When Robert Mitchum was very, very bad, he was very, very good

The Night of the Hunter (92 mins, 12) Directed by Charles Laughton; starring Robert Mitchum, Lillian Gish, Shelley Winters

Perhaps it was too original and out of touch with the spirit of the time. Maybe moviegoers didn’t like the idea of Robert Mitchum as a serial killer. Whatever, The Night of the Hunter was a critical and box-office failure in 1955.

Based on Davis Grubb’s novel, it’s set in the Midwest at the depth of the Depression. A father goes to the gallows for murder, leaving the money he’s stolen in his daughter’s doll, swearing her brother to secrecy. An ogre in the form of a mad preacher is after the loot and takes over as the children’s father, but they flee and take refuge with a kind, elderly woman. Mitchum the priest is pure evil, Gish the woman is the incarnation of goodness.

The only film directed by Laughton, superbly photographed by Stanley Cortez, it is full of unforgettable images: Mitchum’s hands with LOVE and HATE tattooed on the fingers; the impotent, guilt-ridden preacher’s switchblade cutting through the side of his pocket like a lethal erection as he watches a burlesque dancer; the submerged car with Winters’ corpse lashed to the front seat, her hair streaming out like the drowned Ophelia; the silhouette of Mitchum riding along the horizon singing a hymn.

In 1955, the usually perceptive Dilys Powell wrote that ‘the preacher should have been played not by Robert Mitchum but by Charles Laughton’. Posterity has endorsed the risk Laughton took. It is arguably Mitchum’s greatest performance.