The Night of the Hunter (1955, dir. Charles Laughton)
I imagine there are more people familiar with the filmic tropes that this movie spawned than the film itself. I used to be one of those people. Cape Fear (the 1991 version) and Do the Right Thing both borrowed key elements from Night of the Hunter, most notably, the tattooed knuckles.
Robert Mitchum, in perhaps his most memorable performance, plays Reverend Harry Powell, a serial killer who learns of his cellmate’s hidden bank robbery loot. Powell stops at nothing to find the money, and in so doing, turns out to be one of the scariest characters on screen I’ve ever seen. Powell’s cellmate, the bankrobber, secured his money with his son, who becomes Powell’s target after Powell marries, then kills his widowed mother.
The film is a shadowy gothic-noir, which may not have started the now-cliché image of the evil reverend, but it certainly perfected it. When Powell sings, “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms,” and cooing, “Chiiiild-reeeen….chiiiiiild-reeeeen,” every hair stands up on your arms, the back of your neck, and any other place follicles might have sprung. There are other performers and performances in this film, but compared to Mitchum’s, they all pale in comparison. I was so impressed with The Night of the Hunter, that it quickly became one of my favorite films. It haunts me.
Its legacy continues. Not only did the above-mentioned films take cues from it, with Cape Fear putting much of Harry Powell into De Niro’s Max Cady, but other films did as well. The Rocky Horror Picture Show and the Blues Brothers also nicked the knuckles. If you don’t know, Powell has the words ‘Love’ and ‘Hate’ on his knuckles. He even has a creepy little story to go with the tattoos. The same story is told, in a modern fashion, by Radio Raheem in Do the Right Thing. My favorite homage is done in The Simpsons, as Sideshow Bob, like all Simpsons characters having only four fingers, displays the Powell-esque tattoos, ‘LUV’ and ‘HAT.’
Even the last few lines are pure gothic poetry, “Children are man at his strongest. They abide. They abide and endure,” mirroring the end of William Faulkner’s greatest novel, The Sound and the Fury. This film will definitely endure in my memory.
Seven Samurai (1954, dir. Akira Kurosawa)
Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai is another film that sent ripples of influence throughout the movie universe, and is one of the earlier instances of the American remake machine. I have yet to see a Kurosawa film I haven’t liked. Seven Samurai isn’t necessarily my favorite, but it’s up there. It’s on the long side at three and a half hours, but entertaining and cinematically stunning throughout. If that isn’t enough, you get a heavy peppering of the acting of legend Toshiro Mifune, playing Kickochiyu, maybe not a true samurai in birth, nobility and manner, but assuredly in heart.
It’s no surprise that Seven Samurai was made into an American Western years later. Kurosawa built this film like a western. Or, maybe it’s just that his samurai films and oaters have enough in common to seem identical. In Seven Samurai, a small village is regularly beset by bandits. They are driven to the point of desperation, their wise elder telling them to seek hungry samurai to help them in their plight. The search leads them to eventually gather up, you guessed it, seven samurai, all with different temperaments and skills. They, in turn, help fortify the village, and train the villagers in the art of self-defense.
The film has memorable scenes throughout, including an early one with a daring off-screen hostage rescue. There’s even a romantic subplot, with eager young acolyte Katsushiro and Shino, a young daughter dressed up by her father as a boy to avoid being ravaged by the oncoming bandits, or even the samurai, in an ironic show of mistrust for their would-be saviors. The film has been remade several times, yet none live up to the artistry of the original. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that it’s going to be remade yet again, as apparently Americans can’t sit through over three hours of film unless it has Leo DiCaprio on a boat. And we all know Americans don’t like to read, so movies with subtitles are certainly out. So, what do you do? You release it in 2011 with George Clooney. I’m not kidding.
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