TCM Schedule for Wednesday, March 19 -- MUTINY SCRUTINY

[Longhorn]

5:30am Bop Girl (1957)
A psychiatrist predicts that calypso will replace rock 'n' roll.
Cast: Judy Tyler, Bobby Troup, Lucien Littlefield. Dir: Howard W. Koch. BW-80 mins, TV-G

7:00am Strange Woman, The (1946)
An unscrupulous 19th-century woman will stop at nothing to control the men in her life.
Cast: Hedy Lamarr, George Sanders, Louis Hayward. Dir: Edgar G. Ulmer. BW-99 mins, TV-PG

8:45am Across The Pacific (1942)
An American agent tries to keep Axis spies from blowing up the Panama Canal.
Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Sydney Greenstreet. Dir: John Huston. C-97 mins, TV-PG

10:30am Ambassador's Daughter, The (1956)
A diplomat's daughter in Paris turns a fact-finding mission into a non-stop party.
Cast: Olivia de Havilland, John Forsythe, Myrna Loy. Dir: Norman Krasna. C-103 mins, TV-G

12:30pm Tomorrow Is Forever (1946)
A scarred veteran presumed dead returns home to find his wife remarried.
Cast: Orson Welles, Claudette Colbert, George Brent. Dir: Irving Pichel. BW-104 mins, TV-PG

2:30pm Saboteur (1942)
A young man accused of sabotage goes on the lam to prove his innocence.
Cast: Robert Cummings, Priscilla Lane, Norman Lloyd. Dir: Alfred Hitchcock. BW-109 mins, TV-PG

4:30pm Night Of The Hunter, The (1955)
A bogus preacher marries an outlaw's widow in search of the man's hidden loot.
Cast: Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters, Lillian Gish. Dir: Charles Laughton. BW-93 mins, TV-PG

6:15pm Thunder Road (1958)
A fast-driving moonshiner locks horns with a Chicago gangster.
Cast: Robert Mitchum, Gene Barry, Keely Smith. Dir: Arthur Ripley. BW-93 mins, TV-PG

What's On Tonight: TCM PRIME TIME FEATURE: MUTINY SCRUTINY

8:00pm Caine Mutiny, The (1954)
Naval officers begin to suspect their captain of insanity.
Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Jose Ferrer, Van Johnson. Dir: Edward Dmytryk. C-125 mins, TV-PG

10:15pm Mutiny on the Bounty (1962)
Lavish remake of the classic tale of the villainous Captain Bligh who drives his crew to revolt during a South Seas expedition.
Cast: Marlon Brando, Trevor Howard, Richard Harris. Dir: Lewis Milestone. C-185 mins, TV-PG

1:30am Damn The Defiant! (1962)
The crew of a British sailing ship threatens mutiny during the Napoleonic wars.
Cast: Alec Guinness, Dirk Bogarde, Anthony Quayle. Dir: Lewis Gilbert. C-101 mins, TV-PG

3:15am Battleship Potemkin, The (1925)
In this silent classic, a Russian mutiny triggers revolutionary sentiments around the nation.
Cast: Alexander Antonov, Grigori Alexandrov, Vladimir Barsky. Dir: Sergei Eisenstein. BW-69 mins, TV-G

[Longhorn]

1. Night of the Hunter, The (1955)

In his own words, director Charles Laughton described The Night of the Hunter (1955) as "a nightmarish sort of Mother Goose tale." Based on a popular novel by David Grubb, the film takes place in West Virginia during the Depression and follows a homicidal preacher as he stalks two children, a brother and sister, across the rural landscape. The reason for his pursuit is $10,000 in cash and it's stuffed inside a doll the little girl is carrying.

Laughton worked with James Agee on the screenplay but the famous author of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men had a severe drinking problem (he died the same year) and the screenplay he delivered was a mammoth script by Hollywood standards that Laughton had to whittle down to an acceptable length. Although Agee biographer Lawrence Bergman maintained that Laughton had to rewrite most of screenplay, the discovery of Agee's first draft of the script in 2004 proved that it reflected Laughton's final release version, almost scene for scene.

Laughton had a much more positive working experience with his second-unit directors, Terry and Denis Sanders, whose documentary film, A Time Out of War (1954) won an Oscar®, and cinematographer, Stanley Cortez. The latter once remarked: "Apart from The Magnificent Ambersons, the most exciting experience I have had in the cinema was with Charles Laughton on Night of the Hunter..every day I consider something new about light, that incredible thing that can't be described. Of the directors I've worked with, only two have understood it: Orson Welles and Charles Laughton."

The casting was also exceptional and Laughton coaxed excellent performances from Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters, and Lillian Gish. However, he developed an aversion to the two child actors and when he overheard the little boy, Billy Chapin, brag about winning the New York Critics' Circle Prize for a recent play, Laughton roared, "Get that child away from me." After that, the two children took their direction mostly from Mitchum. The only other problem Laughton encountered was having to juggle his shooting schedule so that Mitchum could begin work on his next film, Not as a Stranger (1955).

Ignored and misunderstood at the time of its release, except by a handful of critics, The Night of the Hunter had to wait several decades before it took its rightful place alongside other revered works of the American cinema like John Ford's The Searchers (1956) and Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958). It was the sole directorial effort of actor Charles Laughton and he took the film's commercial failure very hard, abandoning any future plans to direct another film.

Yet, The Night of the Hunter is anything but a failure and is chock full of riches: Robert Mitchum creates a chilling portrait of evil in one of his finest performances (and one of his personal favorites); the rock-steady presence of Lillian Gish is both a homage and a direct link to the films of D.W. Griffith, the film pioneer Laughton pays tribute to with this movie; the shimmering beauty of Stanley Cortez's cinematography also recalls the shadows and lighting of other silent era classics by Fritz Lang and Josef von Sternberg, and the music score by Walter Schumann is unusually evocative, mixing hymns, children's songs, and orchestral effects.

Director: Charles Laughton
Producer: Paul Gregory
Screenplay: James Agee, Charles Laughton (uncredited), based on the novel by Davis Grubb
Cinematography: Stanley Cortez
Editor: Robert Golden
Art Direction: Hilyard Brown
Music: Walter Schumann
Cast: Robert Mitchum (Rev. Harry Powell), Shelley Winters (Willa Harper), Lillian Gish (Rachel Cooper), James Gleason (Birdie Steptoe), Evelyn Varden (Icey Spoon).
BW-93m. Letterboxed. Closed captioning.

by Jeff Stafford

[Lydia Leftcoast]

2. That movie has some of the most stunning b&w cinematography I've ever seen

I saw it in a revival house in Portland, and I mentioned it to a friend who hadn't seen it for some forty years. She was able to recall several shots from it, like Lillian Gish at the window with the rifle across her lap, the car in the river, Robert Mitchum standing outside the gate in the dark, and Mitchum and Winters in a bedroom that looks like something out of German Expressionism.

I found the little girl oddly irritating, though, with her obviously dubbed voice and her hair that made her look like a poodle.