The Story:

Spartacus (Douglas), a Thracian slave, is working in some Libyan mines at the film’s beginning. We see him stop to help an older slave that’s fallen, so naturally he’s whipped- but he’s got spirit, this one, and he ends up biting a guard in the leg. (A Roman guard. This is set in that part when the Roman Empire was sort of listlessly controlling everything with just the senate, not an emperor).

Anyway, he gets sold to Batiatus (Ustinov), who takes him to his camp that trains gladiators, where he generally does a whole bunch of silent brooding while I realize how many parts of Ridley Scott’s Gladiator were cribbed directly from this film. Eventually, a rich, powerful Roman senator named Crassus (Olivier) and his friend Glabrus stop by for a visit, and their wives are bored so they choose some gladiators to fight to the death and entertain them- naturally our stoic hero is among them. Spartacus actually loses his battle, but his opponent flips out and tries unsuccessfully to kill Crassus instead of finishing him off.

Now, this whole time Spartacus has been making gaga-eyes at a woman slave named Varinia (Simmons), even holding her hand when she came round to give him some soup. Aw. But when he sees her being taken away since she’s been sold to Crassus, he flips out, kills the head trainer, and the other gladiators join in and overthrow Batiatus’s entire estate. Now there’s an army of trained gladiators looting the countryside and living it up around Vesuvius. Oops.

The scene shifts to Rome, where Crassus’s main political rival, Gracchus (Laughton), manipulates things to get his buddy Caesar (hey, I know that guy!) in temporary command of the Roman Garrison, while Crassus’s teammate Glabrus leads six cohorts to stomp out Spartacus and co. Crassus is pissed about these developments, and also his favorite new boy slave Antonius (Curtis) has escaped, right when he was talking all menacingly yet seductively to him. What’s a crazy warlord to do?

Glabrus, it turns out, is not so up to snuff- the slave army destroys the entire six cohorts, burns their camp, and sends him back tied to a horse. Spartacus, after not talking for the entire first hour of the film, convinces the entire slave army that they need to organize, free and recruit other slaves, and bribe Sicilian Pirates into taking them out of Italy back to their homelands. Also, Varinia’s escaped from Batiatus and the lovers (who’ve hardly actually spoken to one another, really) are happily reunited.

If only the movie ended there…

The Artisticness:

Did I mention before that this movie is long? Always a curse and a blessing for Kubrick, his films are deliberately paced, which certainly gave Olivier and company plenty of time to flesh characters out, but makes for a long movie, especially when we all kind of know how the slave rebellion is going to end- maybe not specifically, but we’re pretty sure they don’t destroy Rome or anything.

The sets and battle-scenes are certainly pretty impressive for the time- this is even after an entire host of battle-footage was cut out of the finished film because it didn’t test well with audiences.

Douglas’s curious and resolved Spartacus is an all right hero, but you kind of wish he had some sort of flaw to round him out (this was apparently also a source of friction between Kubrick and Douglas as well). I loved Olivier’s Crassus, and I sort of found the Roman senate more intriguing than the war aspects.
And the “I am Spartacus!” scene- yeah, it worked for me. Call me a sap.

THE ENDING! THESE ARE SPOILERS! NO, THESE ARE SPOILERS!

Where were we? Oh yeah, the slave army, having grown, destroys an entire legion and makes it to one day’s journey from the very end of Italy- but the Sicilian Pirates have been bought off by Crassus, and they have no where to go, with large armies converging on them from the east and the south.

Spartacus sees that the only viable option is to march on Rome itself, which is exactly what Crassus wants, since the Senate has to basically hand him a dictatorship to get him to lead his legions in defense of the city. It all ends in a big, epic showdown with giant flaming logs rolling down hills and lots of people getting stabbed. The battle’s kind of even until those other two armies show up, and the slaves lose.

Then, of course, the survivors are rounded up and told that they will be allowed to live and sold back into slavery if they just turn over Spartacus to be crucified. But they all claim to be Spartacus. So they ALL GET CRUCIFIED. Wow. Way to go.

Also Crassus buys and tries to woo Varinia because he’s sort of got a Spartacus complex now. Plus he forces Antonius (who had joined the slave army and taught them about poetry and stuff) and Spartacus (who he’s pretty sure is Spartacus, but still is frustratingly unsure about) to fight to the death. Since the winner will be painfully crucified, they both try earnestly to kill the other and spare them, but Spartacus of course “wins.”

Finally Varinia, freed by Gracchus to spite Crassus gets to travel with Batiatus (who’s now anti-Crassus because he had been promised the right to auction off the slave army survivors who instead got crucified) and she gets to see nearly dead Spartacus (and show him his son) on her way out of Rome.

END SPOILERS


Overall: Should It Be Higher, Lower?

Whoo. What a downer. Personally, I still haven’t seen Ben-Hur or Gone With The Wind or many other historical epic type things, so Spartacus is pretty impressive to me as a technical achievement, and the cast is winning enough to stick out the run-time. So, higher-ish.

The Legacy:

Well, it’s somehow the only Golden Globe Best Picture, Drama winner to not be nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars, but it won four of ‘em anyway (Ustinov, Art Direction, Costumes, and Cinematography).

Plus the famous scene gets parodied all the time, including a soullessly annoying Pepsi commercial from 2005. Please see a whole list of parodies and homages here (but be warned, TV tropes is a hellish time-vortex that will destroy your brain).

The Best Video Of It On YouTube:

Whole thing starting here (it had to be split into 18 parts!), or you know, the Scene of Scenes:



I bet a lot of dudes in Hollywood at the time said they were extras in that scene. “You know that eighth dude that’s all like ‘I’m Spartacus!’? That was me.”

Leftover Thoughts:

-It’s not as prevalent as his later work, but you can still see Kubrick being Kubrick from time to time in the film. Like when Spartacus drowns his trainer in a giant pot of soup, we get to watch the entire 45 seconds of it in one long take.

-Oh yeah, this is the verbatim voice-over narration that opens the film: “In the last century before the birth of the new faith called Christianity, which was destined to overthrow the pagan tyranny of Rome and bring about a new society…” ‘Cause we all know Christianity turned out to be infallibly awesome, at all times.