“Salvation is a last-minute business, boy.”

Posted by keelsetter on August 15, 2010

I spent two weeks working round-the-clock to put together my fall film calendar and to meet my printer’s deadline last Friday. I celebrated with top-shelf beers and a 16mm screening in my backyard of The Night of the Hunter (1955). It was the great actor Charles Laughton’s only directorial excursion, using a script by Pulitzer Prize winning author James Agee, and is supposedly Robert Mitchum’s favorite role. As is my custom, I grabbed a few books for choice excerpts to read by way of introduction but, at the last-minute, I was moved by the spirits to toss the books aside and share a personal recollection instead. In retrospect, it was an anecdote that ran parallel to the highly memorable speech Robert Mitchum gives as Rev. Harry Powell when he talks about his tattooed fingers which spell out H-A-T-E and L-O-V-E.

Would you like me to tell you the little story of right-hand/left-hand? The story of good and evil? H-A-T-E! It was with this left hand that old brother Cain struck the blow that laid his brother low. L-O-V-E! You see these fingers, dear hearts? These fingers has veins that run straight to the soul of man. The right hand, friends, the hand of love. Now watch, and I’ll show you the story of life. Those fingers, dear hearts, is always a-warring and a-tugging, one agin t’other. Now watch ‘em! Old brother left hand, left hand he’s a fighting, and it looks like love’s a goner. But wait a minute! Hot dog, love’s a winning! Yessirree! It’s love that’s won, and old left hand hate is down for the count!

I first saw The Night of the Hunter in a film history class taught by Stan Brakhage (1933 – 2003). As Brakhage’s name is synonymous to most with avant-garde cinema, it might surprise them to know that in his early years as a young and aspiring filmmaker he not only considered a career in Tinseltown, he even moved to Hollywood – and this was thanks, in large part, to The Night of the Hunter.

Brakhage always combined narrative with non-narrative films in his class. The avant-garde label was one he grudgingly accepted as useful shorthand, but he preferred to think of the artistic and personal films that were made by a wide variety of struggling artists as visual poetry – and he liked to precede “normal” feature films with personally selected avant-garde films that were somehow related. Had it been a literature class this would be akin to being given the assignment to compare T.S. Eliot and Cormac McCarthy in back-to-back readings – and, really, what better pairing to The Road than The Waste Land?

Traditional narratives vs. poetry. For some filmmakers this a painful choice to make. For most it’s as simple as choosing between poverty and success. But for others it’s about much, much more. It’s about your soul. It’s about who you really are. Will you be your own man or woman, charting your own course, beholden to no-one? Or will you prostitute your vision for the sake of money? If you decide to make uncompromising and highly personal works that might never be financially viable, how will you put food on the table? But if you become completely subservient to a traditional narrative that is designed by committee for the sole purpose of making bank, how will you look at yourself in the mirror?

George Lucas struggled with this topic as a young filmmaker with aspirations to make very personal and avant-garde films, but ultimately opted for Star Wars. Stan Brakhage wrestled with it too, and has 373 films to his credit (some being very short, some quite long). Criterion recently released two anthologies of his onto Blu-ray and it is one of their best-sellers.

The reason The Night of the Hunter stood out so much for Brakhage was because here, finally, was a film that seemed to indicate that you can have both visual poetry and narrative filmmaking co-exist on the same plane. Of course, there are many films for which this can be said, but the stunning and expressionistic beauty (special kudos to cinematographer Stanley Cortez) of The Night of the Hunter came to Brakhage when he was at a crossroads in his life – and it came to him as if a sign from above. Here it is: proof that you can work with the studios and other financiers as both an uncompromising poet and a traditional story-teller. So off he goes, but here’s where the story takes an unexpected turn – because not only does Brakhage make it to the Hollywood hills – he also gets drunk in a bar with… Charles Laughton. That night changed everything:

The simpler way in which I found it out (ed. note – re: not being destined for narrative cinema) was I went to Hollywood and I had an actual way to get a job there. I had what every young person dreams of, a literal letter of entrée through some actors that I met in Central City, Colorado, Wendell Correy, Paul Douglas, Jan Sterling, and finally, via them, Charles Laughton. And the week I arrived in Hollywood to get that job, to carry a chair or whatever you do when you start in Hollywood, Charles Laughton got drunk with me and a couple of people and said, “Get out of Hollywood! Get out, it will kill you, it will destroy you!” It was a whole ugly night, between his lurching to the john and the pissoir, and the vomit smell on his breath and the horror and the anger over having accomplished, to me, one of the few great narrative films of Hollywood history, Night of the Hunter, and having had that taken away from him. Having made that film and then to see it fail at the box office. (It fell out just that week I arrived in Hollywood.) It was his chance to do The Naked and the Dead, one of the more interesting books of the Second World War, Norman Mailer’s great book. So there I was, drunk in a booth at the Turnaround Theater with Charles Laughton, being given every reason, as if I needed any, for giving up the whole course of narrative drama. (Stan Brakhage with Pip Chodorov)

To my way of thinking this was for Brakhage a decision between L-O-V-E and H-A-T-E, because he loved poetry and hated the whole money-oriented business part of the equation. For the duration of his life, Brakhage struggled to make ends meet financially and paid for his films out of his own pocket and even with his own health – but he leaves behind a monumental body of work that is a singular legacy like no other. No one can dispute that these are all the labor of a great love. It’s funny to think of a drunk Charles Laughton helping the young poet go on his way and to strike out on his own. It was to be the road-less-traveled, and sometimes it was a tortured ride. But, over the long run and in this particular case, Robert Mitchum’s preacher was right: “It’s love that’s won.”