Archives for August 13, 2018

Titus Techera, who hosts a podcast for the American Cinema Foundation on which he and his guests discuss important films of the past and present, invited me back to talk about Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter on his latest episode. (I appeared last month to discuss Laura.) Our hour-long chat is now available on line.

Titus and I spoke in detail about the film, the only one that Laughton directed, which starred Robert Mitchum and Shelley Winters and whose screenplay was adapted by James Agee from Davis Grubb’s best-selling 1953 novel. The screen version flopped at the box office on its original release in 1955 but is now universally regarded as one of the supreme masterpieces of English-language cinema.

Here’s part of Titus’ summary of our conversation:

Titus and Terry Teachout discuss…a remarkable movie about false prophets—the possibility that the devil would come among us in the clothes of a preacher. We talk at length about the various aspects of the making of the movie—actors, script, production, score, and even some editing and cinematography—and we also talk about the moral seriousness served by all these crafts and Laughton’s unity of conception.

To listen to or download this episode, go here.

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The original theatrical trailer for The Night of the Hunter:

A scene from the film:

“Who Is Gustav Mahler?”, a Young People’s Concert by Leonard Bernstein, Reri Grist, Helen Raab, and the New York Philharmonic. This program was originally telecast from Carnegie Hall by CBS on February 7, 1960, at a time when Mahler’s music was still largely unknown to the American concertgoing public. The music heard includes excerpts from Mahler’s Second and Fourth Symphonies, Des Knaben Wunderhorn, and Das Lied von der Erde:

To read Bernstein’s script, go here.

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“Intimate acquaintance with the executive side of music in orchestra, chorus and opera made even Mahler into a very tolerable imitation of a composer.”

Ralph Vaughan Williams, “A Musical Autobiography”