The Night of the Hunter (1955)

USA Director Charles Laughton Runtime 93 minutes Blu-ray USA, 2014 Distributed by The Criterion Collection (region A/1)

BANISHED FROM PARADISE. GENESIS MOTIFS IN THREE COMING-OF-AGE FILMS: THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER (CHARLES LAUGHTON, 1955), MOONFLEET (FRITZ LANG, 1955) AND EL ESPÍRITU DE LA COLMENA (VÍCTOR ERICE, 1973)

This essay proposes a new approach to three fi lms, The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955), Moonfleet (Fritz Lang, 1955) and El espíritu de la colmena (Víctor Erice, 1973), by comparing and analysing structural and audiovisual elements that refer to the Fall of Man and Expulsion from Paradise Myth as a coming-of-age tale.

Notorious, The Paradine Case, Rope, Under Capricorn, Stage Fright

Still in Ingrid Bergman’s thrall, Hitchcock made one of his most romantic pictures for her, Notorious (1946), in which she and Cary Grant work out many of the contrasts and tensions in their screen personas. Hitchcock was stymied by casting decisions not his own on The Paradine Case (1947), which was the last film he made for producer David O. Selznick, and then he foundered on miscasting again when James Stewart was given the central role of a queer academic in Rope (1948), his first color picture. Hitchcock made Under Capricorn (1949) as a valentine to Ingrid Bergman, allowing her to dominate an eight minute and forty-seven second take where her character confesses to a crime, a rare instance of acting for its own sake in Hitchcock’s work. Though Marlene Dietrich was superficially in the mode of the liberated women that Hitchcock enjoyed like Carole Lombard and Tallulah Bankhead, the Master was mainly bemused by Dietrich’s demands for special lighting in Stage Fright (1950), and so he lets her have her way as he lets Charles Laughton dominate Jamaica Inn.

Young and Innocent, The Lady Vanishes, Jamaica Inn

If Young and Innocent (1937) is the weakest Hitchcock film of this period partly because of poor or insubstantial acting from most of its players, then The Lady Vanishes (1938) is the height of his British career in large part due to the lively excellence of its cast, particularly Michael Redgrave as the all-out charmer hero. But then Hitchcock came to grief directing the demanding Charles Laughton in Jamaica Inn (1939), a film that is lopsidedly centered around Laughton’s self-indulgent, effortful performance, which is filled with lots of face making and external signifiers that could not be further from Hitchcock’s own concept of what acting for the camera should be, which he outlined in detail in a 1939 interview for Film Weekly called “What I’d Do to the Stars.”

Charles Laughton in Hobson’s Choice

A discussion of Charles Laughton in Hobson’s Choice

Lear's Terrible Journey: Charles Laughton at Stratford, 1959

Interest in Charles Laughton has recently been revived by the publication of Simon Callow's biography (Methuen, 1987), in which the author quoted from the personal recollections of a teacher. Ken Carter, whose view of Laughton's Stratford performance as Lear in 1959 ran counter to the critical dismissals which have otherwise come down to us. Carter expanded his views for a short article published in Drama (4–1987), and now provides a fuller account of a performance recollected in remarkable detail after almost thirty years. An Oxford graduate, Ken Carter has worked mainly as a teacher in London, with interludes near Bath and in Madrid.