Driving by his deep will of taking the money, Harry Powell, a villain, who claims to be a preacher, who marries a widow to take the money stolen by her executed husband, the thing that brings terrible for him.
This start for Gregory as producer and Laughton as director is rich in promise but the completed product, bewitching at times, loses sustained drive via too many offbeat touches that have a misty effect.
A unique blend of fractured fairy tale, Southern gothic grisliness and striking German expressionism, it also has some pitch-black humor thrown in for good measure.
It's overwrought and lurid; the story is grotesque and so are the characters. It's unlike anything else before and since. And that is why this strident psychological horror stands up now as one of the great pieces of American genre cinema.
A classic that is beautifully restored to life, successfully mixing lightness and humour in a dark film that would even have Frankenstein's monster running for cover.
A magnificent example of a movie doing what movies do best: capturing emotions on film and presenting a feverish, imaginative state with the tactile quality of the real.
Mitchum gives one of cinema's greatest performances as a demented man who's one part preacher, one part murderer, and totally determined to track down a stash of stolen loot in the possession of two kids.
All this has been crisply compacted into clear screen drama by the late James Agee and it is put forth under the direction of Mr. Laughton in stark, rigid visual terms.
Tom Huddleston
Time Out
January 26, 2006
It's the most haunted and dreamlike of all American films, a gothic backwoods ramble with the Devil at its heels.
