This Saturday (11 Feb) at 13:00 we'll be screening The Night Of The Hunter, one of cinema's bonafide masterworks. A failure on its initial release, only in recent years has it finally achieved the masterpiece status it so overwhelmingly deserves - and this is an extremely rare chance to see it in all of its cinematic glory.

Introducing the film on the day will be film historian and Tweeter par excellence @iambags (otherwise known as Jonathan Bygraves). We asked him to write this short piece giving some background and insight into the film's enduring relevance and popularity - so big thankyous to him, and we hope it spurs you on to come to Saturday's screening.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the death of Charles Laughton, a man once described by Sir Laurence Olivier as 'the acting profession's one true genius'. A hugely dominant screen presence during the 1930s, he viewed acting as not mere mimicry but rather an act of artistic creation, and his famously larger-than-life performances as the likes of Henry VIII, Dr. Moreau, Quasimodo, Emperor Nero and Captain Bligh are 'creations' seared into the annals of cinema history. However, perhaps none of his 'creations' have endured the years as well as his sole directorial credit, The Night of the Hunter, simply because there has never been anything quite like it before or since: part-American pastoral, part-horror film, part-Biblical parable, part-fairytale; 'Mother Goose with goosebumps', as Laughton himself would describe it.

Working from the best-selling novel by West Virginia-native Davis Grubb, Laughton, screenwriter James Agee and cinematographer Stanley Cortez translated the book's Depression-era Southern Gothic stylings into a work of pure cinema: a realm both real and otherworldly, lyrical and nightmarish, inspired equally by the poetic sensibility of D.W. Griffith and the macabre chiaroscuro of German Expressionism, and in stark contrast to the then-prevailing Hollywood idiom of social realism; rather, the world of The Night of the Hunter is one of psychological realism, a dreamlike quality which perhaps explains why it continues to have such a visceral hold on audiences to this day.

It is a film of exaggerated contrasts: good versus evil, light and shadow, the innocence of childhood against the callousness of adulthood, and – most famously of all – the LOVE and HATE which adorn the knuckles of its villainous antagonist, self-styled 'Reverend' Harry Powell, one of cinema's greatest villains. Said villain is played with a memorable intensity by a never-better Robert Mitchum, the one moment in his career in which he transcends his trademark laconic inexpressiveness and delivers a truly maniacal, vaudevillian performance - if viewers can only recall his glowering sense of menace, then it is worth watching again to remember how often his extraordinary physicality strays closer to slapstick than Grand Guignol.

Those who have not already seen the film ought not miss out on the chance to catch one of the greatest works of American cinema. But for those who have already seen it, it is an opportunity to reappraise a work which defies easy categorization, yet whose mark on cinema is indelible. “They abide and they endure”, exclaims Lillian Gish's character about children suffering from hardships. The film itself endured its own hardship - it was both a critical and box-office failure on release – yet its own cinematic offspring, in the form of its quietly unshakeable resonances in the work of the Coen brothers, David Lynch, Paul Thomas Anderson, Terrence Malick and countless others, ensures that The Night of the Hunter abides, and endures.