The Night Of The Hunter

"Remake fever" spread in 1991 to the producers of the TV-movie Night of the Hunter. 36 years earlier, writer James Agee, director Charles Laughton and stars Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters and Lillian Gish combined their considerable talents to create the original Night of the Hunter, a first-rate allegorical suspenser involving stolen funds, a homicidal phony preacher, and two innocent but resilient children. The 1991 remakes stars Richard Chamberlain in the old Mitchum role as Harry Powell, the bogus preacher with the words LOVE and HATE tattooed on his knuckles. In pursuit of stolen money hidden by an old prison cellmate, "Reverend" Powell ingratiates himself with the cellmate's widow (Diana Scarwid), then kills her. The woman's children seem to know where the money is, so Powell pursues them through the woods, nearly catching up with them before they are taken in by a kindly old woman. The 1991 Night of the Hunter couldn't come up with an adequate substitute for Lillian Gish, so the new script altered the ending, thereby diminishing most of the property's inherent value.