The Night of the Hunter (1955) is, at moments, a bit what I would imagine a Flannery O’Connor story to be like in the cinematic form. There are other impressive and iconic Southern writers to fulfill the comparison, but I think Flannery suits best. Her work is so elegant, spare, and powerful that, although you can imagine other ways of telling the story, you cannot imagine it being told any better. In the same way, neither could the story at the heart of this film (a story with some of my ultimate beloved themes: religious delusion, the relationship between violence and eroticism, hypocrisy, and mirthfully hard truths) be delivered any more ravishingly than as it was by director Charles Laughton. Flannery has always had the miraculous confidence to slip the reader into the soul of a character who, in one way or another, has been underempathised with for most of their existence. It is certainly tempting to draw the comparison between Flannery and The Night of the Hunter along these lines: that somehow it all boils down to the emotion of empathy. However, it would, I think, be foolish to assume that the work of Flannery O’Connor was aimed at empathy in a simple-minded manner, as well as to think this is all that is happening in The Night of the Hunter. Paul Hammond, whose 1979 essay on the film was reprinted in the BFI programme notes, points to the role of empathy in the film:

“Like all Hollywood film, Hunter relies on our empathy. The camera sets us up alongside John and  

Pearl. Occasionally our identification with John is emphasised by a shot from his point of view, as 

when at the picnic where Powell courts Willa, John has his tie roughly straightened by his stepfather-

to-be. His fingers busy out of frame, Mitchum’s smirking face appears in close-up, bottom right, 

while on the hill behind him, already in his power so to speak, we see Pearl and her doll and Willa 

running towards Icey, who waits, arms outstretched, to congratulate the young woman on her choice 

of suitor. While an off-screen John is excluded, Mitchum is integrated into this gullible harem by 

Cortez’s deep-focus photography. Yet he is simultaneously alienated from it: light reflected from the 

river at his feet plays over his face and lends it a livid appearance that contradicts the Arcadian
            feeling of sunshine bathing the landscape at his back.” 

In order to respond to what Hammond has stated in the above excerpt, I want to discuss a film of an entirely different nature. Through avant-garde filmmaking, the American photographer Paul Strand further developed his ability to construct sequences out of heterogeneous material. The tension between romanticism and modernism is apparent in his 1921 film “Manhatta”, directed with Charles Sheeler. As Jan-Christopher Horak writes,

“Manhatta merely approaches closure, implying a narrative that allows for the subject’s inscription in the film’s final transcendental image. This harmonious subtext is mitigated by and in conflict with the film’s overall modernist design, its oblique and disorienting camera angles, its monolithic perspectives of urban architecture, and its dynamic juxtaposition of movement, light, and shadow. Manhatta is thus very much a heterogenous text, both modernist and anti-modernist, its conflicting discourses never quite resolving themselves, as indeed they are never resolved within the discourse of twentieth-century American art.” 

The ambiguity and the contradictions that Horak sees in Manhatta can also be seen in The Night of the Hunter. Perhaps not the specific type of tension (between romanticism and modernism) but there are others, such as the telling of a supremely dark, violent story through a child protagonist, as well as somewhat strict narrative structures, and the classical cutting they are given, that surrender to unsettlingly beautiful departures, as in the shot of Willa, murdered, anchored by rope yet dreamily suspended beneath the river. I do not think that The Night of the Hunter “relies” on either empathy or distanciation, as stated by Paul Hammond, who also suggests that the distanciation in the film occurs through a mixture of contrasting, and sometimes conflicting, cinematic styles. Rather, I think the heteregeneity (or contrast of styles) strengthens the film to the extent that it is possible for the audience to slip into John’s soul, as he faces the monumental failures and betrayals of the adults around him, just as a Flannery O’Connor story would do – a very powerful phenomenon that I want to say is not fully explained by the term of empathy. It is worrying that the audience should fixate on one element over another, as was apparently the case with Manhatta, which was nearly relegated to cinema-historical amnesia due to critics who managed only to appreciate one-half of the dichotomy as opposed to the rich meaning of the dichotomy itself. All that was oblique and fragmented in Manhatta naturally supported the anti-modernist reading, but the extreme angles, collapsed space, and static compositions also did their clever job of allowing the Whitmanesque themes to emerge with exceptional beauty. A complex work of art is more than an ideological project, a swift alignment of aesthetic design and emotion; a spirit is manifested. The Night of the Hunter is one of the most gorgeous films I have ever seen, and I will have more to say about it in time.

 Robert Mitchum as Preacher Powell, who charms the neighbors 

but puts a blade to a child's neck and is terrifyingly remorseless.