Noaptea vînătorului / The Night of the Hunter
Thriller, SUA, 1955
Regia: Charles Laughton
Cu:
Robert Mitchum
Shelley Winters
Lillian Gish
“Film inclasabil, care împrumută de la toate genurile cîte ceva pentru a ajunge la o operă a cărei poezie de factură onirică nu are antecedente în cinema, ci mai degrabă în literatura fantastică anglosaxonă.” (Philippe d’Huygues) (Cinema… un secol şi ceva, 2002)
“Într-un nume sens, este primul film cinefil din istoria cinematografului totodată cultivat și total inocent.” (Serge Daney) (Cinema… un secol şi ceva, 2002)
“Cel mai bun rol din cariera lui Robert Mitchum; imaginea lui în costum de pastor și cu degetele pe care are tatuate cuvintele “love” și “hate” devine celebră.” (Cinema… un secol şi ceva, 2002)
Roger Ebert: „Charles Laughton’s „The Night of the Hunter” (1955) is one of the greatest of all American films, but has never received the attention it deserves because of its lack of the proper trappings. Many „great movies” are by great directors, but Laughton directed only this one film, which was a critical and commercial failure long overshadowed by his acting career. Many great movies use actors who come draped in respectability and prestige, but Robert Mitchum has always been a raffish outsider. And many great movies are realistic, but „Night of the Hunter” is an expressionistic oddity, telling its chilling story through visual fantasy. People don’t know how to categorize it, so they leave it off their lists. […]
Charles Laughton showed here that he had an original eye, and a taste for material that stretched the conventions of the movies. It is risky to combine horror and humor, and foolhardy to approach them through expressionism. For his first film, Laughton made a film like no other before or since, and with such confidence it seemed to draw on a lifetime of work. Critics were baffled by it, the public rejected it, and the studio had a much more expensive Mitchum picture („Not as a Stranger”) it wanted to promote instead. But nobody who has seen „The Night of the Hunter” has forgotten it, or Mitchum’s voice coiling down those basement stairs: „Chillll . . . dren?””
La Rotundu 