“This film is as far away from the city as a fairy-tale, ‘leaning on the everlasting Lord' with the awe and trust of country innocence. The traditional Western was too fixed on parable to notice that its characters led rural lives; and too steadfastly Manichaean to see how men of God appropriated (and confused) the moral pragmatism of the new, lawless lands. And so, in The Night of the Hunter (set loosely in the 1930s, in the back-roads mood of Ohio River country), we have stolen money and a demon preacher (Robert Mitchum) who comes after it, chasing two lost children towards the indomitably sturdy homestead of Lillian Gish. It has hints of a modern Western nightmare--the Jonestown story--in which spiritual hysteria has eclipsed legality.
“Harry Powell's chosen weapon is a knife. But with ‘LOVE' on one hand and ‘HATE' on the other, he is a twisted descendent of the Western's violent men of righteousness. In Charles Laughton's American masterpiece, that strain has driven Powell mad; whereas in all those hallowed Westerns, the good and bad alike are conscientiously sane. The Night of the Hunter is all the more suggestive in arousing obsession in an actor (Mitchum) who had his own persona of laconic, stetson-shaded reliability. As much as it draws on Hans Christian Andersen, D.W. Griffith and German expressionism, Night of the Hunter knows an isolated state of the union (Amerikana) where the icons of the Western have survived by becoming grotesque.” David Thomson