The scene I am going to write about is from “The Night of the Hunter”, starts from 85:00 to 86:15. It is the scene that describes the arrest of Harry Powell.
In the scene, the policemen arrived at Ms. Cooper’s place to arrest Harry for the murder of Willa Harper. They tackled him down and put handcuffs on him. John witnessed all these, and he screamed, rushed to Harry with the doll and broke it over Harry’s back. The money was revealed in everyone’s sight.
From my perspective, this scene is a copy of the former scene from the very beginning of the movie that the policemen showed up in Harper’s yard and arrested Ben. Seeing the policemen tackled Harry down brought John back to the time when he lost Ben to the power of authority. Loughton used recurrences in this scene to emphasize the sense that to John, the crush of fatherhood was happening all over again.
The scene starts with the whistle of the police’s cars and a view from inside of the car, which was also displayed in the former scene, showing the arrival of the authority. When they were about to pull their guns out for the arrest, Ms. Cooper shouted to them, “Mind where you shoot boys, there’s children here!” This along with the call out from the police “We don’t want the kids hurt” in the former scene, indicates a fact that the children should be kept away from all this. It is too crucial for them to see an arrest like this, let alone the reality that the man who was tackled down is their father.
Right before the policemen hit Harry and Ben down to the ground, they were all standing there with their left arm lifted. The only difference is that Harry’s left hand held his knife and Ben’s held a gun. The left hand, by the words of Harry, is the hand of HATE. I think it’s a sign of two men’s confessions, admit or not, they know they let their inner evil side wins the fighting of good and evil, love and hate.
To John, it was just too much to bear. He did the same thing when the time Ben was...