The only film ever directed by Charles Laughton, The Night of the Hunter is one of the strangest and most haunting works in American cinema. Robert Mitchum plays Harry Powell, a murderous false preacher with the words love and hate tattooed on his knuckles, who marries a widow to find hidden money and then pursues her two children across Depression-era America. Laughton tells the story not as a conventional thriller but through expressionistic imagery, somewhere between nightmare and fairy tale. A failure on release that left critics baffled, it is now regarded as an American masterpiece, its influence felt in the work of Scorsese and the Coen brothers. With Stanley Cortez's luminous black and white photography and unforgettable performances by Mitchum and Lillian Gish, it is a film no one forgets once they have seen it.