The Night of the Hunter

"In the first major study of the long-lost first-draft screenplay by James Agee, Jeffrey Couchman confronts a fifty-year controversy about the authorship of the film. He explores many levels of artistic convergence - between novelist and director, director and actor, and cinematic form and audience expectations. The talents that clashed or came together along the road from book to movie created a film of rich stylistic contradiction. Combining biographical and historical analysis with a critical study of both the novel and the film, Couchman makes the case that this initially overlooked. cinematic gem is a prismatic work that continually reveals new aspects of itself."--BOOK JACKET.