![]() Mitchum is a big man, a significant presence and when he's holding a switchblade, be somewhere else. Steeped in the holy cloth for selfish gain posing as a vessel through which the Lord's work is done, is a man who can barely be counted as a container of the tiniest drop of humanity. To some credulous idiots (almost the rest of the cast), you only have to wear a dog collar and ye are judged to be good. He gets everyone to fall for his lies and treachery - except one whom we'll get to in a minute. ![]() ![]() Is he (in character) just a bad actor as a Preacher content to let his status fill in the emotional blanks or does he have so much contempt for ordinary folk that he allows them the chance to call him out on his deceptions? They never do. His fake upset at the apparent loss of his runaway wife is hard to read. He appears as a man of God, a man of perceived goodness who is all too aware of the frightening and cavernous gullibility of god-fearing mid-west folk and is so accepted that he sometimes doesn't even seem to try to play the part convincingly. He makes no real effort to conceal his obscene deceits. One of the Preacher's most heinous traits is, of all things, laziness. But that ten grand is somewhere back at his house and after serving thirty days on a car theft misdemeanour, the decidedly un-revered Reverend Harry Powell sets off to Ohio and the dust bowl that was the mid-west in the 1930s. He pays the ultimate price at the end of a rope. You get the sense that he is remorseful but desperate, trying to give his family some financial security. Ben Harper, played by Peter Graves (he of the original Mission Impossible TV series fame and the pilot in Airplane who asks a child "Have you ever seen a grown man naked?") plays the father who murders during a bank robbery. He is determined to find the ten grand his cellmate admitted was stashed back at his home. This odd coincidence aside, Mitchum is horrifically mesmeric in the role of a southern preacher (not sure if the movie shows that he really has been ordained as a man of God - jury's still out on that one). This isn't a million miles from Dennis Hopper calling David Lynch demanding that he was the psychotic Frank in Blue Velvet. And bad boy Robert Mitchum was playing himself? Jesus. But there is a mostly unsung movie monster that scrabbles for a place among the worst of them a human being so corrupted by his own desires that murder is just another counter on the board game that is his life men, women, children… If they stand in his way, they're not standing for much longer. Aliens pierce craniums and monsters devour the unsuspecting as do the wickedest sociopaths with fava beans and a flinty little red. There are creatures dishing out the vilest punishments thrown on to the pure white screen only to defile it. There are movie monstrosities, crazed, cruel and destined for a dark, corrupt and immoral immortality. American Legends interview with producer Paul Gregory
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