Night of the Hunter

Harry Powell is the hunter. Ms Cooper is the protectrice. The hunted are the children. The hunt itself lasts for longer than a single night, but indeed reaches a climax after dark. During this climax, music and chiaroscuro, two of the film’s most outstanding elements, come to the fore.

The story is set in the U.S. during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Ben Harper, the father in a young family, faced with the sight of child poverty all around, is driven to rob a bank so that his own children should never go hungry. Powell is a psychopathic “preacher” who carries on like a force of nature, violent and cunning in pursuit of his goal. The object of his attention here is Harper’s ill-gotten gains, which he learns about fortuitously when the two men are sharing a cell in a local prison. In this way, the lives of Harper’s family and Powell’s are set to become involved with each other, and the fall-out is terrible.

Of key importance to the plot is that we see Harper, before being taken into custody, entrusting the safekeeping of the family to his young son, rather than his wife, on the basis that his son has more common sense. When the impending crisis, in the form of Powell, comes to a head, Harper’s children find no adult in their own town capable of giving them the protection that they desperately need. With a great deal of luck they find Ms. Cooper (or she finds them) in a town downstream from their own on the Ohio river. Replete with common sense and a kind heart (and little time for women who don’t look after their own children) she takes them in hand.

All this, and Ms. Cooper’s pronouncements on the subject most of all, highlight the way in which a difficulty in the adult realm can impinge on the children that rely on said adults. Ms. Cooper suggests that children are man at his most resilient, that “they abide and endure”. Implicit in this idea is the notion of just how much they are sometimes forced to endure. As Ms. Cooper has it, “it’s a hard world for little things”.

If the people of the Harper’s town, who take to Powell and his patter almost instantly, had the sense of Ms. Cooper, things would have turned out miles better. Ms. Cooper gets much of her homely wisdom from the Bible (the townspeople could have spotted Powell was a bad sort using the “by their fruits you shall know them” criteria, that Ms. Cooper used, for example) which is given lip service and thus distorted by Powell in his big preacher act. This Biblical theme is also reflected in the circumstances of Ms. Cooper’s discovery of the Harper children, among the reeds of the riverbank, which resembles the story of Moses. The film’s other great theme is visual, and deals with shadow and light. Much of the film is shot on a sound stage, and we are shown some highly stylised lighting set ups during some key scenes. Silhouettes, especially of the broad-brimmed preacher’s hat as Powell once more comes onto the horizon in relentless pursuit of his young prey, are seen extensively throughout.

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