Thoughts on Unforgiven (1992, dir. Clint Eastwood)

The first shot. The quaintly phrased "background" implies that a legend is about to be told.

131 min. WB/Malpaso Productions.  Directed and produced by Clint Eastwood.  Screenplay by David Webb Peoples.  Starring Clint Eastwood, Gene Hackman, Morgan Freeman and Jaimz Woolvett.

Amazon DVD – Blu-Ray.

Synopsis

The action is set in motion with a scene of a drunken cowboy attacking a prostitute in a small town “billiards hall.” The female staff of a small town brothel, disgusted by the objectifying response of the Sherrif (Gene Hackman), offer a $1000 bounty for whoever kills the cowboy and his accomplice.  William Munny (Clint Eastwood), a reformed and retired superkiller, is tempted to get back in the game by a young and vindictive “assassin” (Jaimz Woolvett). He eventually agrees to go and brings his friend Ned (Morgan Freeman) along.  The film follows uses the cover of their vendetta to uncover subtleties about each of their characters and ultimately, to make some serious statements about violence and justice.

Commentary

This film is clearly steeped in “old Eastwood” folklore.  In it, he reprises the quintessential Clint Eastwood character.  Cool and removed, he violently dominates all the other characters.  He’s not a particularly good person, but everyone else is really bad.  That would apply to The Good, the Bad and the Ugly(1965, dir. Sergio Leone) and Dirty Harry(1971, dir. Don Siegel) to name only his most famous roles.  Though he never sunk to playing just a tough-guy gunman and he always added just enough humor to keep you guessing what he was really thinking, Unforgiven is different.  He doesn’t just play the role of the tough-guy, he destroys it.

The film opens with a legendary type of scene: a few lines in 19th century American style describing Munny’s dead wife.  The lack of detail and storybook tone of the prose clearly evoke events that are not quite natural.  Munny is introduced to us not as a man but as a legend; a myth.  What is he?  I think that most basically he is violence.  Not some notion of necessary violence in the world but the perpetuation of violence that man cause with his actions.  Unforgiven offers no way to break that cycle, it just follows it through to its bitter end.  This is what happens in a world created by three decades of Clint Eastwood movies.

What Eastwood did with Unforgiven, to retrace the implications of his former self to their painful conclusions, bears a striking resemblance to the “American” comeback of Johnny Cash.   In 1994, Johnny Cash began his series of “American Recordings” with Rick Rubin.  Cash (or Rubin, as the case may be) capitalized on the classic myth of “The Man in Black” in order to reexamine the foundations upon which that myth was founded.  They ended up producing five of the best albums of Cash’s long and illustrious career.  In them, Cash dealt with the long term consequences of being a star of his stature–the drugs, the degradation and his ultimate salvation.  Beyond just the usual “it’s so hard to be famous” routine, Cash speaks about regret for the life that he lived, the pain that he caused people and describes the real solace that he found in his wife and the salvation that he found in Jesus.  He didn’t change his symbolic language but by reexamining himself with new eyes he uncovered the sadness and pain that were always festering behind his stiff virile persona.

The campfire fulfils its traditional role of catalyzing cathartic and terse man-to-man conversatioins

Eastwood forges a similar path.  William Munny was once all the nasty sides of ‘The Man with No Name,’ ‘Dirty Harry’ and ‘Josey Wales’ all rolled up in one.  But he’s left that, or so he thinks.  He’s been saved by his late wife.  Now he’s a man of peace, counting hogs and raising his children.  But, as is shown time and again, he is haunted by his past.  The dozens of men that he killed visit him in visions and nightmares and when given the encouragement, he sets out on a violent mission again.  Significantly, when trying to convince Ned to join him, he exaggerates the wrong that requires their revenge.  He adds on a few more violent touches (cut off her ears, other parts of the body) in an almost pathetic attempt to make his violent nature coincide with justice.  He’s lying to himself and he knows it–once The Kid kills the last cowboy and tries to justify it as “he had it coming,” Munny replies (in the most quoted line of the film) “We all have it coming.”

The pretense of justice as a cover for pure violence is revisited with the character of Sherriff ‘Little Bill’ Daggett.  Daggett is clearly the villain in the film even though it’s clear that he not only abuses his role as sheriff, he actually provides justice for Big Whiskey.  Without him, even more violence and injustice would reign.  But his behavior is unpardonable.  It’s clear that he’s driven first by sadism and only secondly by any sense of justice.  Even worse, he doesn’t realize the monster that he’s become.  In the final showdown he begs for his life, saying “I don’t deserve to die like this, I was Little Bill…”  But Munny understands what he was and who he is.  “Deserves’s got nothing to do with it,” he responds–the glory of violence is nothing but an illusion.

One the most telling scenes in Unforgiven is also seems to be one of its most uneventful.  After deciding to go after the “whores’ gold,” Munny tries to get back in to shape.  He tries to hit some cans with a handgun from a few yards away and misses time after time.  Not only is a scene like this almost unavoidable in a Western, it is inescapably similar to a scene in Eastwood’s earlier The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976).  In that film, he plays a farmer who is out for revenge from the hooligans who raped and killed his wife.  Out of necessity, Josey Wales consciously assumes the role of the murderer in order to set things right; he becomes an outlaw.  William Munny can’t.  Josey Wales quickly develops (or regains) the preternatural marksmanship that defines any Western hero.  (You can watch that scene here.) But William Munny, the most feared killer in all the land, can’t manage the most basic exercise of shooting cans off a fence.

Munny isn’t a character, he’s a force of nature.  He’s not meant to be “real,” in any classical sort of sense.  That’s established by the legend-like intro and coda.  Throughout the film he refuses to become the persona that he “should be” according to Western logic.  He doesn’t talk like a killer, ride like a killer or drink like a killer because he’s not a killer–he’s death itself.  In an interview quoted in John Saunders’ passable book The Western Genre: From Lordsburg to Big Whiskey , Eastwood said that the film was about ‘repercussions.’

The cowboys whose childish cruelty begins the film aren’t evil.  But they must suffer consequences.  “The Englishman,” Bill the Sheriff, Ned–they all suffer the repercussions of their actions.  Not because any of them are particularly good or bad but because all actions have consequences.  The only one who never pays the final price is William Munny.  Is that because the unending torment of living is worse than death for him?  Perhaps.  Or is he superhuman, in some sense?

Though most of the film takes place in poorly lit houses and at night, we are reminded of the frontier with vistas like these.

The Western is always characterized by being set on the frontier, on the border between civilization and the wild.  The ensuing anarchic culture has proven itself to be quite amenable to the film medium.  Depending on the approach of the author or director, this is used in different ways.  In the old fashioned Westerns, it was to amplify the presence of the hero.  In the more subtle Westerns, like Eastwood’s other classics and The Searchers (1956, dir, John Ford), the frontier and its lawlessness unmask the parts of human nature that are perforce covered in more developed societies.  Only in such a setting could Ford confront racism so directly. Kurosawa gave a similar reason for choosing to set many of his films in the pre-Tokugawa period of the “warring states:” human nature is more visible when society has subsided.  But this is the last Western.  This is the end of the line.  There’s something lethal in Munny’s character–not just for his enemies but for the mystique of the West itself.  You can see more about human nature when society isn’t as strict but what you see is devastating.

Saunders also points out the conspicuous lack of the definite article in the title.  Who isn’t forgiven?The cowboys?  The whores? The sheriff? The Kid? Ned? Munny?  A plausible case could be made for any one of them.  There are no winners this time and the losers have no glory.  This is the ugly side of the West, the inescapable repercussions of violence.

The most devastating scene in the film. The ambivalent assassins must suffer the dying cries of the essentially innocent young cowboy.

 

Commentary: ‘Sallah Shabati’ (1964, dir. Ephraim Kishon)

Looks like I’m beginning a trend of reviewing films directed by non-directors.  That’s probably fitting, seeing as I’m not really a film critic.

Sallah Shabati is one of those few films that have had such a strong impact on the culture that from the contemporary perspective, it becomes difficult to discern to what extent the film is imitating or lambasting its world and to what extent our collective memory of that world has been shaped by the film itself.  Given the circumstances of its creation–no film industry to speak of, the country barely staying afloat–it’s hard to quite pin it down.  But I’ll give it a try or at least to explain why it is difficult.

Israel, 110 minutes.  Golan Productions.  Written and directed by Efraim Kishon.  Starring Haim Topol, Geula Nuni, Arik Einstein and Shraga Friedman.

Amazon Link to ‘Sallah Shabati’

Synopsis

Sallah arrives with his large (and growing) family from an undisclosed Arab country to Israel.  Somehow he figures out that the government housing project, called “shikun” (שיכון) is the good place to live and tries to get housing there.  Despite his attempts, he is sent to the “maabarot” (מעברות) –temporary dwellings erected by the state until proper shikunim can be made available.  He tries half-heartedly to work but ends up just playing shesh-besh (backgammon) with his Ashkenazi neighbor.  In his struggle for the 1000 lira that he needs in order to get a shikun he butts heads with everyone from the neighboring kibbutz to corrupt politicians.  He tries to get a mohar (“bride price”) for his daughter, only to have to pay it back for his son to get married.  In the end, the only thing that works is for him to protest being moved into the shikun–on the principal that you never get what you want, only what you don’t want.

Commentary

Cinematically, the first thing that strikes the viewer of Sallah is its complete lack of style.    The shots are effective but for the most part not beautiful.  Given the Israeli mentality of that era, one is tempted to believe that a full de-stylization of the cinema would have fit the prevailing Zionist-socialist mindset.  It would be interesting to see how the social realism pioneered by Eisenstein, Vertov and Dovzhenko was accepted by the cinematic community of the extremely leftist early state of Israel.  Unfortunately, I don’t know anything about it.

Perhaps the destylization was ideological or perhaps it is just evidence of inexperience.  Kishon had never before made a film–and unlike Charles Laughton (see The Night of the Hunter), who had starred in over 50 films before he tried his hand at directing–Kishon had no idea how it’s done.  In an interview released with the DVD version of Sallah, he says that when he first got to the set he asked everyone, “Does anyone know how to make a film?” No one knew, so he began “the way an intelligent person would do it:” he sketched storyboards for each scene and took it from there.  In the interview, Kishon shows the original notebooks that they used to plan the film.  We see the script and the sketched scenes alongside them.  It is very interesting to compare these with the similar notebooks that Yasujiro Ozu and Koga Noda made when they wrote all of their films.  Selections from them are reprinted in Donald Richie’s Ozu: His Life and Films and their (at least external)  similarity to Kishon’s seem to vindicate the latter”s claim that there’s really only one “intelligent” way to make a film.

The film is a comedy and as such, it offers us the chance to discuss some of the general features of the genre much as we did with horror and The Night of the Hunter.  At the heart of comedy lies the following problem.  The things which happen to the people on screen are, for the most part, horrible.  We might even call them tragic (using the term casually).  And yet, we are supposed to find them funny and enjoyable to see.  In Mr. & Mrs. Smith (1941), Alfred Hitchcock made a film which, though well veneered with light-hearted comedy, had such a powerful and disturbing undercurrent that it overpowered the overtly comic element; thus returning the film to Hitchcock’s home territory–insanity, violence, the way two people can take romantic love and…well, I guess you’ll just have to see it to find out.

Many of the most successful comedies (Chaplin, Keaton) show events that in any other context would be considered awful–when buildings fall on people or when trains derail and plummet into a river it’s really much more awful than funny.  One of the main jobs of the comic director is to make sure that you are involved enough in the story to keep watching but not involved in a way that you sense the horror of what’s going on in the film’s world.  Keaton and Chaplin exploited a tradition of clowning–by looking different and acting oddly, they let the viewer relate to them as not-quite-human characters.  But in Sallah Shabati, the hero is a very real character (half the country acts like him to this day!) and his tribulations become increasingly realistic as the film progresses.

At the beginning of the film, Sallah is more or less a clown.  He explains to the driver that the old lady traveling with them must be a relative, (she came all this way, what else could she be?) He tells the housing bureau that he is a shoe-maker (after seeing the shoe-maker in front of him get sent to shikun) but that he’s never actually done it before (a recurring joke in the film).  But as the story progresses he becomes less like a clown and more like Job.  In a scene that is more acerbic than funny, he is fired from his tree-planting job after protesting the fact that the government sold the same forest to multiple donors.  Incapable of introspection and unwilling to compromise on his principles, he is reduced to a truly pathetic state.  This culminates in a scene in the rain where he calls out to the Lord, begging for a miracle to save him.  Though it fits the comic narrative (a poster for the elections is immediately lit by a lightening bolt, leading him to another bungled attempt at making money via selling his vote), the reality of the scene makes it painful to watch.  No longer happy-go-lucky and clueless, our clownish hero is dirty and broken.

And in true tragic fashion, it is unavoidable–both he and the system under which he suffers lack the adaptability/insight necessary to make things right.  After things are at their absolute worst, the story is turned around by an absurd ploy in which Sallah and co. protest against being moved into the shikunim.  This brings the authorities against them (nod nod wink wink) and they are forced to move into the shikunim. This whole subplot is so absurd, so sloganistic (“you never get what you want, always what you don’t want” is the oft repeated maxim) that it stands in stark relief to the painful realism of the rest of the film.  I understand this as an artificial attempt to make a tragedy into a comedy.  The world that has been created onscreen has proven itself as being purely antagonistic towards Sallah.  But few films as bleak as the first two thirds of Sallah are successful at speaking to anyone aside from the usual group of cinephiles (and Japanese)–so another fantasy world is tacked on to save him.

One gets the sense that Kishon’s worldview is ultimately one of pessimistic despair, a sort of victimization.  Unlike Mizoguchi (who often dealt with very similar themes) he tries to dress it in comedy to make it more palatable.  But the result is uneven at best. I disagree with the 1965 NY Times review which derides Sallah’s jests as “old.”  The film has many really funny moments.  Its percentage of funny screen time far surpasses such “classics” as The Producers or Blazing Saddles in which the repeatability of a handful of jokes is supposed to compensate for the other hour and a half of feeling like you’re supposed to be laughing but not.  But, unlike films like To Be or Not to Be (1942, dir. Ernst Lubitsch), in which every element from the pacing, to the characters, to the overall plot and sentiment contribute to a unique and powerful comic atmosphere, Sallah Shabati leaves the viewer confused.  I’m made to love this character, for his charm, his unique morality–and then I see how what I love in him is the very thing that destroys him.

I don’t mean to say that tragedy and comedy can never coincide.  Tragicomedy, black comedy–on the surface these might seem to be equivalent to what I find lacking in Sallah. But there is a significant difference.  Black comedy (and tragicomedy if I understand what it is) takes a situation and shows how the same incongruities which make it tragic can also be seen to make it funny.  In Sallah, one might be tempted to say the same thing.  The plight of the Sephardic immigrants in the 1950s was really bad but through the character of Sallah we can see that there was a humorous side to it as well and, through that, we can process the trauma and move on.  But in a certain sense, the film goes full circle and returns us to the tragedy from which we began thus undermining whatever new perspective we may have gained.  Perhaps that was the film’s intention, to sucker us in with a lovable character and then make us really feel the immigrants’ pain by showing him humiliated.

One of the responses that I got from my first review was: “How do you know that he really had this stuff in mind when he made the film?”  That is one of the most central questions when it comes to analyzing this or any other work of art.  With Laughton it was clear.  The whole film had such a continuity of style, the apparent themes were carried so masterfully by the acting, the photography, the music and the script, that there was little doubt that he had some ideas in his head and was doing his best to communicate them.  But with Kishon, I really don’t know.  Was the film meant to be read two or three layers deep?  Or was it meant to be a good laugh that took a couple of stabs at the establishment but ultimately got derailed by its own inner logic?

So if I had to sum up my opinion bottom line:  the film is really funny, it successfully skewers a whole host of 50s Israeli institutions but the amateurish style and the ultimate dissonance between the story and how it is told keep it from being a true comic masterpiece.

PS: I found this Chinese television site with a really funny synopsis of the film.  When you see how little they understood the situation of the film, it gives you a hint on how the world can be so clueless about so many other aspects of the modern middle east.  Be sure to check out the mms trailer!

 

The Night of the Hunter (1955, dir. Charles Laughton)

93 min. Paul Gregory Productions.  Based on the novel of the same title by David Grubb.  Adapted for the screen by James Agee (but really by Laughton, as any review will tell you).  Starring: Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters and Lillian Gish.

Synopsis

We are introduced to a psychotic preacher named Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum).  His m.o.: con a widow, kill her,  steal her money and car, repeat.  Meanwhile a desperate Ben Harper (Peter Graces) has just stolen $10,000 and hid it in his daughter Pearl’s(Sally Jane Bruce) doll.  He scarcely has time to swear his son John (Billy Chapin) to secrecy before he is hauled off by the cops.  Judged to hang for the murder of two men, he spends his last night with Powell in the jail during which he discloses (in his sleep) that he has hid the money with his family.  After his death, Powell tracks down his family,  marries Ben’s widow, Willa (Shelley Winters), and proceeds to try and coax the secret out of the children.  Willa catches him threatening Pearl but by that point is so far into his cult that she doesn’t mind.  He murders her, and the children run away down the river.  Powell chases after them on horseback until they land in the property of Rachel Cooper (Lillian Gish), a religious old lady who takes care of children in various stages of abandonment.  Eventually, Powell finds out that they are with her and a final showdown takes place in which he is ultimately caught, tried, convicted and hanged.  Before the hanging a lynch mob forms and Cooper whisks the children away.  The film closes with a peaceful Christmas scene in Mrs Cooper’s home.

The first shot of the film, not explainable until the final act.

Review

Perhaps the most basic requirement of any horror film, and ‘Night of the Hunter’ is without a doubt one of the paradigms of the genre, is the removal of all “natural” authority.  We are presented with an awful situation and the solution of calling the cops or any other representatives of the state can’t be allowed–it would eliminate the horror.  Indeed, the ability to weave a plausible world in which horrible things can happen without any of the social structures that would inevitably arise to arrest the horrors is the first requirement of any horror film.  To mention just one example, ‘Carnival of Souls’ (1962, dir. Herk Harvey, public domain) solves this problem by making, within the framework of the heroine’s delusions, everyone a clown-faced monster, including the police.  Predictable? Perhaps, but well executed.

‘The Night of the Hunter’ makes a similarly predictable choice by casting as heroes two young children who have systematically been disabused of all authority figures.  The film opens with them seeing their father dragged off to his death by the police.  Hastily, they must swear never to disclose the location of the stolen loot.  The cops are out.  Their mother and their entire small town society are under the spell of Harry Powell, the villainous preacher.   Their only hope for authority, Uncle Birdie,  is too drunk to be of any service the moment that he’s needed.

But the necessary shift to the children’s point of view runs much deeper.  From the first scenes of the film, it is clear that we are dealing not with any “grown-up” realist story but rather with a fairy tale.  The film follows the well trod border between the grown-up’s horror film and the child’s bedtime tale.  Realism is largely disregarded and the surprisingly natural pairing of German expressionism with the perception of a child is exploited to full effect.  After all, where more does one see reality distorted to fit an emotional state than in the minds of children?

Exactly the way a child would perceive the "big city."

One of the many masterful examples of Laughton’s use of expressionism to further the childlike reality is in the construction of the Harper family house.  The corridors are ridiculously narrow, the angles unnaturally sharp.  As a result, a feeling of claustrophobia simply exudes from the set.

What sort of small-town house would have a corridor not wide enough for a man and a half to pass?

The effect of distorting reality suits the viewers identification with a child’s world.  For continuity, that style is preserved throughout the film but it is clear that its most direct purpose is the establishment of the world in which the night of the hunter can take place and in which it is the most horrifying.

The unequivocal center of the film is the eponymous night in which the children are hunted down the river by the cool dominant Powell.  Natural images of predators and prey abound.  “Nature is strong, nature is harsh, nature is inevitable,” they seem to say. The nightmare becomes real, as it were, with Powell slowly following the children on horseback. (Though the word nightmare has no etymological link to the word mare, it retains a psychological association that Laughton seems more than happy to capitalize on.)  To quote Roger Ebert, “this beautifully stylized sequence uses the logic of nightmares, in which no matter how fast one runs, the slow step of the pursuer keeps the pace.”

To this end, Laughton has offered us one of those rare treats in the history of cinema, a story that couldn’t have been told in another medium.  I have not read the novel upon which the film is based but the very medium of writing cannot free itself from conjuring characters in the mind of the reader.  If an adult reads a novel about children, the children will be “adultized” naturally–their thoughts will be granted the unrealistic depth of the reader’s own and the childishness will be unavoidably eclipsed by the mature personality of the reader.  In Laughton’s use of expressionistic technique–the rich textures combined with distorted realities–he has shown us the world of the child.  It is a world of fear, of beauty and of mystery that could not be seen otherwise.  In that respect it is similar to that great fountainhead of expressionist cinema, ‘The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, 1917 dir. Robert Wien), which gives a similar treatment to insanity.

The hunter and his prey.

The film’s title is apt.  The night of chase is clearly the climax upon which the entire film hinges upon.  The night sequence is so central, in fact, that the rest of the film, particularly the beginning,  seems to fall by the wayside.  This is particularly felt in the pacing of the film.  The pacing of the “calm” first part of the story is jerky, confusing and ultimately superficial.  The father comes and goes so quickly, Powell arrives and is accepted so fast that the viewer is confused.   The pacing befits a violent and dramatic climax but the story is by nature slow and banal–the calm before the storm that is requisite in all horror films.  But the exposition is so hasty, one feels more like the characters were passengers in a passing train than cinematically living human beings.

To a certain extent, I think one could excuse the maltreatment of the first half on the grounds that it somehow intensifies the chase.  The Ben Harper, Willa Harper–these characters are irrelevant and any emotions devoted to them would distract us from the central conflict between the kids and Powell.  I would still maintain, though, that the poor treatment of the first half of the story is the great weakness of this film and that it could have been avoided by a more well paced exposition.  It is too quick and jittery to allow the viewer to enter the world of the film and, though the main sequence is terrifying, none of the characters aside from the three central ones are brought to life.  It is conceivable that after seeing this film a few more times I will see more logic in the first part of the film.  As of now it looks like a blemish.

It is clear, watching this film,  that Laughton wanted to say something deeper, specifically regarding religion.  It’s equally clear, though, that the film is not the statement of someone truly anti-religious as it is portrayed by mediadiva.com.  It doesn’t even condemn organized religion.  The villain is not affiliated with anything other than his own psychosis. (Ben: What religion do you profess, Preacher? Powell: The religion the Almighty and me worked out
betwixt us.)  An obvious candidate for criticism would be Powell’s L-O-V-E vs. H-A-T-E extreme view of the world.  Women = Sex = Evil, or something like that.  But that approach is presented as too psychotic and really too silly to be worth criticizing.  To make matters worse for the anti-religious view, salvation is brought to the children by a Mary-esque bible-thumper who is just as fanatical about her faith as Powell is and equally removed from any organized form of religion.  An “anti-religious” film could have easily brought salvation in a more secular vehicle.

In fact, the true target of Laughton’s wrath (if one can say such a thing) are the suckers who fall for Powell’s preacher act.  This is one of the more subtle and important points that the film makes, in my opinion.  Evil can find its home in religious imagery (Powell: Not that you mind the killin’s…Yore Book is full of killin’s.) yet that same religious imagery has the key to its defeat (Cooper/Narrator: And he opened his mouth and taught them,
saying, ‘Beware of false prophets which come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly, they are ravening wolves.).  The victims are the ones who are unwilling or unable to make sense of the religious imagery themselves.  These are the ignorant townspeople, the facile Willa Harper and presumably Powell’s previous victims–all those who get worked up in a fervor by Powell’s cheesecake hand routine or his more developed torchlit rites.

Of course, these are the same people that form a lynch mob at the end of the film to do away with Powell once and for all.  Cooper understands that the “righteous rage” of the townsfolk is essentially the same blind passion that allowed Powell to take control.  As such, she rushes the children away from the mob with an urgency that she didn’t even show when dealing with Powell himself.  Powell is unforgivable but his character is rich enough for us to sympathize with him in a villainous sort of way.  The townspeople’s stupidity and vulgar religiosity is given no sympathy.

Probably the most significant scene relating to the symbolic conflict between Powell’s religion and Cooper’s is the one in which he sits on her front lawn singing ‘Leaning on the Everlasting Arms’ and Cooper joins in, briefly, but with the altered verse, “Leaning on Jesus.”  On the one hand, she succumbs to his singing, she joins in harmoniously, she doesn’t try and drown him out nor does she just ignore him–she actively picks up the same hymn.  She just adds two words, “on Jesus,” that are supposed to distinguish her from him.  It’s a difficult scene to explain completely.  In my opinion, its opaqueness is inherited from the real complexity of the issue.  Religion is one of the best and worst things that mankind has been associated with.  Fortunately, the song can be seen on youtube:

Greed, too, is a major theme of the film.  After all, why else was Powell hounding the children if not for the $10,000 they are carrying?  But any simple equivalence between greed and evil is not borne out by the film.  Early in the film, Powell expresses his relation to money outright:

“You always send me money to go forth and preach
your Word. A widow with a little wad of bills
hidden away in the sugar-bowl.”

Though never mentioned explicitly, we are led to believe that “The Word”  is nothing other than the murder of all women, at least all women with anything sexual about them.  Money is an afterthought, a divine stamp of approval, as it were.  To paraphrase Nick Cave, (who was obviously influenced by this film) Powell’s not there for her money, not for her love but for her soul.  And yet, as the film progresses he seems to pursue the money with a single-mindedness that leads directly to his own ruin.   Was he lying to the Lord? Or perhaps his hunt had some other rationality besides for the obvious money?  This same sort of tension is reevaluated by the Coen Brothers in ‘No Country For Old Men’ (2007).  Two men who distinguish themselves as being far less materialistic than their surrounding society in a maniacal race for a small fortune–a race that will leave at least one of them dead.

At the end of the day it is the incomprehensibility of these two themes–religion fuels evil and yet it saves, greed is an afterthought yet it drives men to atrocities–that makes ‘The Night of the Hunter’ a great film.

The harsh inevitability of the natural world justifies the children's terror.