This unforgettable film was the only movie ever directed by the larger than life British actor Charles Laughton. It’s one of the strangest and most beguiling movies you’ll ever see. The story comes from a poetic, nightmarish novel by Davis Grubb, a fable about two children fleeing from a psychotic evangelical preacher (Robert Mitchum) who believes they know the whereabouts of a stash of money.
It’s set in the South during the Great Depression, and as well as shooting in black and white, Laughton adopts many of the techniques pioneered by DW Griffith in the silent era, such as expressionist lighting effects and beginning and closing scenes with an iris into a detail of the frame. He also cast Griffith’s favourite actress, Lillian Gish in a key role. But it’s Mitchum who will haunt your dreams. The words “Love” and “Hate” tattooed across his fingers, he turns in an uncharacteristically flamboyant performance that’s no less menacing for its twisted streak of black comedy. Sadly the movie was a flop and Laughton was forced to abandon plans to film Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead.
Sunday’s Pantheon screening will be preceded by a 15 minute introductory lecture and feature a book club-style discussion afterwards.
Oct 20: Intro by Christine Evans, Professor in Cinema Studies, UBC
Christine Evans’ pedagogic research focuses on bridging film theoretical, psychoanalytic, and ideological approaches with evidence-based scholarly teaching in film and media studies. Her discipline-specific research focuses primarily on film theory, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and the work of Slavoj Žižek. Her work has appeared in The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Film-Philosophy and The International Journal of Žižek Studies; her book in the series Film Thinks, Slavoj Žižek: A Cinematic Ontology, is forthcoming from Bloomsbury.
What a compelling, frightening and beautiful film it is! And how well it has survived its period. Many films from the mid-1950s, even the good ones, seem somewhat dated now, but by setting his story in an invented movie world outside conventional realism, Laughton gave it a timelessness.
Roger Ebert
Charles Laughton
Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters, Lillian Gish
USA
1955
English
Book Tickets
Indigenous & Community Access
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Credits
Screenwriter
James Agee
Cinematography
Stanley Cortez
Editor
Robert Golden
Original Music
Walter Schumann
Art Director
Hilyard Brown
Also in This Series
The greatest films of all time.
Fantasia
Walt Disney pushed the boundaries of animation and sound recording when he put together a movie concert: eight classical pieces by Bach, Beethoven, Stravinski et al, each animated in a different style. It's playful, sometimes cute, other times inspired.
Image: © Disney, 1940
Breaking the Waves
Kicking off our 2026 Pantheon series of the greatest films ever made, Lars von Trier's 1996 masterpiece is a devastating melodrama featuring an indelible performance from Emily Watson as the woman whose love for her husband knows no bounds.
Antonia's Line
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Sansho the Bailiff
The third of the great Japanese masters (with Ozu and Kurosawa), Mizoguchi is a poet of suffering. There's plenty of that here in his exquisite telling of an ancient folktale about the enslavement of a woman and her two children.
The Leopard
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Rear Window
James Stewart is the man who sees too much. "Jeff" Jeffries is a sports photographer waylaid by a broken leg, doomed to spend the summer in a wheelchair in his New York apartment. That's how he comes to witness a murder in the dead of night (or does he?).
Day of Wrath
Anna, the young second wife of a well-respected but much older pastor, falls in love with her stepson when he returns to their small seventeenth-century village. Stepping outside the bounds of the village's harsh moral code has disastrous results.
