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by Jill Vranken, Staff Writer

When the American Film Institute presented their 100 Years… 100 Heroes and Villains list in 2003, they defined a villain as: a character(s) whose wickedness of mind, selfishness of character and will to power are sometimes masked by beauty and nobility, while others may rage unmasked. They can be horribly evil or grandiosely funny but are ultimately tragic.

Preacher Harry Powell, the villain of Charles Laughton’s only film as a director, 1955’s The Night of the Hunter, was voted 29th on that list. As played by Robert Mitchum, Preacher Powell remains one of cinema's greatest villains, an iconic noir performance that still chills to the bone today.

But why?

To answer that question, let’s start by taking it back to the source material for the movie. Davis Grubb, a short story writer, started writing The Night of the Hunter in the early 1950s. He was influenced by accounts of economic hardship by Depression-era Americans, something his social worker mother had witnessed firsthand. For his villain, Grubb used real-life serial killer Harry Powers as his basis.

Harry Powers, born Harm Drenth in the Dutch village of Beerta, Groningen, emigrated to the United States in 1910. He moved to West Virginia in 1926 and married a woman named Luella Strother the year after, after responding to her lonely hearts advert. Soon, he began taking out lonely hearts adverts under a fake name, looking for victims.

When he was arrested, the police dug up a freshly filled-in ditch on Powers’ property, uncovering the bodies of widow Asta Eicher, Eicher’s three children, and Dorothy Lemke. Eicher and Lemke had both been courted by Powers under his alias–the police discovered more love letters in the trunk of his car, as Powers had written back to many more women with the same intention: steal their money and kill them.

Grubb’s novel shapes this basis into the character of Harry Powell, a self-declared itinerant preacher (ordained by absolutely no church but the one which exists in his own head), con artist and serial killer. Powell, acting on a story told to him by his former cellmate (who has been executed for the crime of robbery), misrepresents himself as a prison chaplain upon his release, approaching the cellmate’s widow and conning her into marrying him in the hopes that her children will reveal to him where the money from their father’s last robbery is hidden.

The novel was a bestseller, and when Charles Laughton was handed a copy of the book, he fell in love with it (describing it as a nightmarish Mother Goose story). With help from screenwriter James Agee, Laughton set out to direct an adaptation of the novel, and therefore bring a face to the name of Preacher Powell.

Robert Mitchum–a veteran of film noir who Roger Ebert affectionately described as: “the kind of guy you'd picture in a saloon at closing time, waiting for someone to walk in through the door and break his heart” was eager to play the role of Preacher Powell, impressing Laughton during his casting interview (when Laughton described Powell as “a diabolical shit”, Mitchum–promptly and without hesitation–answered “PRESENT!” which, okay sir, calm down).

It’s very hard to imagine anyone else as Preacher Powell. Mitchum slips into the role so effortlessly, so fluently, that it’s actually terrifying to watch him. He is a man taut with rage, a coiled spring ready to burst at any time. On the surface, he can come across as someone quite ridiculous, with his LOVE/HATE tattooed knuckles (which he’ll tell you all about whether you like it or not) and his deep, DEEP Southern drawl which veers dangerously towards Foghorn Leghorn territory. At one point, late in the film, he lets out a comically loud “YEAOOOOWWWW” (rest assured, this is transcribed verbatim) when he’s shot at by Lillian Gish’s character Rachel.

If not played just right, all of these elements could have led to the character not working. But Mitchum manages to infuse them with a menace so acute that you can’t help but still be scared of him.

Rather than take you through the whole movie, I want to highlight what I feel are a couple of key moments throughout the movie that shape Preacher Powell into one of cinema’s greatest villains.

His introduction

When we first meet Powell, he’s driving along the Ohio River in a stolen car. It’s all but stated outright that he’s driving away from the scene of a murder, as the movie starts with a couple of children finding the body of a woman in a kitchen. Powell, in a monologue to “God”, says “Not that you mind the killings! Your book is full of killings. But there are things you do hate, Lord. Perfume-smelling things, lacy things, things with curly hair.”

Watching his mouth twist around that last sentence, every word dripping with disgust tells you everything you need to know. Powell attends a burlesque show, sitting the world’s most disinterested audience, scowling. The camera cuts to his left hand, the hand with HATE tattooed on his knuckles. He clenches his fist, sticking his hand in his pocket. The blade of a knife pierces through the fabric of his shirt. “There’s too many of them,” he whispers, “I can’t kill the world.”

Powell is a pure misogynist, disgusted by women and led by a moral compass that shields his evil in the cloak of religion. He’s also very hungry for money…

The conversation in the cell

Powell is arrested for driving a stolen car and ends up in a jail cell with Ben Harper (Peter Graves). Harper, who is about to be executed for his role in a bank robbery which killed two men, has hidden a sum of money for his children and made them promise to never reveal the location. Powell tries to get Harper to tell him where the money is, but Harper ends up taking the secret to his grave.

As they talk, Harper asks what religion it is exactly that he professes, and Powell responds with “the religion the Almighty and me worked out betwixt us.” which, you will have guessed by now that Powell is essentially the only member of the church of Harry Powell-ism (where the only entry requirement is being a diabolical shit).

The first time the children see him (and to an extent, hear him)

John and Pearl Harper (Billy Chapin and Sally Jane Bruce) see what their mother Willa (Shelley Winters) cannot - that Powell is bad news (well, John can, from the start - Pearl takes a while to get there). This may be because the first time they see him is in the middle of the night - John tells Pearl a bedtime story, and at the mention of a “bad man”, a large, distinctly Harry Powell-shaped shadow (complete with fancy hat) materialises through the window. John goes to look and sees him, standing near a lantern. He walks off, softly (but menacingly) singing the hymn Leaning on the Everlasting Arms, a musical motif that will return throughout the film.

The Night of the Hunter draws heavily from the harsh and angular look of German expressionist cinema of the twenties, with inky black shadows and ominous liminal spaces. Powell’s shadow coming into view is one of the film’s most effective moments (Pearl in particular looks very surprised, pointing with her little mouth open) because it lets the viewer, and the children, see him for what he is - a very dangerous man - before they’ve even met him.

Plus, who the heck stands outside someone’s house at night just singing hymns, I mean.

Willa’s death

As mentioned, Willa is a woman so lonely that she’s either not able to see the evil she’s letting into her life or is trying to make sense and reason of what Powell is doing in her head (I’ll let her off the hook for choosing to ignore the number of times Powell brings up the money, which is pretty much every other sentence). Powell charms Willa enough that she marries him, and when he refuses to consummate the marriage (in a truly harrowing scene where he basically tells her that her body is for begetting children, not for the lust of men), she convinces herself that he was sent here to save her soul.

Not long after, she starts preaching in tent revivals with him, but when she overhears Powell threatening Pearl to reveal the location of the money, she loses her faith in him, which ends up being her undoing.

Willa’s death is both heartbreaking and terrifying - in a scene which has echoes of Murnau’s Nosferatu in the way it’s staged, Willa tries to keep talking as Powell approaches. We don’t see the actual murder, but we see the aftermath, in a gorgeously macabre underwater tableau: Willa’s body, tied to a Model T, floating silently in the water.

The children’s escape

John and Pearl run from an enraged Powell, using their father’s small johnboat to escape down the river. Powell gives chase, and the kids, who are hiding in a barn, spot Powell over the horizon, on horseback, while still singing. John, exhausted and frustrated, says “Don’t he never sleep?” - with his tone much in the manner of Bart Simpson being chased by Principal Skinner and calling him a “non-giving-up… school guy”

The preacher meets his match

The children end up seeking shelter with Rachel Cooper (Lillian Gish), a no-nonsense tough woman with a heart of gold who looks after stray children. Powell manages to track them down, but Rachel pretty much immediately sees through his lie about being the children’s father and runs him off her property with a shotgun. Powell returns to her house after dark and after an all-night standoff, Rachel manages to give Powell a face full of birdshot (this is where he lets out the “YEAOOOOOOWWWW”). Powell hides in the barn and Rachel calls the state police on him. Powell is arrested and during his trial just about avoids falling victim to a lynch mob led by the townsfolk.

It is implied that he will be executed for his crimes, and John and Pearl spend their first Christmas together with Rachel, safe at last.

While the film was a failure with both critics and audiences on release, it’s since undergone a re-evaluation (which started as most re-evaluations do with a small cult following screening it regularly) and is now rightly regarded as a bonafide classic, with a number of accolades to its name. The Night of the Hunter has been referenced by countless films and TV shows in the decades since. Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing has Bill Nunn’s character Radio Raheem (who wears brass knuckles saying “love” and “hate”) give a speech which is almost a verbatim copy of Powell’s speech about love and hate. The Simpsons has Sideshow Bob sporting “luv" and "hāt" knuckle tattoos in the classic episode “Cape Feare” (itself a parody of Cape Fear - Robert Mitchum played Max Cady in the original). The Coen Brothers have referenced the film on a number of occasions in their work.

It’s a truly singular film, a unique expressionist vision with a bone chilling villainous performance at its centre. Mitchum’s body language, facial expressions and tone of voice (you will never un-hear him yelling CHIL…DREEEEEEN) all add to a character that, while bordering on cartoonish if he weren’t so terrifying, feels very real. A man who, led by his own twisted sense of superior morality and hunger for money, leads people into his orbit, gaining their trust to the point where they would not believe you if you told them of his true colours. A man who is ultimately deeply, immensely pathetic.

Preacher Powell feels very real because we are continuously confronted with men exactly like him, in the news, in our real lives, in our orbit. And that is what ultimately makes The Night of the Hunter, a movie nearly seventy years old, painfully relevant still.