I've never gotten through this movie before. I've started watching it several times, but it's too disturbing and depressing. But my mother saw the link to it on Filmstruck and wanted to see it, so I sat through the whole thing. I kept starting to cry here and there, but I'm more prone to that than other people.
Two children watch their father arrested for bank robbery and murder. They're mocked by other children after he's executed. Then their father's psychopathic cell-mate, a phony preacher played by Robert Mitchum, comes around looking for the stolen money. The children know where it is, but they swore to their father that they would never tell.
It was the only movie directed by Charles Laughton. It was a commercial failure at the time but is now recognized as a great film.
There was an element of it that made me think of the French film L'Enfance Nue, about a disturbed boy in foster care. It starts with him in a bad foster home with uncaring parents who finally have to get rid of him. He's sent stay with an older couple who seem much warmer, a much better home. But, objectively, the first foster home was better. The father kept giving the kid money, for one thing. The older couple were actually abusive. The old woman smiles as she talks about how she cured another boy of bedwetting by pinning his wet underwear to the back of his coat and sending him to school that way. After the kid intentionally spills soup onto his new foster brother, they start hitting him with a wet towel. "Hit him in the face!" the woman yells.
Robert Mitchum is menacing and the kids sense how dangerous he is, but he acts like a much nicer guy than Lillian Gish who, in her first scene is swishing a switch through the air to threaten the kids. Later, she spanks the naked boy behind some bushes and you can see how hard she's hitting him. But she's the good one, the only adult who sees through Robert Mitchum.
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