“It’s a hard world for little things,” Lillian Gish’s character says near the end of The Night of the Hunter, as she watches an owl prey on a rabbit. This piece is dedicated to one such little thing: a haphazard connection, a perceived echo. It was hard to fit anywhere else, so I turned it into a short video essay.

I can’t even remember when it first occurred to me that there was a link to be made between The African Queen (1951, John Huston) and The Night of the Hunter (1955, Charles Laughton). Was it while watching Huston’s river-set adventure? Or during a rewatch of the eerie boat journey in Laughton’s only feature film?

There is, of course, an obvious connection between these two classics: Pulitzer Prize winning author James Agee (1909-1955) worked on both films. His script for Huston’s adventure helped establish his reputation as a Hollywood screenwriter. Shortly afterwards, he wrote the first draft of The Night of the Hunter, which Charles Laughton substantially reworked. (Just how extensive those revisions were remains a matter of debate). Coincidentally, Agee’s screenplays for both films were later published together in a single volume by the University of Tennessee Press ⁽¹⁾.

But that shared lineage is not the connection at the heart of this short video essay. Nor was it simply the river setting that made me suspect a shared sensibility. It was something harder to define. A matter of tone.

The rough riverboat captain and the refined missionary who navigate danger in The African Queen are not as different from the siblings on the run in The Night of the Hunter as they first appear. In fact, Humphrey Bogart’s boyish captain and Katharine Hepburn’s emphatically naïve missionary often respond more childishly than the children do in Laughton’s dark fairy tale. Regardless of their age, all four are vulnerable figures who discover unexpected courage on their respective boat journeys.

Faced with extreme danger, these characters must confront their own mortality. They do so in surprisingly lyrical ways: through a song or a prayer. The star-filled skies and the watchful eyes of the wildlife along the riverbanks transform these perilous journeys into metaphysical adventures. Are they simply travelling down the river of life, or are they crossing the River Styx? It is a testament to the artistry of both Huston and Laughton that they elevate their thrilling stories into meditations on mortality, existential doubt, and the nature of good and evil. This side-by-side montage is an attempt to bring that shared cinematic vision into focus.

(1) The African Queen and The Night of the Hunter: First and Final Screenplays is the fourth volume of the Collected Works of James Agee published by the University of Tennessee Press and edited by Jeffrey Couchman.

This video essay includes clips from:

The Night of the Hunter [feature film] Dir. Charles Laughton. Paul Gregory Productions, USA, 1955. 93 mins.

The African Queen [feature film] Dir. John Huston. Horizon Enterprises and Romulus Films, UK and USA, 1951. 105 mins.