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

We break the 200 barrier with the rarely seen prisoner-of-war comedy subgenre, 1953's Stalag 17. "Dramedy" might be a better term, though- we wouldn't want to confuse the tone of such a classic with "Hogan's Heroes."

I mean, sure, there's cross-dressing, near-ubiquitous cross-eyed mugging, and easy laughs, but sometimes people get shot.

The Key Players:

Nice to see you again, Billy Wilder. First alcoholism, now WWII- where will you take us next?

Academy Award-winning star William Holden also appeared on this blog two years and twenty three years later ago, if that makes any sense.

Noted director Otto Preminger takes a rare turn in front of the camera in support, along with the late Peter Graves ("Mission: Impossible") among many others.



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The Story:

Based on the hugely successful play by Donald Bevan and Edmund Trzcinski (who cameos in the film), Stalag 17 is the story of inmates in a German POW camp somewhere on the blue Danube river. It opens in December 1944, right during the middle of the Battle of the Bulge- from the German side of the line, it sounds like the tides are turning against the Allies.

Barracks 4 mounts an escape attempt, sending two men out with fake papers and civlian clothes through an underground tunnel, but unlike the "Hogan's Heroes" tunnels (which were endless in number and always lead to safety), this one leads the men to gunfire before they even reach the forest.

Holden, a cynical, caustic grifter, callously wagers cigarettes with the other POWs on this very outcome, and cleans up when the shots start firing. The next day, the smirking Stalag commandant (Preminger) orders the men to fill in the tunnel, and takes away the wood stove that covered the entrance- information that had yet to be discovered.

Talk of a mole quickly starts, and suspicion immediately falls on Holden, who brazenly fries an egg for breakfast that he's bartered with the German guards for. He's built up a surplus of cigarrettes and other goods by setting up a distillery, taking bets on literal rat-races, and improvising a telescope to peek at the nearby Russian women prisoner's camp.

In coming days, the mole provides information that gets the barracks' secret radio confiscated, and gets a recently arrived-Lieutenant arrested as a sabateour after he mentions blowing up a German artillery train. Sefton maintains innocence, but the prisoners rough him up in frustration.

Even Holden's friend and assistant Cookie (also our narrator) starts to wonder who the mole might really be...

The Artistry:

There are a lot of broad comedy bits in Stalag 17 that don't really work for me, most of them involving either Sig Ruman Sergeant Schultz (the German guard) or Robert Strauss and Harvey Lembeck reprising their stage roles as an antic comic duo of POWs (an oaf and a wiseguy, respectively). It might be because things like "M*A*S*H" would have the time to do wartime silliness with more restraint, though- and I did enjoy some parts, like Strauss's gravely exchange of "At ease!" with a whiny voiced messenger.

But everything with Holden jumps off the screen- he plays a classic antihero, and does it to a T. Holden reportedly turned down the part initially because it wasn't very sympathetic- he begged Wilder to give him a line about how much he hates the Nazis, to no avail.

Preminger plays the sort of classic smiling and cruel Nazi that everyone went gaga over Christoph Waltz putting a new spin on- flashy and simmeringly particular. I loved the part when he puts on his boots to call his superiors in Berlin on the phone.

The decision to reveal the traitor with 40 minutes (out of two hours) to go works very well for the pace, as ambiguious intrigue gives way to full-on dramatic tension.

THE ENDING! SPOILERS!

After sussing out the mole's message system of a hollowed-out chess piece (and a light bulb cord as a signal), Holden discovers that a man named Price (Graves) is a German-born spy posing as a G.I. from Cleveland. He'd been elected security chief of the barracks, and had all of the sensitive information necessary to tip off the guards.

This leaves him in a quandary- if Price gets wise that he's been made, he'll just leave and be sent to spy on another Barracks somewhere. If he kills him, the Nazis might retaliate by killig everyone.

Things come to a head when the Lieutenant accused of sabotage is about to be marched off to be executed. The prisoners hatch a plan to hide him from the guards- to make sure Price can't interfere, Holden cannily argues that the security chief should stay behind to guard him, to make sure that Holden (the suspected mole) doesn't give them away.

Finally, Holden breaks Price in front of everyone by grilling him on his fake American past, and catches him when Price claims he was eating dinner when Pearl Harbor was attacked (It was lunchtime in the states, dinnertime in Berlin).

Holden goes to escape with the lieutenant to safety, while the rest push Price out of the barracks as a distraction (the guards shoot him, as they do anyone out after dark).

END SPOILERS


Overall: Should It Be Higher, Lower?

I think higher, on the whole. As far as the silly parts go, they amplify the impact of the dead-serious moments rather well. Holden holds it all together in a classic lead role.

The Legacy:

Strauss and Wilder also earned Oscar nominations, and Stalag is one of the definitive WWII POW films along with The Great Escape and The Bridge On The River Kwai.

The Best Video Of It On YouTube:

Not too many clips, but the beginning of this clip has my favorite Holden vs. the rest scene. "You've put 2 and 2 together and it comes out 4, only it ain't 4!"



Leftover Thoughts:

-A lot of lipservice is paid to the Geneva Conventions in this movie. Remember when people cared about those dusty old things? Good times.

-Did prisoners of war really get mail delivered? This seems dubious to me.

-"One more word. If I ever run into any of you bums on a street corner... just let's pretend we never met before."

Coming Up...

198. Kill Bill Vol. 2

197. Shadow Of A Doubt

196. Sleuth (1972)