The New Pictures

The Night of the Hunter (Paul Gregory; United Artists). Davis Grubb's tense 1954 novel about an itinerant psychopathic preacher is a natural for cinemelo-drama. Directed by Actor Charles Laughton, it is a garish, unbelievable but fairly exciting nightmare.

Robert Mitchum, the preacher, knows that somewhere around the small Ohio River valley house of Widow Shelley Winters he will find a $10,000 cache. Numskull Shelley, who does not believe the money is there, falls for Mitchum's hell fire because she thinks she will find a spark of romance behind it all. But Preacher Mitchum, who thinks sex and painted women are an abomination, really wants to get his switchblade knife on Shelley's two small children, since they are the only ones who know where the loot is hidden.

Actress Winters is better than competent as the mother, and Actor Mitchum is more credible as a murderer than as a Bible-spouting phony. As a whole, Director Laughton's Night is a self-conscious experiment in production, filled with stylized lighting and acting, off-beat music and tricky camera angles.

The Night Holds Terror (Columbia) may well cut the ground from under the Broadway hit, The Desperate Hours, already bought and filmed by Paramount and scheduled for December release. Like the Broadway play, The Night Holds Terror tells of a family held captive by three gunmen who move into their home and take arrogant possession of their lives, money and possessions. Shot in 18 days on a low budget ($78,000), Night was produced, directed, written and edited by the husband and wife team of Andrew and Virginia Stone. None of the cast has a Hollywood "name"; most of them came from TV.

What emerges is a surprisingly good movie. Aircraft Worker Jack Kelly stops to pick up a hitchhiker (Vince Edwards) and the next moment is looking into the business end of a pistol. Following orders, he turns off on a side road where two other badmen join forces with the first. Disgusted by the emptiness of Kelly's wallet, the leader, John Cassavetes (who starred as a juvenile delinquent in ABC's memorable TV Crime in the Streets), wings a couple of shots past his head. The gang then attempts to sell Kelly's car, and failing to get the money that day, moves into his home to await developments. Learning that Kelly's father is a wealthy man, they decide to add kidnaping to their roster of crimes.

When the gunmen depart with her husband, Hildy Parks at last summons the courage to call the police, who agree to cooperate in silence. The tension builds in the last reels through the device of showing the mechanical difficulties of tracing a phone call. The fate of the trapped man oddly becomes less important than the technical riddles that must be solved in determining from what exchange, and in precisely what sequence of numerals, the kidnaper is phoning his instructions. The film ends in the customary blaze of guns, and Kelly is happily reunited with his family. But the film's considerable effect, like that of Dragnet, is built up largely from the detailed, absorbing explanation of the routines, not in this case of police work, but of a telephone-communications center.

House of Bamboo (20th Century-Fox) is a well-made cops-and-robbers story filmed in Tokyo. Enhanced by the petal-like beauty of the scenery, the story al most makes crime seem worth a try.

Robert Ryan bosses a little band of thieves with a nice military precision. He and his men are ex-G.I.s. and they play their game like an army patrol in action.

They are "briefed" on an "operation"; they carry not guns or rods, but "weapons" supplied by their own ordnance officer; they attack an "objective" and never make a getaway--they "withdraw." When they are not in action, most of them behave like polite, narrow-lapelled Madison Avenue admen.

After the robber patrol knocks off a train, Ryan inducts a new enlisted man, tough-talking Robert Stack. Ryan does not know that Stack is an undercover cop for the U.S. Army. But Ryan has a paid informer himself--a Tokyo newsman of mixed Oriental background. This Peiping Tom discovers Stack's true identity, and then comes the fierce chase through Tokyo. It all ends with Villain Ryan, despite his prowess as a crooked field commander, getting his comeuppance at a rooftop carnival.

Actor Ryan is smooth and businesslike, and Stack is competent. Next to the view, though, the biggest delight is Japan's picture-book beauty Shirley Yamaguchi, who plays Stack's "kimono" (i.e., moll); she has all the fluid rhythm of a ripple in a pond.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.