"Would you like me to tell you the little story of right hand / left
hand? The story of good and evil?" So Harry Powell (Mitchum),
cinema's only preacher with a flick-knife, begins explaining the
tattoos of L-O-V-E and H-A-T-E etched onto his fists. Laughton's
astonishing film – rightly considered one of the very greatest ever
made in America – has Powell terrorising two young children (Chapin and
Bruce) to locate the $10,000 hidden by their dead father. His cruelty,
though chilling, isn't subtle. It's expressly amplified by the
child's-eye visualisation, which also yields mesmerising images of a
starlit river whose innocent, transitory flow mirrors childhood
itself.
