IIM Lucknow Movie Club

The only movie directed by actor Charles Laughton, this movie stars Robert Mitchum in one of his most memorable roles as a perverted preacher. The story in the film was very odd for the age it came in, hence it was a critical and commercial failure at that time - but now it's considered one of the most influential films, having influenced directors such as David Lynch, Martin Scorsese, Terrence Malick, Jim Jarmusch, the Coen brothers, and Spike Lee. The movie stands out on all aspects - acting, especially of Lilian Gish, background score and camera-work.

An interesting comment about the movie I found on IMDB totally sums up the film - A comment to explain why it's second on one of the "Best Movies" List-

"I can see why: it's the kind of film that seems specially created for film geeks (cinephiles or cineastes for the more pretentious among us). It mashes up genres, tones, and styles with aplomb. It's full of great, and ostentatious, imagery. It's blessed with some wonderful over-the-top performances. It's a sort of tug of war between silent film styles: Griffith's rustic classicism (the paradigm of cinematic realism/classical Hollywood style) and German expressionist excess (a paradigm of cinematic irrealism/art cinema). It's a sort of treatise on film history, and it's full of wild stylistic flourishes.

And this has to be one of the plain weirdest movies ever to emerge from Hollywood: it's utterly unique, and feels deeply personal, though, even having seen it several times, it remains as mysterious as it was the first time around. Where is this movie coming from? What is the point of view of the person or people who created this? It seems the product of a wholly alien worldview, and it seems made by people who had great technical skill and yet somehow knew nothing about how movies are expected to be made--which is precisely the sort of thing that can have a profound appeal to someone who's seen a million movies. Even people who think they've seen it all haven't seen anything else quite like this."