The Movie Villain

“Leaning, leaning, safe and secure from all alarms. Leaning, leaning, leaning on the everlasting arms.”

            So sings the comforting baritone of the Reverend Henry Powell from his horse late one night, while out scouting for children he wants to rob and murder. As he rides, a distant silhouette, we understand the children’s horror that, run as they might, he is not going to give up.

            The Night of the Hunter is dependent on juxtapositions, powerful images, and this dreamlike horror fantasy environment. Robert Mitchum plays the amiably sinister Henry Powell, a preacher with the words Love and Hate tattooed across his knuckles. We are introduced to him on a clear day, as he drives away from his latest crime. He is praying aloud, asking “well now, what’s it to be Lord? Another widow?” As he tries to remember how many widows the Lord has given him he assumes a thousand yard countenance, not paying much attention to the backlit roads but rather seeing through everything, as a man who has already seen too much. “You say the word Lord, I am on my way – you always send me money to go forth and preach your word,” he continues, as he pulls into a sleepy West Virginian town.

            Whether Powell is sane or not, whether he uses religion as a front for manipulation or is a blind zealot, is never quite clear. He was loosely based off of Henry Powers, a man who murdered widows and their children in the 1930s; however, the character in the film is an entirely separate predator. He wants money and he will do anything and kill anyone to get it, all the while parading as an obstinately pious and rather charming gentleman. With his manipulative charisma, he is a first rate villain, up there with the likes of Harry Lime in The Third Man.

            Lime’s chief concern is also finding short cuts to fortune. He will manipulate those closest to him if it is for his benefit. From the top of a Viennese Ferris wheel, he posits to Holly Martens,

Look down there. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare?

Lime, who in postwar Vienna was cutting penicillin to make a profit while the drug was nullified and thousands died, is another villain who will not let anybody get in between him and money. Like Powell, he is a handsome baritone who is up for killing children to achieve his ends. This smooth talking and manipulative reprobate archetype is not limited to Powell and Lime, but is also seen in Hannibal Lecter, Norman Bates, and Count Dracula – indeed, the charismatic villain has become something of a cinematic trope.

          What makes a great movie villain?  It seems to be a mix of established ruthlessness and the performance by the actor playing them. The American film institute has a list of the 50 greatest heroes and villains, where Powell ranks at #29, and Lime at #37. Their style of villainy is now out of vogue; newer films create villains who, as we learned in The Dark Knight, are not “looking for anything logical. They can't be bought, bullied, reasoned or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.” The villains of today, such as Heath Ledger’s Joker or Javier Bardem’s Anton Chigurh (and Raoul Silva), are menacing in their acts and appearance, making them dissimilar to the good looking Machiavellian villains of another era.

           Night of the Hunter (1955, set in the 1930s) and The Third Man (1949) were part of a certain zeitgeist, a time that was full of uncertainty around the future of mankind, a time with very real paranoia about another world war, and a time when villains flew just under the radar, walking among us. While they might have been able to hide in the shadows their motives were clear - they wanted money and power. Now our fear is different - with random violence occurring throughout the world, we are now most afraid of villains whose evil is never in doubt, but whose motivations always are.