"Never work with children, animals or Charles Laughton," Alfred Hitchcock once advised, making The Night Of The Hunter, which is bountiful in all three, a no-go area for the Master. But that tongue-in-cheek Hitch advice aside, the standing of Laughton's rural noir continues to grow with every passing year. It's been restored ready for a re-release early in the new year, a perfect opportunity to catch it on the big screen, and has a beautiful new quad poster to help get the word out. If you haven't seen it, Laughton's 1955 thriller married traditional Hollywood filmmaking values with a more jarring German expressionist style to create a Grimm-like fairy tale of two wee'uns and a crazed preacher with sinister hand tattoos and a surprisingly loose adherence to the Ten Commandments.
Robert Mitchum's preacher, Reverend Harry Powell, is a villain for the ages. He's heard about a stash of stolen money from his soon-to-be-executed cellmate and believes the man's young son John (Billy Chapin) and his little sister Pearl (Sally Jane Bruce) know its location. And, as Lillian Gish's character points out, "It's a hard world for little things."
Shelley Winters, as the kids' naif-like mother, and silent era star Gish, as the more guileful older lady under whose protection the children fall, round out a masterful cast, all captured in a noirish nightmare by Stanley Cortez's near-perfect lighting. As you can see from the original poster, distributor Park Circus has done an even better job of capturing the film's sinister stillness with their new effort.
{Original Night Of The Hunter Poster} Catch **The Night Of The Hunter **in selected cinemas from January 17, 2014.