Screenpicks

by Sam Adams

Night of the Hunter (Thu., March 28 and Fri., March 29, 7:30 p.m.; Sat., March 30, 3 p.m., Prince Music Theater, 1412 Chestnut St., 215-569-9700, www.princemusictheater.org) An influence on films from Cape Fear to Do the Right Thing, Charles Laughton’s 1955 gothic film is like a fairy tale gone awry. Though drawn from a script by James Agee, Hunter shows little of the love for realism evident in the reviews collected in Agee on Film; the film’s incandescent, almost lurid expressionism has a far more obvious antecedent in the tempestuous style of Laughton’s performances in movies like Mutiny on the Bounty (1935). (Agee’s script, which Laughton reportedly disdained, is available, along with four others, in the out-of-print Agee on Film, Vol. 2.) Robert Mitchum, in his most indelible performance, plays Harry Powell, the convict/preacher whose soul is as conflicted as the opposing love/hate tattoos on his fingers. Hunter’s chilling imagery, memorably captured by cinematographer Stanley Cortez (The Magnificent Ambersons) is, after Mitchum’s performance, the film’s most legendary aspect, but while it’s easy to enjoy it as over-the-top spectacle, there’s a genuine poetry to Laughton’s conception. The swampy air through which Mitchum chases the children who’ve unwittingly made off with his sought-after prize is like primordial soup; you can almost feel something new being created as you watch. Sadly, this Big Bang fell victim to entropy far too soon -- Laughton never directed again. (You wonder what would have happened if they’d had DV back then.) But while a single directorial effort may not be enough to build an auteur theory on, it’s certainly enough to qualify Laughton as a great filmmaker, if a tragically underrepresented one.

The Sleepy Time Gal (Fri., March 29, 9 p.m.; Mon., April 1, 3:35 p.m., Sundance Channel) It wasn’t so long ago that Christopher Münch was considered one of the leading lights of the New Queer Cinema, but the past decade hasn’t been kind to directors with Münch’s calm, placid mise-en-scène. The Hours and Times (1991) made it into theaters despite its sub-feature length; The Color of a Brisk and Leaping Day (1996) had a healthy life on the festival circuit. Now, there’s The Sleepy Time Gal, which despite Münch’s first “name” cast -- Jacqueline Bisset, Martha Plimpton, Nick Stahl and Amy Madigan -- and fairly ecstatic New York reviews, has only the good graces of the Sundance Channel standing between it and near-oblivion. Münch’s movies have always been steeped in longing, poised between nostalgia and elegy, and although The Sleepy Time Gal is, by Münch’s standards, practically contemporary (it starts in 1982), it’s no less preoccupied with loss, and the attempt to undo it. Bisset is a former radio personality who discovers that she’s dying of cancer, while the adopted Plimpton, at the end of a long-term relationship, decides to search for her birth mother. Their lives intersect in unexpected ways (and a few all-too-expected ones), and the soap opera doesn’t always mesh with Münch’s quieter brand of sentiment. Still, it’s not the best of signs that Sorority Boys gets a nationwide rollout while The Sleepy Time Gal winds up trapped in a 13-inch box. Sigh.

Murder on a Sunday Morning (premieres Sun., March 31, 10 p.m., HBO) Call it good timing or speculate that the fix was in, but no sooner does Jean-Xavier de Lestrade’s miscarriage-of-justice documentary take home Sunday night’s Oscar (over the widely-favored Promises) than its previously-scheduled HBO premiere follows hard on its heels. If only someone could explain what was up with J.Lo’s hair, the whole thing might actually start to make sense.