So this movie starts with Robert Mitchum as a self-styled preacher driving down the road, talking to god about how he likes killing widows and stealing their money, and how women are all good-for-nothing whores anyway. So that establishes the level of subtlety that we’re talking about here.

The structure of this movie is weird, because the basic tension of it is that the criminal — that widow-killing preacher mentioned above — finds out that his cellmate (who is later hanged) stole a bunch of money, and only his kids know where he hid it; and so when the preacher is let out, he goes and tracks down that dude’s widow, and then tries to get the kids to tell him where the money is. And so through one thing and another, he’s basically threatening these kids from minute one.

But like… they get away from him, repeatedly, and there are whole swaths of the movie where the fundamental tension is backgrounded, and in a bunch of places where it could be a really dark psychological thriller, it backs off and goes easy. It’s not that there’s no tension — it’s chilling in a couple of scenes, most notably on the wedding night when he goes all GOP on his new wife — it’s just that it could be a lot tenser. A modern thriller would keep the tension on more.

Anyway, for a movie from the ’50s, it’s pretty harsh on misogynistic religious shitbirds, so unlike a lot of older movies, I approve of its message. But boy howdy, this is a giant ball of Swiss cheese (Swiss, because of all the plot holes, see), and I probably laughed at it as much as I was tense at it.

Two random things:

  1. The dude has “LOVE”/”HATE” tattoos on his knuckles. This also appears in the Simpsons’ Cape Feare episode (as “LUV”/”HĀT”), and I had 100% assumed that this was something that appeared in Cape Fear, but the internet suggests: Nope! It’s Robert Mitchum in both movies, so maybe that’s why I was thinking that; but more likely, I actually only remember Cape Fear through the lens of the Simpsons parody.

  2. There’s a scene where the little kid is fishing with his wacky drunk uncle (who literally has no reason for appearing in this movie, except to be an unfired mantle gun — in at least three separate places, he seems like he’ll be important, but he never is), and he brings a fish into the boat and then whaps it to death with an oar, which is pretty grim, but maybe that’s just how people fished in the ’50s?