silver nitrate notes

Stanley Cortez and the Theology of Charles Laughton

13 oct 2022

The Night of the Hunter (1955) was a commercial failure. Charles Laughton (1899-1962), the actor who directed it, never directed another film. He died seven years later. The film entered the canon over the next twenty-five years, on the strength of programming at retrospectives and the slow recognition that Stanley Cortez (1908-1997) had photographed something American cinema had not photographed before.

Cortez had been a working cinematographer since the early 1930s. His best-known previous credit was The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) for Welles. Before that, The Black Cat (1934). He had a reputation for taking on assignments other cinematographers had refused, and for making the result look like the most expensive film of the year on a quarter of the budget. Laughton hired him for The Night of the Hunter on Welles's recommendation.

What Cortez and Laughton did is take German Expressionism, route it through American Southern Gothic, and shoot it in 1955 lighting style. The famous shots are the obvious ones. Robert Mitchum as Harry Powell, the false preacher, photographed in silhouette riding a horse along a hilltop, the moonlit sky behind him. The two children, John and Pearl, drifting downriver in a small boat at night, lit so that the foreground reeds and the foreground spider's web are in focus and the boat is a small bright shape in the middle distance. Shelley Winters dead at the bottom of the river, her hair drifting in the current, her car a black geometric form in the depth.

The set design is what makes the lighting work. The Powell house is a real exterior matched to a studio interior built so that the staircase, the bedroom doors, and the upstairs windows form a rigid geometry of triangles and rectangles. Cortez lights into this geometry with hard, low key sources that throw long diagonal shadows. The shadows do as much narrative work as the actors do.

There is a scene in the children's bedroom where Powell, off screen, is singing a hymn outside the house. John lies in bed terrified, listening. Cortez has lit the room from a single window source, raked across the floor. Powell's silhouette appears on the bedroom wall as a moving shadow, gigantic, the hat visible as a black triangle. The silhouette grows as Powell approaches the window. We never see Powell. We see what John sees, which is a wall full of dread. This is not a borrowed effect. It is one of the cleanest demonstrations in American cinema of what monochrome image-making can do that other visual media cannot.

James Agee wrote the screenplay before he died. He drank himself to death the year of the film's release. The Hollywood industry noticed neither his death nor his last film. Both turned out to be losses we only understood years later.

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sources
[1] Callow, Simon. Charles Laughton: A Difficult Actor. Methuen, 1987.
[2] Jones, Preston Neal. Heaven and Hell to Play With: The Filming of The Night of the Hunter. Limelight, 2002.
[3] Cortez, Stanley. Interview in American Cinematographer, October 1975.
[4] Agee, James. Agee on Film: Criticism and Comment on the Movies. Beacon, 1958.