'Night of the Hunter' takes risks modern thrillers don't

The iconic 1955 noir thriller The Night of the Hunter is certainly dated in some key ways (its score for instance, occasionally lapses into pure cheese), but in other more significant ways, its macabre plot is light years more adventurous than many modern genre movies.

For instance, it not only casts then-heartthrob actor Robert Mitchum (one of my favorites from Hollywood's golden age) as an unhinged psychopath, but it has him moonlighting as a rabble-rousing preacher (complete with striking 'love' and 'hate' tattoos on his hands). In a key early scene we see that Mitchum's character is both drawn to and infuriated by sexual permissiveness (he quakes with anger while viewing a striptease that he paid to see).

By making the antagonist's madness motivated by a kind of religious zealotry gone haywire, The Night of the Hunter, whether intentionally or not (and I suspect it was intended this way) casts suspicions on the wisdom of reactionary evangelicalism and makes a political statement about persuasive demagogues too.

Curiously, modern movies almost never touch religion with a ten-foot pole. The only exceptions are souped up Biblical epics (which really are more about elaborate action scenes than scripture) or the more stealthy Purpose Driven Life-esque screeds couched as middle-of-the-road drama in pablum like Miracles from Heaven.

Every once in a while a movie like Silence deals seriously with faith, but those films can almost feel more like a term paper than entertainment. They are movies you admire, but don't necessarily enjoy.

The Night of the Hunter never runs the risk of feeling like a religious parable, because its corker of a plot keeps you too amused. The heroes of the movie are a couple of young country kids whose father has been executed for a robbery gone wrong.

Mitchum knows that the loot from that crime is still at large, and he ominously and systematically moves in on the dead man's family, marrying his widow and insidiously making veiled threats (that eventually become not so veiled) towards the kids.

That a movie from 1955 has the audacity to 'go there' on issues of child abuse and matricide is still shocking, but the fact that it is also underscored by a kind of faith-based extremism is downright riveting.

There's a particularly disturbing scene where Mitchum forces his new wife (played by a vulnerable Shelley Winters) to look at herself in the mirror while he dresses her down for having the audacity to lust after him. Of course, the audience knows that its Mitchum's sexual perversion that apparently motivates his desire to kill, but in a way his psychological manipulation is far more malevolent than any physical threat he poses.

As he begins to mold Winters into a kind of zombiefied Tammy Faye Baker on steroids, he also starts to go to work on the kids, using his natural charisma to play the two young children against each other in a twisted effort to learn the location of the missing money.

Modern audiences unaccustomed to the slightly more matter-of-fact rhythms of classic Hollywood movies might not find The Night of the Hunter particularly scary now. Certainly audiences back in 1955 didn't quite know what to make of it (especially with its oddly beautiful portrayal of a drowned corpse). But to me it remains a fascinating curiosity. Its director, celebrated character actor Charles Laughton, never made another film, and Mitchum largely struck to heroic films after this (although he made a mean Max Cady in the original Cape Fear).

Normally, I don't think films that are already great ought to be remade, but there is so much juicy material here that could be really vivid in an updated version that doesn't have to be neutered in any way by censorship. I'd love to see Ryan Gosling play against type in the Mitchum role.

You listening Hollywood?