The Night of the Hunter . Davis Grubb's tense 1954 novel about an itinerant psychopathic preacher is a natural for cinemelo-drama. Directed by Actor Charles Laughton, it is a garish, unbelievable but fairly exciting nightmare. Robert Mitchum, the preacher, knows that somewhere around the small Ohio River valley house of Widow Shelley Winters he will find a $10,000 cache. Numskull Shelley, who does not believe the money is there, falls for Mitchum's hell fire because she thinks she will find ...

The Night of the Hunter . Davis Grubb's tense 1954 novel about an itinerant psychopathic preacher is a natural for cinemelo-drama. Directed by Actor Charles Laughton, it is a garish, unbelievable but fairly exciting nightmare. Robert Mitchum, the preacher, knows that somewhere around the small Ohio River valley house of Widow Shelley Winters he will find a $10,000 cache. Numskull Shelley, who does not believe the money is there, falls for Mitchum's hell fire because she thinks she will find ...

The scrum of reporters assembles in the pre-dawn quiet two blocks from the border of Chinatown. It is more than two hours before Dominique Strauss-Kahn is scheduled to make an appearance, but it doesn't matter. On Monday the curtain will lift on Act I of the trial of the new century, and the courtroom has precious few seats. Two hours early might be too late. After being herded through metal detectors, we ride the nearest elevator to ...

If you've ever looked at the moonless night sky from a spot where the air is clear and city lights are far away, you've seen the Milky Way — a band of stars so dense and so distant that they merge into a hazy ribbon of light. Astronomers have long known, however, that the Milky Way looks this way to us only because we're embedded inside it. What we're really looking at is an immense, flat pinwheel ...

In August 1973, a quiet young courier took a print of Terrence Malick's debut feature Badlands from Los Angeles to Manhattan for submission to the New York Film Festival. After the screening, festival chief Richard Roud said to the messenger, "Would you please tell Mr. Malick that we loved Badlands and want it as our closing-night film?" The unassuming fellow replied, "I'm Mr. Malick." After that, he was harder to find. In his fulfilling but furtive 38 years since Badlands, ...

MORATORIUM" was scarcely a household word a couple of months ago. The dictionary definition is "a period of permissive or obligatory delay," and to most people it meant a pause in paying one's debts or in talking. Now, suddenly, "moratorium" has become the focus of national attention in its special 1969 sense: M-day, Oct. 15, a movement intended by its organizers and supporters to show the Nixon Administration that large and growing numbers of Americans want out of the Viet ...

You would not think that TV would be a sphere of life where men feel endangered. Katie Couric is being replaced by a dude. Men host every late-night show outside cable. Entourage has somehow managed to run for more seasons than Sex and the City. But at May's upfronts — where networks announce their fall schedules to advertisers — there was a pattern: sitcom after sitcom about how today's men are besieged and need to rediscover their masculinity. ...

I don't watch Saturday Night Live. I don't own a television, and I do own a 10-month-old baby, so you do the math. But that didn't stop me from being riveted, absolutely riveted, by an oral history of the show called Live from New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live, by James Miller and Tom Shales, published in 2002. Until then I didn't realize that Chris Farley pooping out a 17th story window of Rockefeller ...

It rained on southern Louisiana Thursday night, May 12 — and that made fears along the lower Mississippi River rise as high as the Big Muddy's already dangerously swollen levels. The Mississippi grew to 43.4 ft., almost 20 ft. above its normal mark at Louisiana's capital, Baton Rouge, and even more rain is forecast for today. Heading into the weekend, state officials are faced with an ugly reality: the river keeps rising even though they've opened more than half the bays on a ...

Last Monday, the Navy was the hero across America, for the exploits of its SEALs in bringing Osama bin Laden to justice. This Monday, the sea service was zero in certain quarters for saying it will permit same-sex marriages within its hallowed chapels. It marks the first of what is likely to be many thunderclaps associated with the lifting of the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" ban on openly gay men and women serving in the U.S. military. Navy ...