Robert Mitchum's silky, sleepy evangelist, L-O-V-E and H-A-T-E tattooed on his knuckles, is a monster under the skin, perceptible only to innocent children (in the horror-movie tradition that allows dumb animals to sense the presence of ghosts, vampires, demons), while the gullible grownups fall for his façade. At night, the time for dreams, two little children flee from him through an inside-the-mind or inside-the-studio landscape that has an Henri Rousseau strangeness, and they find refuge at last under the wing of an angel protectress: Lillian Gish in a rocking chair, a shotgun across her lap. James Agee's final script enables him to recall the flavor of some of his abiding film favorites, Von Stroheim's Greed and D.W. Griffith in general. And it gives to Gish her best role in talkies. Her personality permeates the movie to as large a degree as that of Agee or Davis Grubb, who wrote the original novel, or Charles Laughton, who directed; and she brings down the curtain (also the house) with a ringing recitation of the prayer "Lord save little children." (1955) — Duncan Shepherd
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