Yea, my Netflix queue is back & going strong.
Synopsis : A man (Peter Graves) steals a sack o' cash & tells his kids where he buried it. The thief gets caught & does time w\ the "Reverend" Harry Powell. Powell gets outta jail & goes looking for the loot.
There's three key players in this. I'll get to them later. First off, this was Charles Laughton's only directorial effort. Fucking why? He manages to shoot a fucking classic of suspense & terror. What we have here is a Hitchcock film with less psychological terror & more visual scare tactics (provided by Robert Mitchum).
There are four reasons why this film kicks as much ass as it does. The number three reason is Charles Laughton. The number four reason is Ben Chapin who plays the son of Peter Graves. Best child acting I've seen in forever.
The second reason is Lillian Gish as the shotgun-wielding granny. There is a weird duality between her & Mitchum as they occupy opposite ends of the moral spectrum & claim moral superiority from the same source. Mitchum, at one point, says he spoke to the "Almighty Himself." Where Mitchum is a violent murderer that uses religion as an excuse to kill more, Gish uses the same God to fight him off. All this including a damn fine performance.
The biggest fucking reason for this film's impact is Robert Mitchum. Mayhaps one of the finest actors to play a psycho since Nicholson in "The Shining," he provides a genuinely creepy-ass villain. Know that gimmick where someone's got "LOVE" and "HATE" tattooed on their knuckles? This is where that shit started. Everything about Mitchum's character is meant to intimidate. The clothes, the eyes, the words, every-fucking-thing. Rather than play a raving loon, Mitchum's preacher was meant to be a quiet maniac, akin to Norman Bates or Hannibal Lector. Perhaps the actors just suck today or the writers can write decent villains anymore, but even fifty-plus years after being made, Harry Powell is still one of the greatest evil fuckers ever dreamt up.
Verdict : 4.5 stars (goddamned lackluster showdown).