Night of the Hunter is a terrific, weird, cheap, beautiful, dreamy and tacked-together masterpiece, a rare auteur film from the '50s Hollywood studio system as stylized as Douglas Sirk but all the more remarkable for being the sole directing effort of hammy but riveting actor Charles Laughton. It's a black-and-white fable with two innocent children--precocious Pearl and man-before-his-time John, defending their late father's stolen nest egg and their very lives from evil con man, phony preacher and legitimate psycho Robert Mitchum, he of the "LOVE" and "HATE" on his knuckles, lifted by De Niro for the Cape Fear remake. It's a film you have to give yourself to, because there are ample exit doors: the intentionally crude sets, with barns and houses often looking no better than school play dressing (clearly intentional), the thankless, infuriating mother role for Shelley Winters, who so quickly falls under new husband Mitchum's spell and betrays her children; and finally the cackling, hysterical hypocrisy of supporting character Icey Spoon (Evelyn Varden). It's a high-pitched movie at times that somehow turns into a quiet, nature-filled dream just when it should by rights start cranking up the action.

The film is not a noir, though it is sometimes labeled as such. It does start with some police activity, as murdering robber Peter Graves is arrested in front of son John, but after that crime isn't really the point. And neither, really, is the money. That's what creates the conflict between John and Mitchum's Harry Powell, but the movie is more a dark fable than anything else. Much power is derived from just how bad Mitchum gets with the kids. Laughton dispenses with cat-and-mouse games and one feels in several scenes that given just one more minute, Mitchum would just kill the children to get the money. Holding his own is Billy Chapin as John, his wise young face and even stride signaling to the viewer that he is the only one capable of standing up to Powell.

But he's still a boy, and as his unsuitable father figure, the drunk fisherman Birdie Steptoe, crumbles, John and Pearl take a journey upriver, the harmless frogs and bunnies on the shore eventually giving way to the predatory fox as Powell closes in, but there is safety in the Mother Goose-like Lillian Gish, a saintly woman caring for children abandoned during the Great Depression in which the film is set. What's at stake in the film is not money but innocence, and she does her best to keep John, Pearl, and the other children safe. In one of many haunting scenes, she sings a spiritual, "Safe in the Everlasting Arms," shotgun poised, as Powell lurks outside, harmonizing with her. They share the same God but seen from very different angles. The ending is surprisingly moving.

Curiously, IMDB uses "Oedipus complex" as a key phrase in their page for the film, but I don't see that at all. It's true that with the dad dead, John is the man of the house in the brief period before Powell arrives, but John is not competing for the job, nor is he competing for his mother's affection. He's a daddy's boy all the way, and both children are very distant from the Winters character. She hardly has any scenes with them.