“The Night of the Hunter”, the black tale of filmmaker Charles Laughton

2023-08-06 19:00:06
Robert Mitchum in “The Night of the Hunter” (1955), by Charles Laughton. SIPA

Even today, the mystery remains whole around The hunter’s night (1955). How could a rookie director like Charles Laughton, then 55 years old, manage to sign this eternal tale on the first try, the odyssey of two children chased by a white-collared ogre in North America? Great Depression, acrobatic synthesis of pure terror and infinite mercy? Sanctioned on its release by a bitter failure, the film has risen over time to the rank of myth, champion of the cinephile pantheons.

A first attempt without a future since its author, known to the public as an actor, will never go back behind a camera. From this deeply original work, several scenes have since infiltrated popular culture, such as an unforgettable Robert Mitchum in the skin of a bloodthirsty pastor, miming in front of a dumbfounded assembly the fight between good and evil with his fists with tattooed knuckles. « Love » et « Hate » (“love” and “hate”).

The origin of this cult film dates back to November 1949, when Paul Gregory, a young actor turned agent, leaving a New York restaurant, came across a television show, the “Ed Sullivan Show”, where Charles Laughton was reading extracts from the Bible. Born British in 1899 into a family of hoteliers, naturalized American in 1950, the latter did not embrace the vocation of actor until he was 25 years old, but quickly found success with his chiseled acting and his atypical physique: round and lippue, protruding ears and stocky figure – a cherub pushed into an adult body.

Carnival incarnations

During the prosperous decade of the 1930s, he shuttled between England and the United States, multiplying the roles of disturbed characters: mad scientist in The Island of Doctor Moreau (Erle C. Kenton, 1932), tyrannical captain in Mutiny on the Bounty (Frank Lloyd, 1935), ogresque monarch in The Private Life of Henry VIII (Alexander Korda, 1933), servant stuck in L’Extravagant Mr Ruggles (Leo McCarey, 1935) and hunchback of Notre-Dame in Quasimodo (William Dieterle, 1939). A crowd of carnivalesque incarnations, which registered Laughton in a line of monstrous and tortured actors, following Lon Chaney.

Read the story (2009): Lon Chaney, the man with a hundred faces

Since the war in the mid-1940s, Laughton hit the bottom of the wave: the roles becoming rarer and more secondary, a withdrawal on the boards is essential. Paul Gregory, a specialist in recuperating stars on the decline, took him under his wing in early 1950 and launched him on a major reading tour across the United States, which proved to be very lucrative. Laughton, an outstanding storyteller, goes up the slope, until making the cover of Time in March 1952. To keep him active, Gregory encouraged him to stage, first plays, knowing that his colt had worked with Bertolt Brecht in 1947 on The Life of Galileo, and, soon, a film project, based on a first novel whose proofs the impresario had obtained, signed by a complete stranger, David Grubb, and promised to be a great success in bookstores.

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