During the depression, Ben Harper (Peter Graves) robs a bank and kills two people. He is on the run with $10,000 in cash and the police hot on his tail. He runs home looking for a hiding place for the money. At home he finds his son, John (Billy Chapin) and his daughter Pearl (Sally Jane Bruce). Thinking quickly, he stuffs the money in a doll that his daughter never lets out of her sight. He then makes both kids promise to never tell where the money is. The police arrive and take Ben into custody. He is put on trial and sentenced to death. While waiting his execution, Ben is kept in prison.
Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum) is a serial killer con man pretending to be a traveling preacher. Harry gets caught driving a stolen car and is sent to prison for thirty days. While in prison his cellmate is Ben Harper. Harry learns about the money and that it was never recovered. He tries to get Ben to tell him where he hid it and promises to take care of his kids. Ben doesn’t buy it and is put to death taking the information with him.
When Harry gets out of prison, he goes to Ben Harper’s hometown and charms everyone except Ben’s son, John. Ben’s widow, Willa (Shelley Winters) is even more susceptible to Harry’s charms and agrees to marry him. Harry knows that the kids know where the money is. Once he has Willa under his spell, he begins to work on Pearl to try to coax her into telling where it is hidden. Both Pearl and John are tight lipped about it. Willa figures out that the only reason Harry married her was to find the money. She resigns herself to her fate and is willing to ignore the knowledge, but Harry kills her anyway, and dumps her in the river, tied to a model T car. He tells everyone that she ran off with a salesman.
Harry is now free to interrogate the children. John takes Pearl, and Pearl’s doll, and escapes down the river in his father’s old skiff. Harry casually pursues the children waiting for an opportunity to corner them and learn where the money is hidden. So begins a slow psychological game with the children. The hunter and the prey.
“Night of the Hunter” was released in 1955 and was directed by Charles Laughton. It is an American psychological drama and a film noir. The film was based on the 1953 novel by Davis Grubb and takes some elements from the true crimes of serial killer Harry Powers who killed several women and children in Clarksburg, West Virginia. Powell was hanged for his crimes in 1932.
Director Laughton did a fascinating job of combining various film styles together. In addition to the noir elements, he introduces expressionism along with some creative cinematography. Laughton even added some silent film stylization to add dimension to the production. All of these elements add some really creepy images making the movie dark and cold. The movie is slow burning but intense which really adds more evilness to Mitchum’s character.
The movie was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry in 1992 for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".