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The Night of the Hunter is a 1953 thriller novel by American author Davis Grubb. The book was a national bestseller and a finalist for the 1955 National Book Award.
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The Night of the Hunter is a 1953 thriller novel by American author Davis Grubb. The book was a national bestseller and a finalist for the 1955 National Book Award.
Murderous ex-convict Harry Powell misrepresents himself as a prison chaplain upon his release from prison. Acting on a story told to him by his now-dead cellmate, Preacher Powell cons the cellmate's widow, Willa Harper, into marrying him in hopes that her children will tell him where their father hid the money from his last robbery. After killing their mother, he embarks on a hunt for the children, who have sensed his evil and are running from him.
Grubb explores the presentation of the American South during the Great Depression. He uses tropes of the Southern Gothic genre to explore issues such as social corruption and instability.
The plot was based on the true story of Harry Powers, who was hanged in 1932 for the murders of two widows and three children in Quiet Dell, West Virginia. [1]
In 1955, the book was adapted by Charles Laughton and James Agee as the film The Night of the Hunter. The film version has earned ranks in numerous movie lists [2] [3] and was added to the National Film Registry in 1992. Despite its critical success, The Night of the Hunter remained the only film ever directed by Laughton. [4] The book was remade as a 1991 television movie starring Richard Chamberlain in the role of Preacher Harry Powell, a role made famous by Robert Mitchum in the 1955 version.
Lyricist-librettist Stephen Cole and composer Claibe Richardson started working on a musical adaptation sometime in the late 1990s, releasing a concept album in 1998 through the Fynsworth Alley label. [5] Cole wrote preliminary forms of the book and lyrics, which earned him the 2000 Kleban Award for Most Promising Librettist, while Richardson composed a score. After going through a workshop revision phase, the show was premiered at the Willow's Theatre in Concord, California, on September 24, 2004. It was directed and produced by John Bowab, and starred Brian Noonan (from the original workshop cast) as Harry Powell and Lynne Wintersteller as Willa. The show received mixed reviews, [6] [7] but received four awards from the Bay Area Critics Circle. [8] The show moved on to the New York Musical Theatre Festival in 2006, the last performance being on October 1. [9] The cast included Brian Noonan, Carly Rose Sonenclar, Dee Hoty as Willa, Beth Fowler as Rachel Cooper, and others, some of whom were in the original workshops.
City Lit Theater of Chicago, Illinois presented the world premiere of a stage adaptation of "The Night of the Hunter" by Shawna Tucker which opened October 29, 2023 as part of the theater's forty-third season with Producer and Artistic Director Terry McCabe. [10] [11] The adaptation was directed by Brian Pastor, the incoming artistic director at City Lit and starred Bryan Breau as Preacher, Jacqui Touchet as John, Kendal Romero as Willa, Mary Margaret McCormack as Pearl, and Shawna Tucker [12] as Miz Cooper. Also in the cast: Alex Albrecht, Simmery Branch, Richard Cotovsky, Sean Harkelrode, and Sheila Willis.
Ruggles of Red Gap is a 1935 American comedy film directed by Leo McCarey and starring Charles Laughton, Mary Boland, Charlie Ruggles, and ZaSu Pitts and featuring Roland Young and Leila Hyams. It was based on the best-selling 1915 novel by Harry Leon Wilson, adapted by Humphrey Pearson, with a screenplay by Walter DeLeon and Harlan Thompson. It is the story of a newly rich American couple from the West who win a British gentleman's gentleman in a poker game.
Charles Laughton was a British-American actor. He was trained in London at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and first appeared professionally on the stage in 1926. In 1927, he was cast in a play with his future wife Elsa Lanchester, with whom he lived and worked until his death.
The Night of the Hunter is a 1955 American film noir thriller directed by Charles Laughton and starring Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters and Lillian Gish. The screenplay by James Agee was based on the 1953 novel of the same name by Davis Grubb. The plot involves a serial killer who poses as a preacher and charms an unsuspecting widow to get his hands on $10,000 in stolen bank loot hidden by her executed husband.
Robert Charles Durman Mitchum was an American actor. He is known for his antihero roles and film noir appearances. He received nominations for an Academy Award and a BAFTA Award. He received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1984 and the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award in 1992. Mitchum is rated number 23 on the American Film Institute's list of the greatest male stars of classic American cinema.
James Rufus Agee was an American novelist, journalist, poet, screenwriter and film critic. In the 1940s, writing for Time Magazine, he was one of the most influential film critics in the United States. His autobiographical novel, A Death in the Family (1957), won the author a posthumous 1958 Pulitzer Prize. Agee is also known as a co-writer of the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and as the screenwriter of the film classics The African Queen and The Night of the Hunter.
5 Card Stud is a 1968 American Western mystery film directed by Henry Hathaway and starring Dean Martin and Robert Mitchum. The script is based on a novel by Ray Gaulden and was written by Marguerite Roberts, who also wrote the screenplay of True Grit for Hathaway the following year.
Lux Radio Theatre, sometimes spelled Lux Radio Theater, a classic radio anthology series, was broadcast on the NBC Blue Network (1934–35) ; CBS Radio network (1935–54), and NBC Radio (1954–55). Initially, the series adapted Broadway plays during its first two seasons before it began adapting films. These hour-long radio programs were performed live before studio audiences. The series became the most popular dramatic anthology series on radio, broadcast for more than 20 years and continued on television as the Lux Video Theatre through most of the 1950s. The primary sponsor of the show was Unilever through its Lux Soap brand.
Climax! is an American television anthology series that aired on CBS from 1954 to 1958. The series was hosted by William Lundigan and later co-hosted by Mary Costa. It was one of the few CBS programs of that era to be broadcast in color, using the massive TK-40A color cameras pioneered and manufactured by RCA, and used primarily by CBS's rival network, NBC. Many of the episodes were performed and broadcast live, but, although the series was transmitted in color, only black-and-white kinescope copies of some episodes survive to the present day. The series finished at #22 in the Nielsen ratings for the 1955-1956 season and #26 for 1956-1957.
Davis Alexander Grubb was an American novelist and short story writer, best known for his 1953 novel The Night of the Hunter, which was adapted as a film in 1955 by Charles Laughton.
Night of the Hunter may refer to:
Harry Powell is a fictional character in Davis Grubb's 1953 novel The Night of the Hunter, known as "Preacher". He was portrayed by Robert Mitchum in Charles Laughton's 1955 film adaptation, and by Richard Chamberlain in the 1991 TV movie. Preacher was voted 29th on the American Film Institute's top 50 villains of all time list.
Joseph Stein was an American playwright best known for writing the books for such musicals as Fiddler on the Roof and Zorba.
John Mitchum was an American actor from the 1940s to the 1970s in film and television. The younger brother of the actor Robert Mitchum, he was credited as Jack Mitchum early in his career.
William McClellan Chapin was an American child actor, known for a considerable number of screen and TV performances from 1943 to 1959 and best remembered for both his roles as the "diaper manager" Christie Cooper in the 1953 family feature The Kid from Left Field and little John Harper in Charles Laughton's 1955 film noir movie The Night of the Hunter.
Sally Jane Bruce is an American former child performer, best known for playing little Pearl Harper in Charles Laughton's 1955 film noir The Night of the Hunter.
Payment Deferred is a 1932 American pre-Code crime drama film, starring Charles Laughton as a man so desperate for money, he resorts to murder. It was based on the 1931 play of the same name by Jeffrey Dell, which was in turn based on the 1926 novel of the same name by C. S. Forester. Laughton also played the lead role in the play, which opened on Broadway on September 30, 1931 and ran for 70 performances.
The Naked and the Dead is a 1958 World War II film directed by Raoul Walsh, and based on the 1948 novel of the same name by Norman Mailer. The screenplay was written by brothers Denis and Terry Sanders, and the film was shot in Panama on Technicolor film. The movie adds a strip tease and an action scene to the story in the novel. It is one of the last films produced by RKO before the studio's closure. The film was released by Warner Bros. It was the last film that Walsh directed for Warner Bros.
Harry F. Powers was a Dutch-born American serial killer who was hanged in Moundsville, West Virginia.
Night of the Hunter is a 1991 American television film directed by David Greene starring Richard Chamberlain as a self-styled preacher who is a psychotic serial killer pursuing two children for $50,000 in money stolen by their father after marrying and murdering their widowed mother. The film also stars Burgess Meredith in the role of her son's friend, the river rat Birdy.
Paul Gregory was an American film, theatre and television producer.