These notes on Charles Laughton's masterpiece, The Night of the Hunter (1955), were written by UW student and WUD Film programmer Vincent Mollica. A 35mm print of The Night of the Hunter, from the UCLA Film and Television Archive, will be the first screening in the Cinematheque's "One and Done" series on Saturday, April 9 at 7 p.m., in the Cinematheque's regular venue, 4070 Vilas Hall.

By Vincent Mollica

If I were to choose a single film to introduce someone, of any age, to classic cinema, it would be The Night of the Hunter, a southern gothic-thriller whose great stylishness and emotional depth make it endlessly watchable. Director Charles Laughton was known primarily as an actor, both on stage and on screen, working with many of the most famous filmmakers of the 1930s-1960s such as Alfred Hitchcock, Leo McCarey and Billy Wilder. In the early 1950s Laughton worked with producer Paul Gregory on a bible reading tour as well as theater directing work, before Gregory helped Laughton direct his first and only Hollywood film.

Set in the midst of the Depression, The Night of the Hunter is about a young boy, John, and his younger sister, Pearl, whose father is sent to death row after a bank heist gone wrong. John’s final moment with his father is right before the police whisk him away, in front of their West Virginia home, as he entrusts John with hiding his stolen booty. In prison John’s father meets Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum), a woman-murdering psychopath in preacher’s clothing. Upon learning of his hidden prize, Powell leaves prison to ingratiate himself in John and Pearl’s lives by taking advantage of their lonely mother (Shelly Winters). The film becomes a mind game between Powell and the ever vigilant John who wants nothing more than to protect his father’s honor.

To his great credit, Laughton didn’t squander his time in the director’s chair by making an anonymous actors picture. He thrills his audience by creating a rich, unique, visual world for John and Pearl to get lost in, as laid out in the invaluable featurette, “The Making of the Night of the Hunter” on the Criterion Collection Blu-ray/DVD release. In it author Preston Neal Jones explains that Laughton made the film to return viewers to the era of silent film where he felt they engaged with films on a more active level. Jones and academic Jeffrey Couchman show how the filmmakers set out to create the film’s world from a child’s point of view. They applied stripped down sets, mimicking what a child might notice, and formed expressionistic visuals and special effects to evoke the world of a nightmare (helped in great part by Stanley Cortez’s stark lighting). In skillfully using the medium of film as fully as any of the auteurs he worked under as an actor, Laughton made a film world that thrills and excites an audience in a timeless way.

Although there is clearly great technical skill on the screen, what has always had the most immediate effect on me as a viewer are the film’s performances. Most famous is Robert Mitchum as Harry Powell, whose high theatricality and flair, used to con and manipulate everyone he meets, is constantly on. The drive that Mitchum possesses is especially notable in the film’s final moments, after he has been arrested, and it is as if all the life has drained from his body, reducing him to a human rag doll. Perhaps more than any other one element of the film, there is nothing more reliably entertaining and engrossing than Mitchum’s mannered villainy. My favorite moment with Mitchum is a rare scene where I think we see past this persona. It’s the moment right before he kills Shelly Winters where, in an extravagant long shot, he tenderly reaches to the heavens while, as revealed in a later close up, his face ominously twitches. Benefitted by the shadow on his body and face, which allows us to partly fill in Powell’s emotion ourselves, it comes off as a much more private, genuinely religious, version of Powell.

The second listed adult lead is Lillian Gish, as Ms. Cooper, who protects the children from Powell in the film’s final act. Gish was a carryover from the silent cinema of D.W. Griffith, a director whose work had inspired Laughton and that he had studied in preparation for the film. She transforms her lines, many of which are meant to underline the film’s themes about survival and the durability of youth, from the potentially tacky into something weary and beautiful. However, it’s Billy Chapin that gets my favorite moment of the film. It comes at the very end as Chapin runs, crying, to the arrested, broken Powell, who he begs to just take the money, mirroring his final scene with his father. This scene’s unexpected complexity and sadness haunted me so much when I first saw the film at age 10, I felt the need to try to explain it to anyone who would listen.

Night of the Hunter’s initial commercial failure, which crushed the insecure Laughton, meant he was only allowed create such a rich vision once (his follow up would have been an adaptation of Norman Mailer's novel The Naked and the Dead), which gives an added tragic quality to the film. However, despite this failure The Night of the Hunter has rightfully risen higher and higher in the ranks of the canon of great American cinema over the intervening 60 years. It even spawned a few worthwhile pseudo-remakes: the subversive anti-Reagan slasher The Stepfather, David Gordon Green’s dreamy Undertow and of course Radio Raheem’s take on Mitchum’s Love and Hate speech in Do the Right Thing. Like many “great” pieces of cinema it’s maybe best to not overthink its myriad qualities, as touched on here, while watching the film, and rather let the film come back to you later, piecemeal, like a dream. Watch the film as Laughton intended it to be seen: On the edge of your seat, attention rapt. As if a child.

Due to a shipping problem, our screening of the new restored Il Brigante, part of our New Italian Restoration series, has been postponed. Originally scheduled to screen on Saturday, March 19 at 2 p.m., Il Brigante will now screen on Saturday, April 2, at 2 p.m. We apologize for any inconvenience.

This essay on Ingmar Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly (1961) was written by Harry Gilbert. A 35mm print of Through a Glass Darkly will screen in our Sunday Cinematheque at the Chazen: Ingmar Bergman in Black and White series on Sunday, February 28 at 2 p.m.

By Harry Gilbert

In the November 1960 issue of the Swedish film journal Chaplin, then unknown Frenchman Ernest Riffe inveighed against the films of Ingmar Bergman. Riffe declaimed that Bergman’s “deep misanthropy” and “lack of contact with his surroundings” foreclosed any possibility that his work might approximate “originality,” and that his continued filmmaking confirmed the poverty of his writing, for which he had “never [...] been well-regarded [...] in his homeland” and for which he “suffered under the contempt from his literary colleagues.”  Such allegations were not without intellectual or popular support. Indeed, that single issue of Chaplain contained three critiques of Bergman’s work from three preeminent Swedish film critics.

Moreover, the landscape in which films were produced and circulated, and the aesthetics of “European art cinema” were shifting.  In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Sweden witnessed a significant decline in cinema attendance, with the nation’s film production making up an increasingly small portion of the market. The appearance of television also offered new ways to distribute, aestheticize, and see the moving-image. Both of these transformations in modes of (re)production affected how—or, indeed, whether—Bergman was seen and how his work was received. Furthermore, the advent of French New Wave and Italian auteurs, some scholars have contended, crowded Bergman out of Swedish and European intellectual circles. This is a limited portrait of the environment which launched Through a Glass Darkly.

Up until that point, however, critiques had not taken Bergman to task for the inferiority of his writing or disparaged him personally—at least not to the degree Riffe had. Prior to the publication of the third issue of Chaplin, Bergman had revealed Riffe to be a personal pseudonym. Bergman recalled in a later interview: “I experienced a special freedom in collecting my innermost self-criticism (which, to some extent, matched the criticism directed at me from outside), verbalizing it, tricking it out to seem a bad Swedish translation from the French, and then opening Expressen to read: ‘This is the best statement about Ingmar Bergman in recent years.’”

Much has been made of Bergman’s thematic and artistic interests, and how these questions are uniquely bound to Bergman’s life: he is serious and deals with serious issues, he is interested in existential truths, he is of a bad temperament and difficult, etc.  To some degree, Bergman’s trick speaks to that. Less, I think, has been made of the way Bergman gets at these serious, difficult, existential truths through play and playfulness of varying kinds and of varying effects.

This idea of play can be understood in different ways. For one, Bergman was an active producer and consumer of different media—film, theatre, television, music, writing, etc.—and was interested in how various art forms might have resonances with and could speak through one another. Music and theatre were such forms. Married at the time to renowned concert pianist Käbi Laretei and intrigued by music more generally, Bergman noted in interviews before the release of Through a Glass Darkly that he was interested in structuring his films not as symphonies but in the chamber music format of Beethoven and Bartók. Indeed, Bergman’s initial choice (later renounced as a “decoy for eager journalists”) to compose Through a Glass Darkly as the first of a trilogy of films, including Winter Light and The Silence (both released in 1963), known as “God’s Silence” speaks to organizing music as a suite. 

Moreover, Bergman was interested in the intimacy of chamber music’s format. As opposed to a “sprawling” and “grandiose” symphony, chamber music brought attention to how a few instruments—like a few actors—could interact and produce tension with each other within a confined space—such as the isolated island of Fårö, a Baltic isle that would form the setting of many of Bergman’s films. 

The intimacy of space might have been on Bergman’s mind for a host of other reasons, all related to his interest in other media. Just four years prior, Bergman had made his directorial debut on television with Mr. Sleeman Is Coming and went on to direct three more television films before the release of Through a Glass Darkly. In interviews, Bergman had admitted that “television was his new theater,” which brought new artistic, technical, and commercial freedoms and constraints. Among other things, this new context prompted Bergman to work exclusively with director of photography and “sculptor of light” Sven Nykvist over the next thirty years.

Bergman's merging of cinema, theater and chamber music allowed for an exposition of interior lives and an intimate look at the tense, textured relationships between people. Perhaps no better example of this is Minus’s (Lars Passgård) intimate—chamber?—play, “The Artistic Haunting; or, The Funeral Vault of Illusions,” that crowns the first act of Through a Glass Darkly. The morality play quite literally stages the questions of the film: father David (Gunnar Björnstrand) watches on as Minus, playing the artist, becomes seduced by the Princess of Castile, played by his sister, Karin (Harriet Andersson); ultimately, the Artist cannot follow the Princess “into the realm of death” and, instead, chooses to “write a poem about my meeting with the princess. Or paint a picture, or compose an opera—though the end, of course, must be given a more heroic twist.” 

Artist desires woman but refrains in order to turn her and his experience into a commercial product, son desires (the position of the) father, brother desires sister, men are cold and distant, and play penetrates film.

Bibliography

Bjorkman, Stig, Torsten Manns, and Jones Sima.  Bergman on Bergman: Interviews with Ingmar Bergman.  Trans. Paul Britten.  Cambridge: De Capo Press, 1993.

Gado, Frank.  The Passion of Ingmar Bergman.  Durham: Duke University Press, 1986.

Koskinen, Maaret.  Ingmar Bergman Revisited: Performance, Cinema and the Arts.  London: Wallflower Press, 2008.

Mandelbaum, Jacques.  Masters of Cinema: Ingmar Bergman.  Paris: Cahiers du Cinema Sarl, 2011.

This essay on Richard Attenborough's Oh! What a Lovely War was written by Cinematheque Programmer Amanda McQueen. The conclusion of our Musicals of 1969 series, Oh! What a Lovely War will screen on Friday, February 12, at 7 p.m. in the Cinematheque's main venue, 4070 Vilas Hall.

By Amanda McQueen

Fabulous, shrewd, mocking, emotional, witty, technically brilliant: these are just some of the adjectives Variety used to describe Oh! What a Lovely War. But Variety also anticipated that this musical recounting the events of World War I could be a hard sell. Indeed, as director Richard Attenborough explained, it was a “courageous move” by Paramount to fund the film in the first place; it was anti-war, it was exceedingly British in subject and tone, and its style was unorthodox. But what it lacked in commercial potential, it made up for in artistic promise. Hailed as a “masterpiece,” Lovely War is a moving and beautiful example of the unusual approach to film musical production that makes the late-1960s such a fascinating period of the genre’s history.

Lovely War began in 1962 as The Long Long Trail, a BBC radio play that critiqued WWI through a combination of facts, reminiscences, and contemporary popular songs—including the soldiers’ alternate versions of those songs, written in the trenches and recorded in the 1917 collection Tommy's Tunes (e.g. “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” became “When This Lousy War is Over”). The broadcast was adapted for the stage in March 1963 by Joan Littlewood, director of the alternative Theatre Workshop in London's East End. Littlewood presented Oh, What a Lovely War! as a commedia dell'arte-style revue, in which actors, dressed in Pierrot costumes, improvised against a backdrop of period photographs and a neon ticker-tape running statistics. In June—despite objections from the family of Field-Marshal Sir Douglas Haig—the musical transferred to the West End, where it enjoyed a long and celebrated run. Lovely War made the jump to Broadway in September, but despite four Tony nominations, it closed in January 1965 at a financial loss. Variety surmised that Broadway’s audience was “too old, too passive, and too frivolity-minded” to appreciate Littlewood's endeavor.

Two years later, John Mills brought his friend and fellow actor Richard Attenborough a screenplay for a film version of Lovely War, insisting that he direct it. Attenborough had long been considering moving into directing, but, following David Lean's advice that “the time to direct is when you feel that if you don’t direct that particular film, you’ll die,” he’d been hesitating. But Attenborough had a penchant for socially-conscious projects, and he’d seen Lovely War multiple times on stage, so he accepted Mills’ proposal.

To secure funding for the challenging project, Attenborough went directly to Charles Bludhorn, head of Paramount’s parent company, Gulf+Western, who was thought to be just nuts enough to say yes. As part of his pitch, Attenborough promised to fill a significant portion of Lovely War’s 120 speaking parts with top British actors. Bludhorn agreed: if Attenborough could supply the marquee names—chief among them Sir Laurence Olivier—Paramount would supply the money. Thanks to Attenborough’s personal connections and Lovely War’s strong reputation, the director more than delivered, and a veritable Who’s Who of British stars agreed to take small, featured roles for minimal pay. Mills, in return for initiating the project, was cast as Haig. With Paramount on board, Attenborough partnered with producer Brian Duffy and writer Len Deighton (Duffy and Deighton had purchased the film rights from Littlewood) to co-produce under the newly-formed Accord Productions.

Deighton also worked on Lovely War’s screenplay. Interestingly, though, while Variety claims Deighton as the sole author, Attenborough attributes the script to both Deighton and John Mills. Furthermore, early in 1969, for reasons that are slightly unclear, Deighton quit the film and asked that his name be removed. Nevertheless, it does seem to have been Deighton who was chiefly responsible for reshaping Littlewood’s play for the screen. He replaced the Pierrot concept with that of a seaside arcade; he created the Smiths—an archetypal British family, played by unknown actors—to provide a narrative through-line; and he turned the stage musical’s M.C. character into The Photographer (Joe Melia), who provides commentary and records the events of the war. Other conceits of the play—such as tallying deaths on a cricket scoreboard—were retained.

Principal photography began in March 1968 at Brighton Pier and the surrounding area, where the entire film was shot over a period of fourteen weeks. After shooting wrapped in September, Attenborough went to Twickenham Studios, London, to assist with editing. Going only slightly over budget, Lovely War came in around $3 million—a tiny sum compared to other late-1960s musicals. It was released in the UK in April 1969, and opened in America that October, immediately following its showing at the New York Film Festival.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Lovely War was only a modest commercial success; it was, however, a critical favorite. Judith Crist called it not only “the best film of 1969 but an outstanding film for all time.” Roger Ebert called it “breathtaking.” It won 6 BAFTAs and the Golden Globe for Best English Language Foreign Film. The acting and the technical credits were all deservedly applauded, and the film’s final shot—16,000 white wooden crosses in a field—was universally singled out for its emotional impact. The bulk of the praise, however, went to Attenborough and his skillful blending—in Crist’s words—of “theatrical fantasy with the realism that the camera demands and creates.” Indeed, Lovely War transitions fluidly—sometimes through editing, sometimes through camera movement—from the cheerful artificiality of Brighton Pier to the devastating reality of war. It layers the symbolic over the realistic: men lie in the muddy trenches, not blown to bits, but clutching poppies. And woven throughout are dozens of optimistic, bawdy, cynical, and tragic songs, sometimes presented as lavish production numbers and sometimes presented starkly a capella.

In the late-1960s, Hollywood seemed particularly willing to gamble on artistically adventurous film musical productions. Oh! What a Lovely War proves that those gambles could pay off. Born of experimental theater and shaped by a deft and daring cinematic hand, Lovely War is nothing if not unique. It is a challenging musical—history, politics, and Britain’s class hierarchies are key to its arguments—but it is also visually striking, emotionally rich, and truly unforgettable.