The Night of the Hunter (12)

A film without precedent or equal, this creepy curio incorporates elements of horror, film noir, thriller and fairy tale with a performance by Mitchum that's easy, charming, infinitely sinister

Director: Charles Laughton
Starring: Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters, Lillian Gish
USA, 1955, 1 hour 32 minutes

Mon 8 March 2.00pm The Courtyard Hereford

The only film Charles Laughton directed is one of the masterpieces of American cinema. It's the story of two innocent young children threatened by an ex-con preacher who comes searching for the loot their father left. Told in memorable monochrome imagery with a fairy tale-like simplicity and clarity of execution, it welds a Gothic Deep South and German expressionism into a biblical parable on the triumph of good over evil. Genuinely scary, Mitchum surpasses himself as the charming embodiment of evil while the crisp new print means Laughton's interplay between light and dark, shadow and silhouettes, crooked angles and perfect symmetries looks more luminous than ever.