The Night of the Hunter

Towards the top of my list of favorite films about the American South is the 1955 film The Night of the Hunter, based on the Davis Grubbs novel of the same name. This is the only film ever directed by stage and screen actor Charles Laughton, and its commercial and critical failure following its release convinced Laughton and his producers that he should not direct again. When the film was released, critical reaction was mixed and reflected confusion on the part of reviewers and probably also on the part of audiences. The film was an unusual combination of crime drama, film noir, children's fantasy, and stylized, expressionist motifs. It combined scenes of comedy and tragedy, of violence and religion. Parts of the film were conventional; parts seemed almost amateurish. It is not surprising given the kinds of films being made in the 1950s that The Night of the Hunter sank from view soon after its release. It ran counter to established trends. It took 20 years for critics and viewers to recover this film and to begin to recognize its considerable merits.

Admittedly, the inclusion of The Night of the Hunter in a course about Southern films may seem problematic for some. In fact, the more I researched the background of this film, the more problematic its inclusion became. It is first of all not set in the South, or at least not in the deep South. It apparently takes place on or near the banks of the Ohio River, probably where it borders West Virginia. The film certainly looks and feels Southern, set in a rural region during the time of the Depression. A number of scenes show rolling farmland landscapes, with barns such as one would expect to find in the tobacco lands of Tennessee and Kentucky. A number of characters have Southern accents. It has many of the elements we expect to find in Southern literature—for examples, concern with religion and a gothic interest in violence and murder. It also expresses an agrarian skepticism towards cities, progress, technology, and the modern world and the general decay of values in the modern world. So for these reasons I've felt justified including The Night of the Hunter on my list.

But there are further complications. The traditional conception of Southern literature is that it is written by people who have spent all or most of their lives in the American South and that it expresses attitudes and deals with subjects generally associated with the South. We know that this view is being supplanted with other views, and that Southern literature is more diverse than traditional definitions would allow, but I will let tradition suffice for the purpose of this paper. I must further add that I tend to view films in the same way I view literature, that is, as texts suitable for interpretation. I am not a film scholar. My training has been that of a literary critic and teacher. Film has all the basic elements of fiction—narrative, plot, characters, themes, images, setting, and so on. So I treat it as literature. But in thinking about certain films as Southern films, there is a major difference between literature and film. Literature is usually the product of single authors. Film is collaborative. The director is often credited as the auteur, but others, such as screenwriters, cinematographers, editors, and actors, also have a major role in the final product. There is also not a major film industry in the American South. Films are made here, of course, but the people who make them are not typically Southern. Thus in a simplistic way it may be possible to argue that while Southern literature in its traditional definition is by Southerners and about the South, and reflective of attitudes one might associate with the South, Southern films are largely made by non-Southerners who use the South as a landscape on which to explore attitudes that may be Southern or that may not be.

This is certainly the case with The Night of the Hunter. It was filmed on a Hollywood set. Most of the principal actors were not Southerners. Laughton was British. Laughton convinced James Agee, the Tennessee writer who had written the screenplay for John Huston's The African Queen, to write the screenplay for this new film, but the evidence seems to suggest that Laughton did not like Agee's screenplay and partially or largely rewrote it. It is possible that Laughton saw Davis Grubbs' novel The Night of the Hunter as a "Southern" work and that in hiring a Southern writer such as James Agee to write the screenplay he was reflecting this fact. There is conflicting evidence as to how much of the Agee screenplay was actually used in the film. The best discussion of this question that I have read, based on close study of extant drafts of the screenplay, is by Jeffrey J. Folks, "James Agee's Filmscript for The Night of the Hunter," in The Southern Quarterly (1995). Folks suggests, contrary to what others have said, that much of Agee's screenplay appears in the film. Whatever the case might be, the film does reflect his influence.

A number of reasons explain Laughton's desire to make a film of Davis Grubb's novel. He first of all liked the novel, which he read before it was published. He set out to make a faithful adaptation and worked closely with Grubbs in developing the film. The themes that he emphasized in the film were religious extremism, the dire economic conditions of the Depression and the suffering of the rural poor as a result, the victimization of women and of children, and the loss of values in the modern world. His emphasis on the rural landscapes, on the religious extremism and misogyny of his main character Harry Powell, and on the clash of modern values and the modern world against more traditional values—these are emphases he accepted from the novel—are ones that are characteristic of much modern Southern writing. They make it convenient as well as logical to view this film as a Southern work, and at the least as a work which in tone and content is consanguine with other Southern literature.

For those of you unfamiliar with this film, here is a barebones summary. A man named Ben Harper robs a bank and kills two men in the process. He gives the money he has stolen to his son John and directs him to hide and protect the money at all costs. Harper is captured by police, sent to prison, and executed, but before his death he tells his cellmate, an itinerant preacher named Harry Powell, about the hidden money—but does not say where the money is. Powell, who is in prison for stealing a car but who in fact has been traveling through the countryside romancing and marrying vulnerable widows, killing them, and taking their money, decides to find the widow of his executed cellmate and marry her. Soon after this, Powell finds and marries the widow, he realizes that she does not know where the money is and that the children do, so he kills her and begins pressuring John and his sister Pearl to give up the money. They refuse and flee, escaping down the river in a small boat. They are taken in by an elderly woman, played by Lillian Gish, who befriends orphans. She is a pious, virtuous woman who protects parentless children from the evil of modern times, and from people like Harry Powell, whom she wounds with her rifle when he tries to break into her house, and who at the end of the film has been captured and is headed for trial and execution.

Three characteristics make this film remarkable. One is the character of Harry Powell as portrayed by Robert Mitcham. He is an evil and psychopathic serial killer who believes that he is carrying out God's word. His hatred of women, his animalistic greed, and his willingness to kill the children in order to get what he wants make him one a truly chilling character. Mitcham never surpassed or equaled this performance during the remainder of his career. You can't put out of your mind his singing of "leaning on the everlasting arms"—it's not comforting. The second memorable element involves the visual qualities of the film. In cinematography the film ranges from ultra realism to stylized expressionism to fanciful lyricism. One thinks of this film in terms of the visual images that characterize it: the hands of Harry Powell tattooed with the words Love and Hate, the church-like bedroom where Harry kills his wife; the gruesome image of a dead woman sitting in an old jalopy on the bottom of the river, her throat cut; the lyrical images of the children fleeing downriver from their pursuer, and so on. Cinematographer Stanley Cortez deserves much of the credit for this aspect of the film. The third characteristic involves the film's narratives, which fuse the plights of children and widows in the Depression and a young boy's determination to carry out his promise to his father with an elemental battle between virtue and evil.

This is not a perfect film, and from the technical standards of 2007 it may seem dated in ways, especially in several scenes involving special effects. Parts of it are contrived or overstated. My students were particularly put off by a series of scenes in the film's central section where the fleeing children are juxtaposed with images of wild animals that are supposed to suggest that the children live in a world where the strong victimize the weak, where there are predators and their victims. The Night of the Hunter is clearly a "made" film that seeks to create its own world with its own set of standards, not one that seems to emulate the world we inhabit. I like to think of it as a nightmarish fairy tale, the kind that keeps you awake at night. Yet the imperfections, the utter distinctiveness of this film as compared to most American films of the 1950s, or of any other decade for that matter, make this film what it is.

Driving Miss Daisy

Driving Miss Daisy (1989) records a very narrow slice of Southern life between the late 1940s and early 1970s. The setting is Atlanta. The principal characters are an aging black man in need of employment and an old Jewish woman no longer able to drive, or at least whose son does not want her to drive. She is feisty, stubborn, and independent, and when her son brings to her house the man he has hired to chauffeur her around, she makes clear her lack of interest. Gradually, over the course of twenty-five years, a friendship develops between the two. Although Daisy thinks of herself as a progressive woman who has never been prejudiced, she clearly is. She never recognizes the links between herself and Hoke. When the Atlanta Jewish Temple is bombed, Hoke remarks to her that the same men who committed that crime are also the men who commit acts of hatred against blacks. She fails to see the connection. Later she fails to understand why Hoke might want to attend a dinner where Martin Luther King is speaking—she had an extra ticket she could have given him—he drives her to the dinner but does not attend, waiting for her outside in the car while King gives his talk. Despite all of this, their friendship develops in spite of limitations of prejudice and racial divisions.

As the chauffeur Hoke Coburn, Morgan Freeman plays a role that earned him both praise and criticism. He is ingratiating, and there are stereotypical elements in his performance. But he brings Hoke to life not as a general type but as an individual human being. He plays a kind of black man who today would seem a throwback, an anachronism, by 2007 standards. Such men did once exist. To play such a character must have taken courage on Freeman's part, and might well have involved humiliation as well. Jessica Tandy is equally good as Daisy. Criticisms leveled against the film found fault with its portrayal of a friendship between the elderly white woman and her black employee. Such friendships did not exist, so the criticism argues, and the film perpetuates a damaging falsehood as a result. Such friendships may have been rare, but undoubtedly they did occur. Clearly there were black people who worked for white families who felt a sense of kinship with their employers, who may have identified with them to varying extents. Clearly also there were many black people who worked for white families who felt no such kinship at all. Does the film argue that we ought to return to former times, when divisions between the races were more clearly marked, when whites occupied rigidly defined social position over that of blacks? No, I don't think so.

In a sense, the film is about change, progress—both in a good and bad sense.

One can see how the film might be seen to suggest that social progress and modernization have come at a cost. In particular, Daisy's son Boolie and his wife Florine adapt a lifestyle that is decidedly untraditional, at least in the sense of Jewish traditions. They celebrate Christmas and put up seasonal decorations. Boolie may in fact affect Christian customs for the sake of his business, which relies on many non-Jewish customers. He also declines to attend the Martin Luther King tribute dinner because he fears that doing so may cost him the business of white patrons who dislike King. Boolie makes many decisions on the basis of what is good for his business. One might argue that this film portrays a kind of friendship that would have become much more unlikely in post-civil rights days. Thus from this point of view the film may bemoan the loss of such friendships. But what the film doesn't do is argue for a return to the past. It illustrates and marks time's movement forward and the changes it brings. The film effectively illustrates how people grow old, lose their friends, lose their bearings, become more and more alien and alone in a world that is moving forwards and changing without them.

An interesting aspect of this film based on the play of the same name by Alfred Uhry (who also wrote the screenplay) is its low-key portrayal of Jewish Southern life in Atlanta during the mid-twentieth century. In many ways Daisy and Boolie's lives are indistinguishable from the lives of many non-Jewish people around them. Daisy attends synagogue regularly and has her circle of Jewish friends—they play canasta together on a regular basis. They may be outsiders in a predominantly Christian city., but they are also citizens of that city (as Daisy makes clear when she attends the MLK dinner). Some minor conflicts in the film arise from the collision of Jewish and non-Jewish traditions. But Daisy's religion is an incidental context. It's important but not the center of the film. Her identity as a white Southern woman struggling against advancing age and her own prejudices is more important in the film than her religion.

Again we confront in this film the issue of representation. The film portrays an individualized situation—an individual white woman developing a friendship with an individual black man. The film makes no claims that these two are representative of a larger class of people, or that their friendship in some way is representative of a larger phenomenon between white employers and their black employees prior to the Civil Rights movement. But film is a representative medium—it portrays individuals who are also, inescapably, seen as representative types. Audiences are naturally prone to see individual characters in a film as representative of a larger, wider reality. When we watch films (or read books) we often identify with the individual characters—we see them as representative of a larger aspect of experience than their individual situations can imply. It is easy to understand why some viewers of this film may object to the portrayal of a friendship that they do not believe accurately represents white and black relations in mid-20^th century Atlanta. But this whole issue is fraught with complications. Often when we talk about the past, attempt to understand it, to portray it, we skew and distort our visions to encompass a past we want to believe in. How can we know what the facts of the past are to begin with, unless we actually lived through it? Even then our own prejudices and perceptions and memories distort our sense of our own experience.

Colonel Effingham’s Raid

Colonel Effingham's Raid (1946) dramatizes the conflict of modern commerce and traditional values, at least as they are construed in this film based on the 1943 Berry Fleming novel of the same title. In a sense the film is Mr. Smith Goes to Washington for the elderly. Col. Effingham comes home to Fredericksville at the age of 65 after a lifetime career in the army. His great achievement has been assisting with the building of the Panama Canal. He returns home in 1940 eager to be of use. Col. Effingham in the film is a man of high ideals and principles. He regards himself as a patriot. Although he is overbearing and full of bombast, he is also sincere. He volunteers to write a column on the military for the local newspaper. The newspaper is ambitious to compete successfully with a larger newspaper in town and is not inclined to seek conflict with the political power structure of Fredericksville, a group of older men who have been running the town out of pocket for years, who make deals and agreements under the table, and who have contempt for the townspeople and for the principles of democracy. When they decide to name the town's Confederate Square for a long deceased businessman whom many locals consider a carpetbagger, and when they decide to demolish the historic courthouse and replace it with a new structure to be built by the mayor's brother, Col. Effingham takes aim in his column, calling the citizens to arms and lambasting these threats to the town community and tradition.

The lines of battle are drawn between business , progress, and traditional values. This film about a small Southern town is also set just before the beginning of the Second World War. Therefore at the same time the colonel is battling attacks on tradition and hometown values, the nation is preparing for war. The film (and presumably the novel) explicitly links these two dimensions—Effingham is leading a battle to defend tradition and place and the nation's military is calling up forces to do the same on a wider scale. Oddly, then, this places the nation's enemies—the Nazis and others--in the same category as the men whom the colonel regards as the enemies of the town-- the corrupt political and commercial machine that have always gotten their ways. Not surprisingly, these forces on various scales continue to do battle today in numerous small and large towns and cities around the nation.

One odd characteristic of this film is that while it makes no hesitation to identify itself with a small Southern town there is virtually nothing about the film that is regionally marked. Virtually no citizen has a Southern accent. Col. Effingham himself, played by Charles Coburn (a Savannah, GA, native) has a British accent and swaggers and wears a monocle. I don't really think this is a matter of the film trying to avoid acknowledging its settings (there are a number of black characters playing servants); it may be more a matter of the film's simply trying to avoid the difficulty and expense of teaching actors accents and dressing them up in regional attire. The film may be navigating the demands of authenticity by ignoring them—we have generic Southerners as a result, Southerners who readily acknowledge their region but who aren't much like people who live there. Once you adjust to the peculiarity the rest of the film works well enough.

Effingham's energetic efforts to defeat the town power structure, save the courthouse, and keep the original name for Confederate Square initially seem to fail when every businessman in town refuses to support his efforts—they have too much money at stake, they don't want to anger the city fathers and endanger their own economic welfare. Even the colonel's cousin, a young man named Albert, who also works for the newspaper, is embarrassed by his elder cousin's stand. Only when his uncle suffers a heart attack and lapses into weakness and despair at the defeat he has suffered does Albert begin to feel regret and a sense of duty both to his cousin and the town. Matters take their formulaic course at a rally in the town square held to send the Georgia National Guard off to war.

The South defined in this film is probably based on Berry Flemings own definition in his novel. The South is portrayed as a place of traditions and values threatened by commerce and corruption that have come in from the outside. The lure of money is too much for many of the town's leaders, men who grew up in Fredericksville. It takes the older men like Effingham as well as the women to stand up for traditional and virtue. The newspaper for which Effingham writes his column is portrayed as a paper more interested in its own financial status than in representing the interests of the community.

An exception to the generic South of this film is the black characters, all of whom appear as servants. They play the typical stereotypical roles, rolling their eyes, acting clownish on occasion. My attempts to identify the black actors in the film were made difficult by the fact that the credits don't seem to list them. It's ironic that the one Southern characteristic the film doesn't ignore is the presence of black servants.

Stranded

Stranded is a 1987 film featuring Maureen O'Sullivan and Ione Skye (the singer Donovan's daughter) about a family of aliens who suddenly appear in a house outside a small Southern town. The aliens are fleeing an assassin on a remote world. Why they are the object of assassination is never explained. The aliens are vintage Lost in Space aliens, with bad hair and cheesy costumes and make-up. Based on their coiffures, the aliens owned blow dryers. One of them, an apparent robot, is dressed as a Ninja. We know this film is set in the South because all the human characters speak with Southern drawls. Some carry shotguns, drive pickups, hate black people and other strange people including aliens. The local sheriff is a black man, and at least one of his deputies, not to mention other numerous locals, hate him because of his race. Despite the fact that they kill several people who are, admittedly, trying to kill them, these aliens turns out to be kind and civilized. A teenage alien boy and the character played by Ione Skye seem to fall in love. The grandmother played by Maureen O'Sullivan becomes friends with an alien grandmother. This silly film lacks humor, intelligence, insight, and skill. Despite the fact that in the course of the film most of them are killed, the surviving aliens leave the earth at the end of the film with smiles on their faces. Galactic understanding and good will for all.

I had not heard of this film when I saw it listed on the schedule of a cable movie channel. Stranded construes the South as shotguns, baseball caps, pickup trucks, dimwitted racists, and a few good souls thrown in for good measure.