It's a unique experience for me to see a movie that's universally acclaimed and not get something out of it. Night Of The Hunter is that movie. The first thing that struck me was, apart from Mitchum, how bad the acting was. It was hard not to believe that some of the cast had not been plucked from the street outside the studio, prodded onto the set with long poles and forced to read their lines off idiot boards. Secondly, any suspense evaporates early on when the kids escape from Mitchum, after being cornered in a cellar, by a contrivance so lame it doesn't just suspend belief, it kills it stone dead. The film has one or two memorable images but the mood is consistently broken by bad acting, excruciating dialogue, backdrops that ripple gently in the draught from the studio fans and poor continuity. Mitchum's performance is good but it's drowned in a sea of tedious, one-dimensional, ham-fisted twaddle - what a waste. I can see my opinion is a minority view, all I can suggest is that people who find this film worthwhile should check out Peter Weir's Picnic At Hanging Rock, a subtle exercise in atmosphere and menace that actually works.
Review of The Night of the Hunter
