Another musical echo of eery beauty from yesterday's Nature Boy, an extraordinary song with a strange, soaring melody, in a equally otherworldly scene in a brilliant film. Night Of The Hunter (1955) was actor Charles Laughton's only one as director. That's because it was panned by critics, but so incorrectly, because it is a masterpiece, one the director described as "a sort of nightmarish Mother Goose tale". It stars Shelley Winters, Lillian Gish, and most notably Robert Mitchum as an evil (the words love and hate tattooed on knuckles), murdering preacher who marries a woman for stolen money and pursues her runaway children for it. In this scene the children escape down the Ohio River, to extraordinary scenes of wildlife and a lullaby-type song by the young character Pearl, played by Sally Jane Bruce, while her brother sleeps. The real singer is Kitty White, who was discovered by composer Walter Schumann in a club. The lyrics were written by Davis Grubb. For more about the film, please read my piece here:
Once upon a time there was a pretty fly.
He had a pretty wife, this pretty fly,
But one day she flew away, flew away.
She had two pretty children,
But one night these two pretty children
Flew away, flew away, Into the sky, Into the moon.
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