NIGHT OF THE HUNTER (Charles Laughton, Robert Mitchum, 1955)

Self-proclaimed preacher Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum, memorable) murders widows, taking their money and orphaning their children in this gothic Depression fable. A “false prophet” fond of quoting scripture in his rural travels, he embodies the risk to children during hard times. Correlative to this is a predatory universe, Nature “red in tooth and claw.” We watch a fox leap upon unseen prey; we hear a rabbit give up a death-squeal as an owl in a tree leaves the frame for its meal-time descent. All this reflects on the vulnerability of “little ones.” But children are tough; they adapt; they “abide and endure.”
     In Night of the Hunter Ben is nine, Pearl, four. After Powell murders their mother, Willa Harper, Ben and Pearl flee, with their stepfather in hot pursuit. Powell is after Pearl’s doll—a corrupted innocent thing—inside which is hidden money that their real father stole. The pair are taken in by Rachel Hooper (Lillian Gish, brilliant), who cares for poor children to compensate for her estrangement from her grown son. A person of faith, Rachel matches wits and will with Powell, eventually capturing him and turning him over to the law.
     Charles Laughton atmospherically directed from James Agee’s fine adaptation of Davis Grubb’s novel. Assisted by art director Hilyard Brown and black-and-white cinematographer Stanley Cortez, Laughton sculpted in darkness and light, correlative to the battle between evil and good, with church steeple-like triangular cut-outs in both Willa’s bedroom and basement. Laughton also created movie screen-like openings in the mise-en-scène, paying homage to cinema.
     Upon its initial release, this film was ridiculously ignored, dismissed; now it is ridiculously overrated. Three things cut into its level of achievement: thin material; sluggish pace; the incompetent acting of Shelley Winters as Willa.

JUDEX (Georges Franju, 1963)

Although just as beautiful, perhaps more so, Georges Franju’s remake of Louis Feuillade’s 1916 Judex is as different from the original as is night from day. It is slower and graver; it is also more darkly magical (Judex, this time, is a magician—a touch here of Fritz Lang’s 1921 Destiny?); its world isn’t ours, as it is in Feuillade’s version, but something stranger, more self-contained; it is a period-piece. It is also in black and white (Marcel Pradetal, his cinematographer, helps make Franju’s film by far the more gorgeous of the two); but Franju’s Judex is moody and mysterious, and also somewhat deterministic, while Feuillade’s is airier, freer, lighter and more open. Feuillade’s Judex is touched by dream(s); Franju’s whole film feels subterranean, as though playing out in his or somebody else’s unconscious. In both style and tone, the film is scarcely different from Franju’s grim, sorrowful Eyes Without a Face (1959), although here we get to see Edith Scob’s lovely face—and also likely determine that her profound performance far outdistances that of Feuillade’s Jacqueline, Yvette Andréyor. (On the other hand, Franju’s Jacques Jouanneau is no match for Feuillade’s Cocantin, Marcel Lévesque.)
     Of course, another difference is striking and omnipresent: Feuillade’s film is silent; Franju’s isn’t—although the absence of extraneous noise gives his Judex, at times, an eerier quiet. There is considerable talk in both versions, but few titles in Feuillade’s, where the pantomime-like acting more often conveys the gist of what people are saying. (Yes, film actors had faces then—but also hands.)
     One thing more: Franju’s camera moves, and evocatively; Feuillade’s doesn’t.
     One of Franju’s most brilliant passages is the engagement party for Favraux’s daughter, where bird-head masks disguise the host, Jacqueline and the intruder, Judex. This grotesque expressionistic dream plays out in waking time.

JUDEX (Louis Feuillade, 1916)

Wealthy Jacques de Tremeuse has an alternate identity: the caped avenger Judex—Latin, for Justice. He kidnaps and imprisons Favraux in a secret dungeon, leaving everyone to believe the Parisian banker is dead, after Favraux mistreats his elderly secretary, Vallières, and refuses to give half his ill-gotten fortune to the poor. But Judex has another, more personal motive: Once upon a time, Favraux financially destroyed Jacques’ father, who committed suicide to avoid dishonor. Meanwhile, crooks kidnap, by turns, Favraux’s widowed daughter, Jacqueline, whom Judex rescues and with whom he falls in love, and her little son.
     Judex impersonates Vallières vis-à-vis Jacqueline, thus hiding from view his sexual interest. Here, the “good guys”—Jacques and his brother, Roger—kidnap as easily as do the greedy villains, Diana Monti and “Moralés” (another character assuming a false identity). Jacques’ father did not live long enough to learn that a gold mine of his panned out; we keep wondering what sort of person Jacques might have been had he not inherited his father’s wealth. Indeed, when kidnapped and marked for death he manages to substitute someone else, who is duly murdered, thereby becoming a kind of murderer himself. “Good” and “evil” fluctuate in this film, then, but love and forgiveness are ultimately triumphant, including the love of children, which turns a seedy character, private detective Cocantin, into a doting adoptive father, and an unexpected ally of righteousness.
     In this dreamlike film, with its fluttering, mesmerizing flight of two white pigeons and Jacqueline, in mourning black, walking down a rural path followed by a pack of benign partly white dogs, one sequence finds Judex imagining Jacqueline, who is thinking about her son, from whom she is separated: a dream within a dream.
     Louis Feuillade’s Judex is the dream that is cinema.