The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Charles Laughton · a film · 1955 · about 93 minutes · screenplay credited to James Agee, from the novel by Davis Grubb · Laughton’s only film as director
Mode
Thriller as fairy tale; American Gothic told in the silent cinema’s idiom of expressionist light and studio artifice
Mythos
The false prophet in sheep’s clothing; the ogre who hunts children by night; children cast adrift on the water and taken in; the hands of love and hate
Phase
Seven movements, from Rachel Cooper’s lesson among the stars through the household under the preacher, the flight down the river and the vigil at her farm, to the second arrest, a trial, a mob and Christmas
Presentation
Feature film in black and white, about 93 minutes, in one released version; Stanley Cortez’s photography, Walter Schumann’s score with the children’s songs and a hymn
Register
From terror to farce and back, from a murder under a pitched ceiling to a parlour’s gossip, from pastoral to a mob; the storybook as the frame for all of it
Scale
Two children, two houses, a river between them, and a town that hears Scripture and stops looking
Governing Proposition
A preacher who kills for money marries the wife of a hanged man to find the ten thousand dollars her husband hid, and her children run from him down the river to an old woman who will not be fooled. The wager of the film is that evil arrives speaking a community’s own language of piety and is welcomed for it, that the child who knows cannot be heard, and that a fable told as a child sees it, in the silent cinema’s language of light and artifice, can say what a realist thriller could not: that the burden of a secret kept for a father is released only when the arrest that took him is lived through again.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins in the sky. Rachel Cooper’s face appears over the night, and children’s heads are set among the stars around her while she gives them a lesson: beware of false prophets, who come in sheep’s clothing. Then the camera comes down out of the air onto children at play, and the children find a dead woman in a cellar. Before there is a story the film has said what kind of story it will be, a lesson told to children, and what is waiting under the house.
Lillian Gish plays Rachel, and her casting is itself a statement. She was the face of Griffith’s silent pastorals, and the film around her speaks their language: the iris, the silent close-up, light that carves a face out of black, sets that make no pretence of being places. Stanley Cortez photographed it in black and white, Walter Schumann wrote the score, Robert Golden cut it. The river it follows was built in the studio, and its skies are painted.
Charles Laughton directed it for Paul Gregory, and United Artists released it in 1955, about 93 minutes in its one version. The screenplay is credited to James Agee, from Davis Grubb’s novel of 1953; how much of the shooting script is Agee’s and how much Laughton’s is disputed, and the film is judged as released, whoever wrote it. It failed with critics and the public, and Laughton never directed again. The rushes and outtakes that survive from the shooting are a record of its making, not part of the film.
Movement II
Ben Harper, played by Peter Graves, comes home with stolen money, ten thousand dollars taken in a robbery for his children’s bread. He hides it in his daughter Pearl’s doll and binds his son John to the secret by an oath. Officers come across the yard and take him on the lawn while the children watch. John keeps his oath and says nothing. The arrest is framed, the officers closing in and the boy looking on, so that the film can make it again.
In prison Ben shares a cell with Harry Powell, played by Robert Mitchum, a preacher who kills for money. The cell is where the money gets into the killer’s head, and Ben takes the hiding place with him: he is hanged. The film has already shown what Powell’s piety covers: in a burlesque house his switchblade springs through his pocket. His knuckles are tattooed with two words, LOVE on one hand and HATE on the other.
Powell comes to the town and preaches the sermon of the two hands, love against hate, and the town loves him for it. The Spoons, who keep the ice-cream parlour, take him to their hearts, and Icey Spoon makes the match between the preacher and Ben’s widow, Willa, played by Shelley Winters. Only John looks at him and sees him. The adults hear Scripture and stop looking, and the boy who looks cannot be heard.
Movement III
On the wedding night Powell turns from his wife in loathing, and the loathing is the root of his religion. Willa is taken up into it, and at a revival the preacher has the congregation he needs. In the house he works on the children, and Pearl plays on the floor with paper dolls she has cut from her father’s banknotes. It is the most dangerous scene in the house, and nobody in it knows.
Willa is laid out on the bed in the bedroom under its pitched ceiling, lit like a chapel, and Powell stands over her with his arm raised. To the boy the marriage was a rite he could not interrupt, and the room is a church because he sees it so.
Willa is next seen in the Model T at the bottom of the river, her throat cut, her hair moving with the weed. The image is beautiful and dreadful at once. An old man, Uncle Birdie, played by James Gleason, finds her and does not tell; he drinks, and he cannot help, and the film says so twice. The town goes on hearing the preacher and not looking at him.
Movement IV
In the cellar the children are cornered, and the escape up the steep stairs is a nightmare and a farce at once: Powell lunges after them with his arms out and falls, and gets up, and comes again. The children reach the river and push off in the skiff. Powell reaches the water’s edge as it drifts free, and howls.
The river journey is the film’s storybook. The children drift by night past animals set huge in the foreground, a frog, a spider’s web, rabbits, a turtle, while the skiff passes small beyond them under a painted sky, and Pearl sings. This is how a child escaping sees the world, enormous and indifferent and full of watchers. They come ashore and sleep in a barn.
From the hayloft John sees a rider on the horizon, a silhouette from a picture book. He is still following. “Don’t he never sleep?” Downstream the children are taken in by Rachel Cooper, an old woman who keeps a farm full of gathered children, and who tells them the story of Moses, a child set adrift on the water and saved.
Movement V
Powell comes to Rachel’s farm, and she is not fooled. She keeps watch through the night in her rocker with a shotgun, and outside in the dark he sings his hymn. She takes up the words and sings them against him. The same hymn is sung by the hunter and the guardian, one in counterfeit and one in faith, and the duet is the film’s knowledge in one tune.
The night ends in the barn, and the officers close in on Powell in Rachel’s yard. The arrest is framed as Ben’s was, the same officers, the same boy watching, and this time John breaks. He beats the preacher with the doll, and the money spills out of it. The film’s whole argument is that second arrest: a secret kept for a father is a guilt only a second arrest can release, and this time the child can speak.
There is a trial, and a mob, and the mob is led by Icey Spoon, the woman who made the match: the credulity that welcomed the preacher now wants him hanged. The film ends at Christmas on Rachel’s farm, with her word that children endure. It is a consolation, and a little warmer than the cellar it closes over; but the film has shown what it set out to show, that piety heard and not looked at let an ogre into a house, and that only a child, and an old woman who listened like one, saw him for what he was.
Act III · The Twelve
Most of the film is required, and what is planted pays. The doll holds the money from the first reel to the last, and Pearl cutting paper dolls from the bills is the most dangerous scene in the house. Ben’s arrest on the lawn, with John watching, is required by Powell’s arrest in Rachel’s yard, where John breaks and beats him with the doll: the film’s whole argument is that second arrest. The cell scene puts the money in the killer’s head; Willa’s revival gives him a congregation. What gives: the Spoons’ parlour runs longer than its point, Uncle Birdie’s turn leads nowhere and the film says so twice, Ruby’s errands state one idea several times, and the mob is broad and quick.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: evil arrives speaking a community’s own language of piety, and the community welcomes it for that reason. The Spoons, the congregation and the widow hear Scripture and stop looking, and the same credulity becomes a mob when the truth is out, led by the woman who made the match. Under it lies a harder truth: the child who knows cannot be heard, and a secret kept for a father is a guilt only a second arrest can release. Powell’s sexual loathing is shown as the root of his religion. Held a tenth below the gate because the frame states its moral as fable more than it discloses it, and the closing sentiment softens the cellar.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The elevation is frequent and of several kinds, terror and wonder in turn. Willa laid out under the pitched ceiling of the bedroom, lit like a chapel, his arm raised. Willa in the car under the river, her hair moving with the weed, beautiful and dreadful at once. Powell lunging up the cellar stairs with his arms out, a nightmare that is also comic; his howl at the river’s edge as the skiff drifts free. The river journey, with frog, web, rabbits and turtle in the near ground and the children small beyond them under a painted sky, Pearl singing. The rider on the horizon. The vigil and the duet of the hymn. Held from the top only because the town scenes between are level.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The myth is built and carries the film. The false prophet in sheep’s clothing is warned against in the prologue and then enters; the hunter of children follows by night and appears on a horse at the edge of the world; the children are cast adrift on the water, as Moses was, and taken in by an old woman who tells them the story of Moses; the hands of love and hate are inscribed on a man’s knuckles and preached. The structure is a fairy tale’s: the mother lost, the flight, the wilderness, the shelter, the guardian who matches the ogre song for song. The particular stays particular: a river town in the Depression, ten thousand dollars, a doll, an apple. Held from the top because the prologue partly announces what the structure builds.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The inheritance is Griffith’s silent pastoral melodrama, recalled by casting Lillian Gish herself; German expressionism in light, set and shadow; the iris and the silent close-up; the American Gothic of the novel. The turns were real and large in 1955, when the American film was moving toward location realism and the social problem picture: a studio river and painted skies avowed as artifice, a thriller told as a children’s storybook, a killer who is a preacher, a hymn as both his weapon and her defence, a horror film whose heroine is an old woman. The stake was real: an actor’s first film as director, independently produced, which failed on release and ended his directing. Held below the top because the swerve is largely a recovery of the silent idiom rather than a new language.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows, which is how terror and safety look to a child. The stylisation is the instrument: the bedroom is a church because to the boy his mother’s marriage is a rite he cannot interrupt; the cellar steps are steep and endless; the river is a storybook landscape because a child escaping sees it so, enormous animals near and himself small. The rhyme of the two arrests is the form’s argument: the same framing, the same officers closing in, and the second time the child can speak. The duet is form as knowledge, faith answering its counterfeit in the same tune. Held from the top because the town scenes use a plainer studio grammar and the frame states what the form has shown.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Seventy-one years of return are evidence, most of it after the first twenty. The film has carried readings as religious fable, as an account of a child’s guilt and a father’s legacy, as a study of sexual repression turned to piety, as a picture of the Depression’s poor, and as a one-off whose authorship, among Laughton, Agee, Grubb and Cortez, stays argued. The release of Laughton’s rushes has opened the making to study. Questions stay open: whether Rachel’s closing faith is endorsed or framed, what John’s breakdown means, whether the comedy of Powell undercuts the terror or deepens it. Held at the figure because the readings converge on the fable’s pairings, and much of the writing is about its look.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Field: the cinema of the 1950s. The intrinsic force is high. The film showed that sound cinema could still speak the silent film’s language of image and artifice, that a thriller could be a fairy tale, and it set the preacher who kills as a figure in American culture. It did not reorganise its decade, which did not follow it, and it founded no school. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: a critical return that came late and is discounted for delay; the speech of love and hate taken by Spike Lee for Radio Raheem in Do the Right Thing (1989); Mitchum’s preacher behind later killers of the Southern Gothic screen, the Max Cady of Scorsese’s Cape Fear (1991) among them; the tattooed knuckles passed into common iconography. The reach is wide in image and narrower in method.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Weighed on form, presence and fabric across seventy-one years. The form is whole: the film survives as released in one version, and its restoration by the UCLA Film and Television Archive is repair. Presence is charged for the first two decades: a failure on release, seen on television and in repertory but not held in view as its peers were. Since then presence has been continuous and wide, in repertory, on every home format, in teaching and in critics’ polls. The surface is the Depression river seen through 1955 eyes and through the silent cinema, so it ages as fable, not as fashion; a studio river was artifice from the start and cannot date as realism does. The fabric, monochrome photography of its period, is the smallest charge.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The making bears weight in most of the film. Stanley Cortez’s light carves faces and spaces out of black: the bedroom, the cellar, the river at night. Robert Mitchum’s Powell is charm, menace and farce in one body, and the comedy never lets the threat down. Lillian Gish carries the second half with a stillness that matches him. Walter Schumann’s score, with the children’s songs and the hymn, is built into the action rather than laid over it. The charges fall where they matter: Sally Jane Bruce’s Pearl is stiff and much of Billy Chapin’s playing is of one note; Shelley Winters is given a woman more of function than of life; the Spoons are played broadly; some painted backdrops and models show more than the style needs.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Icey Spoon at her parlour counter praising the preacher, and Willa under the river with her throat cut. One law governs both: adults hear the language of piety and stop seeing, and only the children see. The Spoons’ comedy, Powell’s pratfalls on the stairs, the hymn duet and the mob obey that law, and the fable frame governs the rest: the world is a storybook in which an ogre may be funny and an old woman may hold a shotgun. The range is wide, from farce to murder to pastoral to Christmas. The strain is real: the passage to Rachel’s farm changes the film’s centre and tempo, the frame’s moralising runs warmer than the cellar, and the mob is staged as satire more than consequence.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Judged on what a film of about 93 minutes holds. The family is held fully, twice: the Harper house broken and refounded, and Rachel’s house of gathered children. Consciousness is John’s, fully: his oath, his silence, his breaking. The sacred is a real order here, in its counterfeit and in its practice, a revival tent and a hymn sung in two meanings. The Depression enters through a robbery done for the children’s bread and through the river’s drifting poor; the natural order through the river and its animals; the law through the gallows, the police and a court; sexuality through Powell’s revulsion and Ruby’s hunger. What holds the axis lowest: labour and the state stay at the edges, the town is a parlour and a congregation more than a society, and history is a setting, not an order held.
Score: 7.5 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.5 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Sublime at 8.9, then The Archetypal Deep and The Living Form at 8.8. Elevation frequent and of several kinds, from Willa under the river to the duet of the hymn; a fairy tale built into the structure, the false prophet, the ogre by night and the children cast adrift; and a form whose knowledge is how terror and safety look to a child, argued in the rhyme of two arrests.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.5: the family, a child’s consciousness and the sacred are held in full, and the Depression, the law and the natural order enter, but labour and the state stay at the edges and the town is a parlour and a congregation more than a society. Above it, The Inevitable and Pressure on Tradition at 8.3: a parlour, a drunk and a mob that run longer than their point, and a force that founded no school, with a reach that came late and lives more in image than in method.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.8, The Made at 8.7, The Inner Law at 8.5, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on two axes: The Archetypal Deep at 8.8, The Imperishable at 8.7 and The Swerve at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.4 falls a tenth short and Pressure on Tradition at 8.3 two tenths short. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.3, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.5. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The summit is withheld by the Epochal Gate and by the aggregate, 8.5 from a sum of 102.0, below the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of The Night of the Hunter as released by United Artists in 1955, about 93 minutes, black and white, in its one released version, from Rachel Cooper’s face among the stars to Christmas on her farm: directed by Charles Laughton, produced by Paul Gregory, screenplay credited to James Agee from Davis Grubb’s novel of 1953, photographed by Stanley Cortez, edited by Robert Golden, with music by Walter Schumann. The share of Agee and of Laughton in the shooting script is disputed, and the film is judged as released. The restoration by the UCLA Film and Television Archive is repair and bears on survival only. The surviving rushes and outtakes are not part of the work. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. Dialogue is quoted only where its words are certain, in one short line. Facts that could not be verified, among them the exact running time, the scene count and shot lengths, the proportions of the film’s two halves, where its critical rediscovery began, its places in particular polls and registries, the source of current home releases, a book-length history of the production and a later television remake, are not given.