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 A preacher travels the countryside "spreading the gospel...and leaving a trail
of murdered women in his wake." Robert Mitchum is Harry Powell, the handsome
preacher with "love" and "hate" tattooed on his knuckles. He's got his eyes on
$10,000 that two little kids know the location of. The box refers to these two
kids as "innocent young lambs who refuse to be led astray." They say that
Mitchum's role is the "most daring and critically acclaimed performance of his
career." The film is also called "spellbinding, ominous and hauntingly
suspenseful" as well as a "film noir classic." 1955, 93 minutes, DVD
When Robert Mitchum's preacher speaks to God after he gets a jail cell with a
guy who has $10,000 stashed and says, "a man with $10,000 hid somewhere and a
widder in the makin'" you know that you're watching one sick puppy. Mitchum is
preacher Harry Powell, a murderous con man dressed in the clothes and words of
the divine. The movie makes no bones about what Harry Powell is, showing us the
corpse of some unlucky "widder" that was bewitched by his bible shenanigans
until Harry got the old dead broad's bread. The next scene shows Harry tooling
along in some car he's ripped off and talking to God about his calling. It's a
great window into how this guy can go around killing everyone and warp
everything he knows about religion to justify it as doing the lord's work.
Harry gets pinched for the hot car and ends up in a jail cell with the guy
who's stashed $10,000 somewhere. Harry knows that God only helps those that
helps themselves, so he decides to help himself to this guy's loot any way he
can.  Harry gets out of jail and heads to the guy's hometown to see if his family
might know where it is. The guy was executed for killing some folks in the
robbery attempt so Harry smells a widder ripe for the pickings. Shelley Winters
is the freshly minted widder who probably shouldn't be making any long range
plans. Harry makes a pitstop in some skanky club where a scantily dressed vixen
is shimmying around on the stage. We watch as Harry practically seethes about
the debauchery in front of him. His switchblade betrays what he really feels as
it pops out of its handle and rips through his clothes (geez! How obvious is
that?). He bolts out after that and shows up in town and immediately sets about
cozying up to the widder. His idea of cozying up is to bluster about sin and
show off his tattooed knuckles and telling the story of right hand and left
hand. It remains to be seen if this whole "I'm so righteous, I'm creepy"
approach would work on women in the real world (please E-mail me your results),
but Shelley Winters is won over and agrees to marry him. In her defense, this
took place during the Depression so there were probably different social
pressures facing her than would face her today. The widder Winters has two kids, John and Pearl. Pearl is excited to have a
daddy again, but John pulls the old "you're not my real dad" routine on the
creepy preacher and at one point even hits him in the head with a hairbrush
(Harry gets even later when he holds his switchblade to the little punk's
throat. Who's your daddy now? Huh?). Also, the two kids know that their real
daddy hid the ten grand inside of Pearl's doll. The preacher figures out that
the kids know where the money is, so you can see where the rest of the tension
in this movie lies. Eventually, the preacher gets tired of seeing Shelley
Winters in her nightgown (testify brother!) so he slits her throat, ties her up
in her car and dumps the whole blooming mess in the river. One of John's
friends, an old grubby fisherman, spots the car with the body at the bottom of
the river (that river must be mighty clear) but doesn't tell anyone because he
thinks everyone will pin it on him. Why would he think that? Wouldn't everyone
immediately suspect the stranger who just showed up one day and married her?
The preacher tells everyone that she just left town. Then the kids run away.  The booklet that comes along with the DVD is only four pages and hardly
qualifies as a "collectible booklet" but it is correct when it compares this
film to a fairy tale. You see a lot of this movie through the eyes of John. He
and his sister are the innocents and this preacher is pure, relentless evil.
Many of the old Grimm's Fairy Tales involved a wicked stepparent (usually a
stepmother). How many tales were there where the good kid was tormented by a
nasty step parent interloper? And how prescient were these tales? You need only
to look around today to see the problems and abuses that occur within families
with step parents. When you have people who marry one another in spite of their
children, there's going to be problems (heck, not everyone can be Kurt Warner).
And the kids can sense this and know when they're not wanted or just some part
of the package that was reluctantly accepted. In this film, John knows the only
reason the preacher is there is because he wants the money. He knows that this
guy would just as soon as see him dead as look at him. So John takes Pearl and
makes a run for it. Not into the deep dark forest as in the old fairy tales,
but down the river, the very river that was his mother's final resting place.
What follows are some of the more remarkable sequences of the film. We watch as
these two float aimlessly down the river, shots of cute little animals
interspersed with shots of their boat. It is calm and quiet and there is no
threat in their boat ride. It achieves a dreamlike state, the children
literally escaping their surroundings into something peaceful, something
children in the real world can only do in their minds. And just like in a fairy
tale, they land at a little old lady's house with white picket fence and she
takes them in and loves them because they're kids not because they're carrying
some stupid looking doll with ten big ones in it. We have not heard the last of the preacher though and he actually appears
riding a pale horse! Because these kids are finally somewhere where they are
wanted, the preacher seems to lose some of his evil power over his surroundings
and no longer is the devil incarnate as he was before. He is revealed as a
cowardly, murdering thief who is held off by old hag with a shotgun. When
there's at least a little light in these kids lives, even the darkest things
seem to fade in their intensity. This film uses its black and white photography
as practically another character. The grays and shadows make the mounting
terror those kids must have felt much more vivid than full color ever could
have. It gives it a nightmarish quality, like some half remembered dream you're
only too glad to wake up from and forget. This was Charles Laughton's only film
as a director. You may recall him as that tubby evil genius, Dr. Moreau, in Island Of Lost Souls . He does a great job managing the symbolism that permeates this film and I
don't believe you'll find another film that achieves the collision between pure
innocence and pure evil so effectively. This is the movie that defined the
killer boogeyman villain and films ape that to this day.
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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