Robert Mitchum stars as a crazy, instense, disturbing preacher in this film which was, simply put, WAY FUCKING ahead of it's time. My memories of this film stood up in other words, and it is a sight to see certainly. Early in the film we meet the preacher. He's obviously a bit unhinged, and as he drives into town, he talks to his god, asking god what's next. Another widow, he asks? He is a bonafide lunatic and serial killer, but held together and with a charismatic, enigmatic presence one would be hard pressed to define.
Peter Graves plays a small part as a bank robber and father to our two main characters, kids John and his younger sister Penny. Graves gives the kids the $10,000 he got from his life of crime, making them promise they'll never tell anyone about it. He is hauled off to jail where his cellmate is the preacher, and he learns of the money. The preacher goes off and eventually find the kids, who now have a single mother, and the preacher gets hooked up with her. Immediately John senses something is off with the preacher despite Penny taking an immediate liking to him. Once the preacher stops treating them nicely and starts asking about the money, however, the kids take the cash and run, only to find themselves being relentlessly pursued by him...
It's the whole picture. There are shots in this film that were so good and so memorable that I remembered them now, 17 years or so after I first saw this film. There is a strange, electric atmosphere to the film, aided by the music, the stark characters, the acting, and the main villain of course. Robert Mitchum turns in a delivery of a truly sinister, ambiguous, trickster of a man. He is demonic in his portrayal, extremely sadistic and twisted and yet muted and diminutive. There's also his haunting song, Lean on Jesus, sung as both a foreboding threat and a calming tune.
There's literally endless things to talk about here. Whether it's the wedding night of the preacher and the kids mom where he guilt trips her with a ahead-of-it's-time talk about sex, or his chasing the kids into a lake with a knife, or the frankly horrifying way which he murders their mom, or the amazing shot of the horse walking along a hilltop in a moonlit night, or the sly looks he shoots different characters at different times. There's hardly a missed step in this film.
Critics agree with me, and it's looks at as one of the scariest films of all time, and certainly one of the most poetic, haunting, a fairy tale like stories I've seen committed to celluloid. I give it five gleaming, shining, illustrious stars. Another film which makes me wish I hadn't handed out so many of these high ratings, cause this is next level 5. This is 6 stars.
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