"I come not with peace, but with a sword," says Robert Mitchum's psychopathic bogus preacher, brandishing a switchblade that at moments of extreme sexual excitement and disgust will poke out of his trouser-pocket, tearing the material. His performance in Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter (1955) – now on re-release – is startlingly stiff-necked and straight backed, with a mannered theatrical baritone, a change from Mitchum's usual rangy coolness. Perhaps it was this unfamiliarity that contributed to the film's failure on first release, a bruising experience that helped make it Charles Laughton's sole directorial credit. In fact, this suspense thriller is a stunning piece of work, with the shadows of German expressionism and a compositional sense comparable to the work of George Stevens: it trumps its own noir cynicism with a thrilling and plausible idealism in the final moments. Critic James Agee adapted the 1953 bestseller by Davis Grubb, inspired by the real-life "Bluebeard" serial killer Harry Powers who in depression-era America killed widows and their children for the family savings. Mitchum plays "Reverend" Harry Powell, a predatory killer, grifter, car-thief and horse-thief who believes his own god-fearing rhetoric. In the poverty-stricken south, a world of broken families and economic despair, this paterfamilias from hell finds credulous victims. He is the ancestor of many a modern televangelist and snake-oil scripturalist. While in jail, Powell hears that a fellow prisoner on death row for robbery and murder has hidden the $10,000 loot with his kids: once free, Powell sets out to find the man's frightened widow (Shelley Winters), seduce her and terrify the children into giving him the cash. Every frame of this film is brilliantly contrived, particularly the underwater nightmare at the end. A gripping, complex chiller.