Once Is Enough

Our theme this week
Actors who have directed one film only

Featured this week (theme introduction)
Monday         —   Marlon Brando:  One-Eyed Jacks (1961)
Tuesday         —   Gary Oldman:  Nil by Mouth (1997)
Wednesday    —   Morgan Freeman:  Bopha! (1993)
Thursday        —   Frank Sinatra:  None But the Brave (1965)

Charles Laughton:  The Night of the Hunter (1955)

And the good Lord went on to say, Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.  Ye shall know them by their fruits….  A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit.  Neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit.  Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.

The Night of the Hunter may be one of the most deeply religious films ever to come out of Hollywood.  It is transcendent at times, and at other times, subversive.  Hymns are sung, scripture is read, a number of characters go on about what the good Lord wants, about the nature of good and evil, and the star of the movie plays a preacher.  But the world of the overtly religious is a corrupt world, and the adults in the picture (with one notable exception) are either corrupt themselves or too gullible to know the difference.  At the heart of the story is a tale of young innocents, children who want no part of world of good versus evil, but only seek haven where it’s safe to be innocent again.

The setting is rural West Virginia during the Depression.  The heroes are a brother and sister, John and Pearl Harper, who lose one parent and then the other, but in the end “abide.”  The villain is Harry Powell, a serial killer wearing the sheep’s clothing of a preacher, who travels from town to town preying on poor widows, taking their money and leaving them dead.  Powell comes looking for the Harper children, hoping to get his hands on $10,000 hidden by their late father, a bank robber that Powell met in the state pen.  Powell befriends the mother, and soon marries her.  When she becomes an obstacle he disposes of her body at the bottom of the river.  The children flee Powell, who chases them downriver.  Eventually they are taken in by Mrs. Cooper, a Bible-quoting, gun-toting older lady who gives them a home.  She protects them from Powell when he arrives, and from the vengeful town mob after Powell is put on trial.

The story moves briskly, taking an economical 93 minutes, but it never rushes.  It takes time to observe its characters, even those on the periphery, in moments of anguish and desperation or tranquility and quiet.  Even the animals get their close-up—an owl in a tree, a frog on a riverbank, two rabbits watching a boat pass by.  (“It’s a hard world for little things,” says Mrs. Cooper, the only one watching out for them.)  The images are unforgettable.  In one shot we see a drop of milk fall from a cow’s teat as John and Pearl climb a ladder to a hayloft in search of a place to sleep for the night.  A sequence with the moon moving across the night sky is simple and beautiful, as is the silhouette of the preacher riding a horse along the ridge.  The waters swirling in the river, the sun bursting through clouds, a tree standing on a hill—the photography throughout the film is stunning, and stirring.

Charles Laughton was one of the most talented and acclaimed actors of his time.  By the mid-1950s, his performing career on the wane, he hoped to move into directing.  The Night of the Hunter was his debut behind the camera.  The reaction at the time was less than favorable—reviews were lukewarm, and the film lost money—and Laughton never directed again.  (He and producer Paul Gregory were set to make The Naked and the Dead next, based on Laughton’s screenplay adaptation of Norman Mailer’s novel, but Laughton dropped out, his health one factor.)

The prevailing view now is far different than it was then.  The Night of the Hunter is considered a classic, Laughton’s masterpiece.  In the past couple of years, critics’ groups have ranked it among the top films of all time.  The French journal Cahiers du Cinéma named it the second-most beautiful film ever in a 2008 poll, and last year the British magazine The Spectator voted it the number-one movie in the history of cinema!

I’ve seen The Night of the Hunter perhaps a half-dozen times, and I’d say it looks better and better after each viewing.  It’s a very rich film.  Its various layers and considerable craft always have more to reveal, and it deserves its status as one of the great achievements of twentieth-century filmmaking.

A few things that set it apart:  The directing, of course.  Laughton apparently watched many silents, especially those of D.W. Griffith, in preparing for the film, and based on the final production he seems adept with a range of styles, including expressionism and film noir.  The success of the film owes much to the writing.  The novel by Davis Grubb was adapted by the extraordinary James Agee (Pulitzer-winning novelist, essayist, poet, and probably the most influential film critic in history), writing his second landmark screenplay of the ’50s (The African Queen was a few years earlier).  The cast was led by Robert Mitchum, perhaps his greatest performance (which is saying a lot), in a chilling portrait of a preacher gone bad.  The children, Billy Chapin and Sally Jane Bruce, were quite effective, and Shelley Winters, as the mother, was at the peak of her career.  Laughton, perhaps in a nod to Griffith, cast one of the earlier director’s famed leading ladies, Lillian Gish, who gave a warm and wonderful performance as Mrs. Cooper, the lady who gave a home to the children and much soul to the film.

In the “good news” department:  You’ll notice the Criterion logo on the artwork above.  The Criterion release (DVD and Blu-ray), with a fine-looking lineup of must-have features, is due in November.

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Oscar Déjà Vu

Our theme this week (theme introduction)
Film titles with two Oscar nominations for Best Picture

Featured this week
Monday         —   Moulin Rouge (1952, 2001)
Tuesday         —   Cleopatra (1934, 1963)
Wednesday    —   Heaven Can Wait (1943, 1978)
Thursday        —   Romeo and Juliet (1936, 1968)

Mutiny on the Bounty (1935, 1962)

Mutiny on the Bounty (1935)
Director:  Frank Lloyd
Writers:  Talbot Jennings, Jules Furthman, Carey Wilson; based on the novel by Charles Nordhoff, James Norman Hall
Cast:  Charles Laughton (William Bligh), Clark Gable (Fletcher Christian), Franchot Tone (Roger Byam), Movita (Tehani), Mamo Clark (Maimiti)
Oscar Summary:  8 nominations, including Picture, Director, Actor (Laughton, Gable, Tone), Adapted Screenplay; 1 win (Picture)

Mutiny on the Bounty (1962)
Director:  Lewis Milestone (replacing Carol Reed, uncredited)
Writer:  Charles Lederer; based on the novel by Charles Nordhoff, James Norman Hall
Cast:  Marlon Brando (Fletcher Christian), Trevor Howard (William Bligh), Richard Harris (John Mills), Tarita (Maimiti)
Oscar Summary:  7 nominations, including Picture; no wins

The essentials
The math says 1962 is much closer to 1935 (27 years) than to 2010 (48 years), but the look of the later production feels closer to something from our era of moviemaking than it does to the earlier film.  In part that’s a result of the widescreen color photography, the spare-no-expense budget, and the three-hour length.  But the performances also make a difference, with a cast led by Marlon Brando offering a more naturalistic, less hammy, rendering of the story.  That’s not to say the newer version is a better film; I rather enjoyed 1935 film.  (These days, we’re not likely to see another Mutiny on the Bounty made.  Now, they’d change the ship to a spaceship and those nature-loving Tahitians to the Na’vi; they wouldn’t film it in Panavision, but 3-D, and they’d shorten the title too.  Avatar fans may want to note, for the record, the ship sent a year later to search for the missing Bounty was the HMS Pandora.) 

The 1962 film took more liberties with the truth, though both films were based on the 1932 book Mutiny on the Bounty, which itself is a historical novel, not a history, of the real-life mutiny that took place in 1789.  William Bligh was the commanding officer of the Bounty during its fateful voyage of the South Pacific.  After a stop in Tahiti, a group led by Fletcher Christian took command in a bloodless mutiny, sending Bligh out to sea in a small boat with a few of his loyalists.  Bligh lived to return to England.  The mutineers settled in Tahiti and Pitcairn Island, where some of their descendents live today.  The mutiny, and the cruelty of Bligh toward his crew that led to it, is the stuff of legend.  The tale’s been told in poetry and prose (among the storytellers:  Lord Byron, Mark Twain, and Jules Verne), and at least half a dozen films. 

Beyond the final credits
Of the ten Best Picture nominees featured this week, the 1935 release of Mutiny of the Bounty was the only one to win the prize.  The film was the first ever to have three acting nominations, and the only one to have three nominations for Best Actor—Laughton, a great actor here chewing the scenery, Gable, minus his mustache, and Tone, as the true hero of the story.

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