The Night of the Hunter (1955)

I’m fortunate enough to teach an elective English course for high school seniors called Literature and Film, and early on I need to convince my students of something: black and white movies can be as engaging as color. I can’t win them all, but I try, and I win more than I don’t. We spend an hour contrasting the funeral speech scene in Julius Caesar of 1970 (color, and crap) with that in Julius Caesar of 1953 (B&W, and great) and they see my point. But I save the big gun for my closing argument: The Night of the Hunter.

There’s nothing quite like it. The plot is nothing brilliant. The Rev. Harry Powell—a murderous con man who justifies every act as God’s will—shares a cell with a condemned man whose widow and children might still have $10,000 stolen from a bank. He works his way into the family’s and town’s good graces, and only the children know of his evil. Rev. Powell is a genuinely great villain, with his deep velvet voice, misogyny, and oft-mimicked knuckle tattoos (“Love” and “Hate”); his voice singing the hymn “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms” gets my vote for most chilling song in cinema. It’s the perfect pairing for a series of striking shots.

Because my God, those shots. It shows what black and white cinematography can do. Shadow, flame, water, fog, horizon. Nothing else looks like The Night of the Hunter, largely because it all looks wrong. The angles are off; there’s flat planes where there should be three dimensions. My favorite monochromatic shot of all time is Powell standing outside a white picket fence, wide-brimmed hat tipped ominously against the night. Nothing in the shot moves except the flame in a gas lamp directly behind him, and literally everything about the shot is wrong. The shadows of the fence posts break away with impossible sharpness; there is light where there should be darkness and darkness where there should be light; the black, cutout mass behind him appears to be a hillside in a flat, riverside town. But like so many other elements in the movie, it works precisely because it’s wrong. It’s surreal and expressionistic in every way, from its characters and plot to its lighting. Roger Ebert wrote that it “follows the logic of nightmare.” There’s a strange musical interlude out of a fairytale or the Bible or a dream or something; the movie plays for odd laughs amid fear and defies logic. By the light of day you feel like you could reason it apart, but its power holds. It is not day; it is dream. It is The Night of the Hunter.