cult film freak: ROBERT MITCHUM SPIRALS THROUGH 'THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER'

Title: THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER Year: 1955 Rating: **

The summary promises that Robert Mitchum plays a con-artist with a background of swindling women, specifically widows, and that he's also a self-professed preacher in THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER...

Since that first type of villain is always sneakily two-faced and entertainingly unpredictable, when we catch a glimpse of Mitchum's convict Harry Powell talking to himself about how only God can set him free, any mystery's quickly lifted — we're experiencing a genuinely pathetic sociopath whose supposed charm is limited to how he'll broadly carry himself throughout an excruciatingly long 90-minutes...

Robert Mitchum in THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER

That looks beautifully stylized in a dream-like B&W hybrid of film noir and gothic horror... with a storybook-surreal feeling had Tennessee Williams adapted the lost rural youth of Mark Twain...

As our true main characters are the monotone children of Shelley Winters, abandoned by who was Mitchum's cellmate... where he got the expository lowdown on the usual hidden bundle of life-altering bank-robbery cash...

From THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER

A crime-potboiler plotline quickly derailed by conveniently becoming the unbearable husband of a wispy wife he refuses to sleep with, and children he winds up chasing across a Huck Finn style river...

Including lovely moonlit shots where first-time director (and legendary actor) Charles Laughton narrows all his creative and artistic energies, deliberately preferring aesthetic over intensity, another way of saying style over substance: which THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER epitomizes...

Shelley Winters and Robert Mitchum in THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER

Providing Robert Mitchum a literally preachy/monologue-spouting psychopath that, finally free of his ten year RKO contact as sleepy-eyed anti-heroes, somehow feels both spontaneous and contained...

In what's more a symbolic fable/presentation than the edgy psychological thriller the anticipating audience, the vulnerable children (including a band of 11th hour orphans raised by 11th hour heroine Lilian Gish), and that otherwise underrated actor Robert Mitchum truly deserved...

Robert Mitchum in THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER

At least the dependably slow-burn HIS KIND OF WOMEN character was an actual human being instead of an overboard cinematic caricature...

And Robert Mitchum's always better (and far more believable) at simply being natural, no matter who (the good guy or the bad) he's portraying on screen.