The devil and Miz Cooper: "The Night of the Hunter" on page and screen.
Item
-
Title
-
The devil and Miz Cooper: "The Night of the Hunter" on page and screen.
-
Identifier
-
AAI3213258
-
identifier
-
3213258
-
Creator
-
Couchman, Jeffrey.
-
Contributor
-
Adviser: Morris Dickstein
-
Date
-
2006
-
Language
-
English
-
Publisher
-
City University of New York.
-
Subject
-
American Studies | Literature, American | Cinema
-
Abstract
-
The Devil and Miz Cooper is a study of Davis Grubb's 1953 novel, The Night of the Hunter, and the 1955 screen adaptation directed by Charles Laughton, who never made another movie. My dissertation looks from many angles at the book and the film, each of which is itself prismatic: at once a fairy tale, a horror story, an allegory, and a thriller. I examine the genesis and the eclectic form of each work. I analyze literary and cinematic influences. And I detail the process of transformation by which the novel became a motion picture. I also consider the different expectations of readers and filmgoers in the 1950s to understand why the book was a Best Seller and the film a box-office disaster. Finally, I trace the after-life of the film, first as a cult object, then as a classic.;This case study in adaptation incorporates new primary sources. Among them is the legendary first draft of the screenplay that James Agee delivered in June 1954. The dissertation includes the first detailed analysis of the recently discovered script. A fifty-year controversy about the authorship of the film can at last be settled. Other sources include hours of outtakes from the UCLA Film and Television Archive, the newly found score by Walter Schumann, and my interviews with producer Paul Gregory, key members of the crew, Robert Mitchum, and Peter Graves. I also study drawings that Grubb made for Laughton to help visualize the story. Several sketches reveal a likely source of expressionistic tendencies in the film. Samples of the drawings, held at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Library, are included in the text. Thanks to second-unit director Terry Sanders, the dissertation displays pages from his production notebook and never-before-seen drawings that Laughton made for shots in the river sequence. All this material supports an essential idea of the dissertation. Laughton worked with his crew in an unusually democratic fashion, yet he maintained such a clear personal vision that with this one film, which is unlike anything else in American cinema, he has joined the ranks of auteurs.
-
Type
-
dissertation
-
Source
-
PQT Legacy Restricted.xlsx
-
degree
-
Ph.D.