THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER

Based on a little-known but weird and rather wonderful novel by Davis Grubb, Laughton’s film is one of the strangest and finest films to have come out of Hollywood in the 1950s. Set in small West Virginia towns on the Ohio River during the Great Depression, it tells of a murderous rogue preacher (Robert Mitchum) who learns of a fortune stolen from a bank by a man he encounters in prison. Upon his release, he sets out to seduce the hanged man’s widow, but he hasn’t reckoned on the resistance of her children, especially her son. So begins a battle – between, as the preacher’s tattooed knuckles would have it, love and hate – to the death…
(Geoff Andrew, BFI)