film classics
KEITH UHLICH
The Night of the Hunter (1955, Charles Laughton, United States) For his only directorial effort, actor Charles Laughton chose to adapt a fanciful horror of a novel by Davis Grubb about a bestial preacher/serial killer who terrorizes a West Virginian family. Robert Mitchum brilliantly plays the evil reverend, Harry Powell, who insinuates himself into the lives of the Harper family (Shelley Winters plays the mother, Billy Chapin and Sally Jane Bruce the two children), at first to secure an illicit payout courtesy the jailed patriarch Ben (Peter Graves). But it’s clear Powell most gets off on the power he wields over people (a potent early image is a closeup of his switchblade piercing through his pants pocket — the sexual charge of the moment is unmistakable). The children eventually go on the run and are taken in by the kindly and protective Rachel (Lillian Gish), who treats Powell like the demon-in-flesh he truly is. Laughton approaches the story like an adult fairy tale with shadow-laden deep focus photography by Stanley Cortez and a poetic screenplay by James Agee heightening the aura of unearthliness. And yet somehow the disturbing feelings the film evokes, particularly about the nature of good and evil, are all-too-recognizably human. (Streaming on AppleTV.) Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, W. Germany) A standout in the already towering filmography of German writer-director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul reworks Douglas Sirk’s great melodrama All That Heaven Allows into a much more grittily thematic, if still lushly visual romance. Emmi (Brigitte Mira) is a 60-something German widow and window cleaner who happens into a friendship, and then a love affair, with Moroccan guest worker Ali (El Hedi ben Salem). Their relationship exposes the micro and macro racial fault lines in post-war Germany, as both family members and complete strangers let their hatred get the better of them. Fassbinder’s blend of the soberly quotidian (the down-in-the-muck ambience of political, economic, and spiritual poverty that envelops all the characters) with the luxuriantly theatrical (see, for example, the dreamlike lighting in the bar in which Ali and Emmi first meet) is beyond compare and especially astonishing given that he shot the film in just under two weeks as an exercise in-between larger productions. (Streaming on Criterion Channel.) Beau Travail (1999, Claire Denis, France) One of the ten greatest films of all time according to Sight and Sound’s recent once-a-decade poll, Claire Denis’ loose adaptation of Herman Melville’s novella Billy Budd will reorient your sense of what cinema can be. The slender narrative is concerned with the repressed longings C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E 2 2 20
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