April 21 – The Night of the Hunter, 1955, 93 minutes, directed by Charles Laughton, starring Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters, and Lillian Gish.
British actor Charles Laughton directed only one film, and it's nearly as astonishing a debut as Orson Welles' Citizen Kane. Robert Mitchum is Reverend Harry Powell, a wanderer with "LOVE" and "HATE" tattooed on his fingers. He's a serial killer sprung from prison, and he's in search of money a fellow inmate stashed before his execution. While a contemporary director might turn this into a splatter-fest, Laughton suffuses The Night of the Hunter with unsurpassed eerie dreamscapes. It's a triumph of sustained mood, with biblical allusions to humans and nature, purity and sin. Nothing quite like The Night of the Hunter has appeared before or since.
April at CinemaLit is devoted to critical favorites of the highest order – films that have been judged as among the greatest ever made.
Every ten years since 1952, the British Film Institute's Sight and Sound magazine publishes a list of the "Top 100 Greatest Films of All Time." The films come from an opinion poll of critics, programmers, archivists, curators, and academics. Of course everyone has opinions, and the list invites debate. As the number of films in the world has grown considerably in the last seventy years, various titles have moved up and down in ranking, or disappeared from the top 100 all together. The very moving Italian neorealist Bicycle Thieves (1948) was the first film ranked at number one, and it's forty-first in the 2022 poll. With the expanding participation of over sixteen hundred film professionals, the most recent list is more international and culturally diverse than ever.
We at CinemaLit have screened several of the top 100 in the last couple of years: Tokyo Story (1953), The Rules of the Game (1939), Cléo From 5 to 7 (1962), Do the Right Thing (1989), Rashomon (1950), Killer of Sheep (1978), The 400 Blows (1959), Moonlight (2016), Daughters of the Dust (1991), Ugetsu Monogatari (1953), and Get Out (2017). Join us in April as we add four more to the list, each an American classic made in the 1950s: The Apartment (1960), Rear Window (1954), The Night of the Hunter (1955), and Singin' in the Rain (1952). Do you think they belong in the top 100?
Matthew Kennedy, CinemaLit’s curator, has written biographies of Marie Dressler, Joan Blondell, and Edmund Goulding. His book Roadshow! The Fall of Film Musicals in the 1960s, was the basis of a film series on Turner Classic Movies.
“I don't have a favorite film,” Matthew says. "I find that my relationships to films, actors, genres, and directors change as I change over the years. Some don't hold up. Some look more profound, as though I've caught up with their artistry. I feel that way about Garbo, Cary Grant, director John Cassavetes, and others."
“Classic films have historical context, something only time can provide,” Matt observes. “They become these great cultural artifacts, so revealing of tastes, attitudes, and assumptions.”
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