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HEAVEN AND HELL TO PLAY WITH: THE FILMING OF THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER
by Preston Neal Jones
reviewed by MATTHEW PLOUFFE
a Film Comment online exclusive
At a time when many moviegoers get their inside look at filmmaking from the DVD "bonus materials" (which generally contain what-I-was-wearing-that-day director's commentary and glossy ads disguised as behind-the-scenes specials), author Preston Neal Jones's Heaven and Hell to Play With: The Filming of Night of the Hunter (Limelight Editions, 398pp., $18.95) offers the kind of back story actually worth one's undivided attention. Using interviews conducted primarily between 1974 and 1977 with a dozen of the film's then-remaining cast and crew, Heaven and Hell to Play With succeeds in telling the complete story, straight from the horse's mouth. In intimate conversations, producer Paul Gregory, cinematographer Stanley Cortez, and the film's inimitable star Robert Mitchum recall the conception, production, and eventual box office failure of Charles Laughton's classic The Night of the Hunter (55), which marked the late actor's first and last foray into the director's chair.
Employing a remarkably successful cut-and-paste method to chronologically reconstruct the filming of Hunter, Jones ably pieces together the often enlightening, sometimes conflicting, and always fascinating remembrances of Laughton's accomplished cast and crew. What results is a kind of conglomerate memoir, its holes filled in by the author's informal commentary and critical analysis. Often referring to Hunter's original footage, Jones quotes from Laughton's take-by-take direction, inserts copies of his personal correspondence, and litters the pages with sketches from various production notebooks; Heaven and Hell to Play With is a copiously researched work from an author with a particular interest in the methods of a master actor turned neophyte director.
Effectively conjuring the deceased Laughton by focusing particularly on his relationships with cast and crew, the author's piecemeal method manages to paint a vivid portrait of the soft-spoken director in and around those 36 days during which Hunter was filmed. Producer Paul Gregory's colorful recollections of the man whom he endearingly refers to as "that fat son of a bitch," reveal a personal and professional awe beneath his coarse exterior language. The film's star, Robert Mitchum, who managed to get through the shoot without performing too many of his characteristic bad-boy antics (save the incident in which he urinated on Gregory's car) reveals his desire to act professionally simply out of respect and admiration for Laughton. It may, however, be actor Peter Graves's comments about his director, drawn from the memoirs of Elsa Lanchester, which present the most flattering and telling recollections: "Going from working for [John] Ford to working for Laughton, the actor decided, was like 'walking into heaven.'"
Part of what makes the book worthwhile is that many of the interviewees are remarkably candid with Jones about the production's flaws. Novelist Davis Grubb, who wrote the book on which the film is based, remarks, "When I see the picture now, I'm always sitting there apprehensively waiting for the laughs that used to come all the time when Preacher would slip on the cellar steps... This hurt me terribly when I first saw it; I thought, Jesus, I didn't plan this for comedy." On the next page, in a moment of realization, second unit director Terry Sanders recalls, "When the Preacher... slips and all that, it's sort of slapsticky the way it's staged. That's supposed to be funny. That was probably a mistake, because I think audiences would rather be scared...There's something conflictive about that." Often, the cast and crew just flat out contradict each other, recounting multiple variations of the same stories or (as with Mitchum and the alleged urination incident) denying that they ever took place. But the two decades of distance between Jones's subjects and their production results in honest, frank discussion, and the lack of nostalgia which sometimes colors similar recollections is welcome.
Doubtlessly, die-hard fans of the film, Laughton, or Mitchum, will find Heaven and Hell to Play With an invaluable addition to their library. The candid and enriching interviews are alone worth the price of the book. And though Preston Neal Jones's own commentary is often saturated with a biased affection for the "flawed masterpiece," his zeal makes for engaging, passionate writing, and there's is always something worthwhile to be learned about a film from a person who is completely enamored of it, whether they're justified or not. - MATTHEW PLOUFFE
© 2003 by The Film Society of Lincoln Center
