Of course film noir was waiting to be born. It was already there in the novels of Dashiell Hammett, who wrote The Maltese Falcon, and the work of Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, John O’Hara, and the other boys in the back room. “Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean,” wrote Chandler, and that was true of his hero Philip Marlowe (another Bogart character). But it wasn’t true of Hammett’s Sam Spade, who was mean, and who set the stage for a decade in which unsentimental heroes talked tough and cracked wise.
The moment everyone remembers from The Maltese Falcon comes near the end, when Brigid O’Shaughnessy (Mary Astor) has been collared for murdering Spade’s partner. She says she loves Spade. She asks if Sam loves her. She pleads for him to spare her from the law. And he replies, in a speech some people can quote by heart, “I hope they don’t hang you, precious, by that sweet neck. . . . The chances are you’ll get off with life. That means if you’re a good girl, you’ll be out in twenty years. I’ll be waiting for you. If they hang you, I’ll always remember you.”
Cold. Spade is cold and hard, like his name. When he gets the news that his partner has been murdered, he doesn’t blink an eye. Didn’t like the guy. Kisses his widow the moment they’re alone together. Beats up Joel Cairo (Lorre) not just because he has to, but because he carries a perfumed handkerchief, and you know what that meant in a 1941 movie. Turns the rough stuff on and off. Loses patience with Greenstreet, throws his cigar into the fire, smashes his glass, barks out a threat, slams the door, and then grins to himself in the hallway, amused by his own act.
If he didn’t like his partner, Spade nevertheless observes a sort of code involving his death. “When a man’s partner is killed,” he tells Brigid, “he’s supposed to do something about it.” He doesn’t like the cops, either; the only person he really seems to like is his secretary, Effie (Lee Patrick), who sits on his desk, lights his cigarettes, knows his sins and accepts them. How do Bogart and Huston get away with making such a dark guy the hero of a film? Because he does his job according to the rules he lives by, and because we sense (as we always would with Bogart after this role) that the toughness conceals old wounds and broken dreams.
John Huston had worked as a writer at Warner Bros. before convincing the studio to let him direct. The Maltese Falcon was his first choice, even though it had been filmed twice before by Warners (in 1931 under the same title and in 1936 as Satan Met a Lady). “They were such wretched pictures,” Huston told his biographer, Lawrence Grobel. He saw Hammett’s vision more clearly, saw that the story was not about plot but about character, saw that to soften Sam Spade would be deadly, fought the tendency (even then) for the studio to pine for a happy ending.
When he finished his screenplay, he set to work storyboarding it, sketching every shot. That was the famous method of Alfred Hitchcock, whose Rebecca won the Oscar as the best picture of 1940. Like Orson Welles, who was directing Citizen Kane across town, Huston was excited by new stylistic possibilities; he gave great thought to composition and camera movement. To view the film in a stop-action analysis, as I have, is to appreciate complex shots that work so well they seem simple. Huston and his cinematographer, Arthur Edeson, accomplished things that in their way were as impressive as what Welles and Gregg Toland were doing on Kane.
Consider an astonishing unbroken seven-minute take. Grobel’s book The Hustons quotes Meta Wilde, Huston’s longtime script supervisor: “It was an incredible camera setup. We rehearsed two days. The camera followed Greenstreet and Bogart from one room into another, then down a long hallway and finally into a living room; there the camera moved up and down in what is referred to as a boom-up and boom-down shot, then panned from left to right and back to Bogart’s drunken face; the next pan shot was to Greenstreet’s massive stomach from Bogart’s point of view. . . . One miss and we had to begin all over again.”
Was the shot just a stunt? Not at all; most viewers don’t notice it because they’re swept along by its flow. And consider another shot, where Greenstreet chatters about the falcon while waiting for a drugged drink to knock out Bogart. Huston’s strategy is crafty. Earlier, Greenstreet has set it up by making a point: “I distrust a man who says ‘when.’ If he’s got to be careful not to drink too much, it’s because he’s not to be trusted when he does.” Now he offers Bogart a drink, but Bogart doesn’t sip from it. Greenstreet talks on, and tops up Bogart’s glass. He still doesn’t drink. Greenstreet watches him narrowly. They discuss the value of the missing black bird. Finally, Bogart drinks, and passes out. The timing is everything; Huston doesn’t give us close-ups of the glass to underline the possibility that it’s drugged. He depends on the situation to generate the suspicion in our minds. (This was, by the way, Greenstreet’s first scene in the movies.)
The plot is the last thing you think of about The Maltese Falcon. The black bird (said to be made of gold and encrusted with jewels) has been stolen, men have been killed for it, and now Gutman (Greenstreet) has arrived with his lackeys (Lorre and Elisha Cook, Jr.) to get it back. Spade gets involved because the Mary Astor character hires him to—but the plot goes around and around, and eventually we realize that the black bird is an example of Hitchcock’s “MacGuffin”—it doesn’t matter what it is, so long as everyone in the story wants or fears it.
To describe the plot in a linear and logical fashion is almost impossible. That doesn’t matter. The movie is essentially a series of conversations punctuated by brief, violent interludes. It’s all style. It isn’t violence or chases, but the way the actors look, move, speak, and embody their characters. Under the style is attitude: Hard men, in a hard season, in a society emerging from Depression and heading for war, are motivated by greed and capable of murder. For an hourly fee, Sam Spade will negotiate this terrain. Everything there is to know about Sam Spade is contained in the scene where Bridget asks for his help and he criticizes her performance: “You’re good. It’s chiefly your eyes, I think—and that throb you get in your voice when you say things like, ‘Be generous, Mr. Spade.’” He always stands outside, sizing things up. Few Hollywood heroes before 1941 kept such a distance from the conventional pieties of the plot.
The Night of the Hunter
NO MPAA RATING, 93 m., 1955
Robert Mitchum (Reverend Harry Powell), Shelley Winters (Willa Harper), Lillian Gish (Rachel), Billy Chapin (John), Sally Jane Bruce (Pearl), James Gleason (Birdie), Evelyn Varden (Icey), Peter Graves (Ben Harper), Don Beddoe (Walt). Directed by Charles Laughton and produced by Paul Gregory. Screenplay by James Agee and Charles Laughton, based on the novel by Davis Grubb.
Charles Laughton’s Night of the Hunter (1955) is one of the greatest of all American films, but has never received the attention it deserves because of its lack of the proper trappings. Many great movies are by great directors, but Laughton directed only this one film, which was a critical and commercial failure long overshadowed by his acting career. Many great movies use actors who come draped in respectability and prestige, but Robert Mitchum has always been a raffish outsider. And many great movies are realistic, but Night of the Hunter is an expressionistic oddity, telling its chilling story through visual fantasy. People don’t know how to categorize it, so they leave it off their lists.
Yet what a compelling, frightening, and beautiful film it is! And how well it has survived its period. Many films from the mid-1950s, even the good ones, seem somewhat dated now, but by setting his story in an invented movie world outside conventional realism, Laughton gave it a timelessness. Yes, the movie takes place in a small town on the banks of a river. But the town looks as artificial as a Christmas card scene, the family’s house with its strange angles inside and out looks too small to live in, and the river becomes a set so obviously artificial it could have been built for a completely stylized studio film like Kwaidan (1964).
Everybody knows the Mitchum character, the sinister “Reverend” Harry Powell. Even those who haven’t seen the movie have heard about the knuckles of his two hands, and how one has the letters H-A-T-E tattooed on them, and the other the letters L-O-V-E. Bruce Springsteen drew on those images in his song “Cautious Man”: “On his right hand Billy’d tattooed the word “love” and on his left hand was the word “fear” / And in which hand he held his fate was never clear.”
Many movie lovers know by heart the reverend’s famous explanation to the wide-eyed boy (“Ah, little lad, you’re staring at my fingers. Would you like me to tell you the little story of right hand / left hand?”) And the scene where the Reverend stands at the top of the stairs and calls down to the boy and his sister has become the model for a hundred other horror scenes.
But does this familiarity give The Night of the Hunter the recognition it deserves? I don’t think so because those famous trademarks distract from its real accomplishment. It is one of the most frightening of movies, with one of the most unforgettable of villains, and on both of those scores it holds up as well after four decades as I expect The Silence of the Lambs to do many years from now.
The story, somewhat rearranged: In a prison cell, Harry Powell discovers the secret of a condemned man (Peter Graves), who has hidden $10,000 somewhere around his house. After being released from prison, Powell seeks out the man’s widow, Willa Harper (Shelley Winters), and two children, John (Billy Chapin) and the owl-faced Pearl (Sally Jane Bruce). They know where the money is, but don’t trust the “preacher.” But their mother buys his con game and marries him, leading to a tortured wedding night inside a high-gabled bedroom that looks a cross between a chapel and a crypt.
Soon Willa Harper is dead, seen in an incredible shot at the wheel of a car at the bottom of the river, her hair drifting with the seaweed. And soon the children are fleeing down the dream-river in a small boat, while the preacher follows them implacably on the shore; this beautifully stylized sequence uses the logic of nightmares, in which no matter how fast one runs, the slow step of the pursuer keeps the pace. The children are finally taken in by a Bible-fearing old lady (Lillian Gish), who would seem to be helpless to defend them against the single-minded murderer, but is as unyielding as her faith.
The shot of Winters at the bottom of the river is one of several remarkable images in the movie, which was photographed in black and white by Stanley Cortez, who shot Welles’s Magnificent Ambersons, and once observed he was “always chosen to shoot weird things.” He shot few weirder than here, where one frightening composition shows a street lamp casting Mitchum’s terrifying shadow on the walls of the children’s bedroom. The basement sequence combines terror and humor, as when the preacher tries to chase the children up the stairs, only to trip, fall, recover, lunge, and catch his fingers in the door. And the masterful nighttime river sequence uses giant foregrounds of natural details, such as frogs and spider webs, to underline a kind of biblical progression as the children drift to eventual safety.
The screenplay, based on a novel by Davis Grubb, is credited to James Agee, one of the icons of American film writing and criticism, then in the final throes of alcoholism. Laughton’s widow, Elsa Lanchester, is adamant in her autobiography: Charles finally had very little respect for Agee. And he hated the script, but he was inspired by his hatred. She quotes the film’s producer, Paul Gregory: “The script that was produced on the screen is no more James Agee’s . . . than I’m Marlene Dietrich.”
Who wrote the final draft? Perhaps Laughton had a hand. Lanchester and Laughton both remembered that Mitchum was invaluable as a help in working with the two children, whom Laughton could not stand. But the final film is all Laughton’s, especially the dreamy, Bible-evoking final sequence, with Lillian Gish presiding over events like an avenging elderly angel.
Robert Mitchum is one of the great icons of the second half century of cinema. Despite his sometimes scandalous offscreen reputation, despite his genial willingness to sign on to half-baked projects, he made a group of films that led David Thomson, in his Biographical Dictionary of Film, to ask, “How can I offer this hunk as one of the best actors in the movies?” And answer: “Since the war, no American actor has made more first-class films, in so many different moods.” The Night of the Hunter, he observes, represents “the only time in his career that Mitchum acted outside himself,” by which he means there is little of the Mitchum persona in the preacher.
Mitchum is uncannily right for the role, with his long face, his gravel voice, and the silky tones of a snake-oil salesman. And Shelley Winters, all jitters and repressed sexual hysteria, is somehow convincing as she falls so prematurely into, and out of, his arms. The supporting actors are like a chattering gallery of Norman Rockwell archetypes, their lives centered on bake sales, soda fountains, and gossip. The children, especially the little girl, look more odd than lovable, which helps the film move away from realism and into stylized nightmare. And Lillian Gish and Stanley Cortez quite deliberately, I think, composed that great shot of her which looks like nothing so much as Whistler’s mother holding a shotgun.
Charles Laughton showed here that he had an original eye and a taste for material that stretched the conventions of the movies. It is risky to combine horror and humor, and foolhardy to approach them through expressionism. For his first film, Laughton made a film like no other before or since, and with such confidence it seemed to draw on a lifetime of work. Critics were baffled by it, the public rejected it, and the studio had a much more expensive Mitchum picture (Not as a Stranger) it wanted to promote instead. But nobody who has seen The Night of the Hunter has forgotten it, or Mitchum’s voice coiling down those basement stairs: “Chillll . . . dren?”