Book Description

Reaching simultaneously into the realms of film and literature, "The Night of the Hunter": A Biography of a Film details the transformation of Davis Grubb's 1953 novel into a motion picture. A popular and critical success, the novel spent four months on the New York Times bestseller list, and Hollywood responded to its atmospheric lyricism. In the hands of first-time director Charles Laughton, the story became equal parts thriller, allegory, and fever dream, filled with slow, inexorable suspense. Yet the film initially failed at the box office. In the first major study of the long-lost first-draft screenplay by James Agee, Jeffrey Couchman confronts a fifty-year controversy about the authorship of the film. He explores many levels of artistic convergence-between novelist and director, director and actor, and cinematic form and audience expectations. The talents that clashed or came together along the road from book to movie created a film of rich stylistic contradiction. Combining biographical and historical analysis with a critical study of both the novel and the film, Couchman makes the case that this initially overlooked cinematic gem is a prismatic work that continually reveals new aspects of itself. Book jacket.