The Night of the Hunter . Davis Grubb's
tense 1954 novel about an itinerant psychopathic preacher is a natural
for cinemelo-drama. Directed by Actor Charles Laughton, it is a
garish, unbelievable but fairly exciting nightmare. Robert Mitchum, the preacher, knows that somewhere around the small Ohio
River valley house of Widow Shelley Winters he will find a $10,000
cache. Numskull Shelley, who does not believe the money is there, falls
for Mitchum's hell fire because she thinks she will find a spark of
romance behind it all. But Preacher Mitchum, who thinks sex and painted
women are an abomination, really wants to get his switchblade knife on
Shelley's two small children, since they are the only ones who know
where the loot is hidden. Actress Winters is better than competent as the mother, and Actor
Mitchum is more credible as a murderer than as a Bible-spouting phony.
As a whole, Director Laughton's Night is a self-conscious experiment in
production, filled with stylized lighting and acting, off-beat music
and tricky camera angles. The Night Holds Terror may well cut the ground from under the
Broadway hit, The Desperate Hours, already bought and filmed by
Paramount and scheduled for December release. Like the Broadway play,
The Night Holds Terror tells of a family held captive by three gunmen
who move into their home and take arrogant possession of their lives,
money and possessions. Shot in 18 days on a low budget , Night
was produced, directed, written and edited by the husband and wife team
of Andrew and Virginia Stone. None of the cast has a Hollywood “name”;
most of them came from TV. What emerges is a surprisingly good movie. Aircraft Worker Jack Kelly
stops to pick up a hitchhiker and the next moment is
looking into the business end of a pistol. Following orders, he turns
off on a side road where two other badmen join forces with the first.
Disgusted by the emptiness of Kelly's wallet, the leader, John
Cassavetes , wings a couple of shots past his head. The gang
then attempts to sell Kelly's car, and failing to get the money that
day, moves into his home to await developments. Learning that Kelly's
father is a wealthy man, they decide to add kidnaping to their roster of crimes. When the gunmen depart with her husband, Hildy Parks at last summons the
courage to call the police, who agree to cooperate in silence. The
tension builds in the last reels through the device of showing the
mechanical difficulties of tracing a phone call. The fate of the
trapped man oddly becomes less important than the technical riddles
that must be solved in determining from what exchange, and in precisely
what sequence of numerals, the kidnaper is phoning his instructions.
The film ends in the customary blaze of guns, and Kelly is happily
reunited with his family. But the film's considerable effect, like that
of Dragnet, is built up largely from the detailed, absorbing
explanation of the routines, not in this case of police work, but of a
telephone-communications center. House of Bamboo is a well-made cops-and-robbers story
filmed in Tokyo. Enhanced by the petal-like beauty of the scenery, the
story al most makes crime seem worth a try.
