The Night of the Hunter - Will's Review

There is a certain something about older films, which I enjoy, but don't somehow quite have the vocabulary to explain. Don't get me wrong; I know a shit ton of words, but there's something about old films that, however hard I try to explain what I like about them, it ends up sounding bad. 

There's a certain pacing to them, which I want to describe as "slow", but somehow it manages (when done well) not to be a bad thing. The truth is that most entertainment changes over the years, adopting new conventions, and it's difficult for many people to appreciate the style of bygone storytelling techniques; even harder to explain them. 

Regardless of my inability to tell you why, I do enjoy a good old movie, and  I thoroughly enjoyed Night of the Hunter. 

In the hight of the Great Depression, Ben Harper races home to his two children, the police in-tow, and hides thousands of dollars of stolen money somewhere only his children see, and makes them swear never to tell anyone, even their mother, where it is, in the hope that they can use it to build lives for themselves when they are older. Ben is arrested for bank robbery and two counts of murder, and taken away. 

Enter Harper's cell-mate, Powell; a misogynist, conman, self styled preacher, and (unbeknownst to the police) murderer, currently serving time for driving a stolen car. 

In jail, Powell learns of the stolen money, and comes to believe that Harper's children know it's whereabouts; upon release (and Harper's execution) he sets too wooing Harper's widow, Willa, and establishing himself as the new head of the household, all in the hope of getting his hands on the cash. 

Robert Mitchum is superb as Powell, moving from charming, to oily, to outright scary as the plot demands, and the movie looks gorgeous.

I was surprised to see the location of the money casually given away to the audience at the films half-way point; until then it had been played as a bit of a mystery, and I was expecting a "rosebud" style reveal.

My only real issue with the movie is it's morality; while Harper's widow and children are innocent, Harper was not; he was a robber, and a murderer. Neither he nor his hairs have any more right to the money than Powell. I'm sure that it was intended for the depression era background to act as justification for his actions, yet Harper was not one of those deeply effected; he and his family live in a real house, he owns a rowboat, and his wife holds a job at a café; this in a time when thousands lived under bridges, or in makeshift towns comprised of ramshackle huts and tents! 

This is not a horror movie, and it's place on TimeOut's list of best horror movies ever mystifies me. With that in mind I am not going to mark it "Will Recommends", here, on a horror movie site. That said, I did, as I mentioned, thoroughly enjoy it.