TV Reviews : The Sun Never Rises on ‘Night of the Hunter’

“Night of the Hunter” represents a bad night, creatively, for ABC. Almost from its opening scene, this remake of a 1955 theatrical movie about the murderous ways of a bogus, fanatical preacher is largely a colorless monotone (at 9 p.m. Sunday on Channels 7, 3, 10 and 42).

The man called Preacher is the story’s demonic dominant figure, an amoral killer relentlessly searching for the $50,000 that a desperate fellow convict had taken in a small-town robbery to support his wife and children. After murdering the man, Preacher is released from prison, and he swiftly sets out to find the money that his victim had hidden in a drainpipe of his house. Only the dead man’s 12-year-old son (Reid Binion) knows where the money is hidden, and he suspects Preacher is a fraud when he charms the town and courts the boy’s mousy mother (Diana Scarwid).

In a radical departure from past roles, Richard Chamberlain has some glints of menace as Preacher, his hair slicked back, eyes all mean and squinty and “LOVE” and “HATE” tattooed on his fingers. And he finds the comic irony in this character, who marries the widow to get closer to the money but haughtily reproaches her for wanting sex on their wedding night: “I cannot believe you want us to soil ourselves with rottenness and filth!”

Yet Chamberlain is rarely sinister enough to be truly convincing (as Robert Mitchum was in the original, directed by Charles Laughton), and director David Greene never manages to pump much suspense or even tension into Edmond Stevens’ script.