Why were these unneeded subtitles in "Night of the Hunter"?

Cafe Society
1

I’m watching The Night of the Hunter (1955) on TCM.

There is the scene where a bunch of kids and John and Pearl are asking for food from a woman in a house. Suddenly, there is this subtitle at the bottom of the screen:

“Peach pickers wanted weekly hire.”

The scene with the kids and woman is still showing. The next scene without anybody has an actual sign in the movie:

“Peach pickers wanted weekly hire.”

Why was the subtitle there in the first place? Both are in English. Why subtitle it?

Another scene has a woman holding a Bible. There is a subtitle with the woman:

“Bible”

The next scene without the woman has a picture of a Bible. No subtitle.

And the last scene in the move with Lilian Gish talking has the subtitle:

“The End”

The next scene , without anyone, has the actual movie “The End”.

There were probably other scenes that did the same thing that I missed. The subtitles were always ahead of what was really happening. And at the start of the movie, this subtitle appeared with the movie producers listed:

“The NIght of the Hunter”

Then the actual movie title “The Night of the Hunter” was the next scene.

Any idea why this was done? My subtitles were off and this looked like something TCM or something else did this.

2

Bad closed captioning?

3

I’ve seen this film in a revival theater and on VHS and I don’t recall any subtitles. I would guess versions dubbed into another language would have those kinds of subtitles, but how they ended up in English in an undubbed version I don’t know.

4

I watched it tonight. I didn’t notice words.

I could’ve missed it.

5

This sounds like a technical glitch, not anything deliberate. It’s not part of the original movie.

(Which is fantastic, by the way. It’s almost certainly the greatest film in history made by a director who made a single movie and nothing else.)

TCM has been suffering as an institution over the last few years. Current owner WB keeps trying to kill it, only to back down in the face of pressure from high-profile film personalities. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn the subtitle glitch is essentially a technical mistake arising from staffing shortfalls.

6

They’ve been saying it for years.

Funny, there’s about 3 knock off channels working now. They still have ads for the most part but that is no different than pledge breaks on PBS or the little dumb crap TCM plays between movies.

My gripe with TCM is the scheduling of their theme days.

I get a special kinda ill when I see Doris Days birthday coming up. I just cannot sit thru her movies. I’m sorry if you like her. I don’t.

I’ve seen one big glitch on a TCM movie once. The score and action proceeded but black screen. The whole movie. I thought my TV broke. But other channels had a picture. That was once is many many years of watching TCM.

7

Those are probably remnants of some print that was shipped on several reels, spliced onto one large “plate” reel for screening, cut up and put back on 3 or 4 or 5 reels for shipping, again, and spliced back together for the next show in the next city. (In other words, not shipped back to the distributor each time for fresh green and red heads & tails with “reel number n” put on each time.) Those words showed up in the frame of the splicer, but not on the 35mm screen, and they were cues to make sure the right ends were spliced together: “bible” was spliced to a woman holding a bible.

However, at some time, the print was used to make a 16mm print, which is almost square, compared to 35mm; it is far less long, and slightly wider-- just wide enough for the words to show.

16mm prints are for second runs, art houses, and other venues that are not moneymakers, typically, and no one cares about something like making new, 16mm prints from the negatives to remove the words.

How that ended up on TCM, I don’t know, unless they outright bought their own print inexpensively, instead of renting one each time they wanted to show it, or the sound was bad on the print they were planning to use, and it was a last-minute sub.

In fact, I’ll confess that as a former art house projectionist (when I was in college) I can tell you a lot about film, but I don’t know that much about TV, or what kind of media TV gets from a distributor to broadcast. I know that there was a point when they used actual film, and that had to do with controlling distribution, but I don’t know what happens now, nor why the words couldn’t be electronically erased, other than contractual agreement not to “tamper” with the print.

Another vote for seeing this movie.

It was Lillian Gish’s screen comeback. She made just a few sound films in the late 20s & early 30s, before deciding she didn’t like what Hollywood was becoming, and returned to stage acting, which she had done as a child.

She liked the character of Rachel Cooper enough to give films another shot, though, and did many more, and lots of TV too, topping her career with a staggering 105 films (she lived to be 99).

Only fan letter I ever wrote was to her. I was 17. Got a personal answer, which I still have, 41 years later.

8

Wow! That is incredibly special.
:star_struck:

9

I viewed the TCM ON DEMAND version last night and there were no subtitles anywhere. I like the reason RivkahChaya gave.

Normally I would post on the TCM Message Boards to ask about this, but they closed them in 2022.

Robert Mitchum is great as Harry Powell but his role as Max Cady is a whole lot more scary in Cape Fear (1962).

10

I think the problem is that sometimes the filmmakers hurry through finishing a movie without carefully checking what some of the people working for them do. They have spent a lot of money on making the film, so they want to release it as soon as possible to make their money back. On another SDMb thread, I discuss one such case of messed-up subtitles. In the 2013 movie Instructions Not Included there are some weird mistakes in the subtitling. This movie is set both in the U.S. and in Mexico, but most of the dialog is in Spanish, so it’s mostly subtitled in the version shown in the U.S. Apparently there is a computer program designed especially for subtitling so that a subtitler can just type in the subtitles as they watch it without having to watch it twice.

The program had two bugs in it that really distracted me while watching the film. One was that the program was somehow programmed so that it dropped any occurrences of the letter q as the subtitler typed it in. So a sentence that translated to “The Queen was quite angry about what happened” would be subtitled as “The ueen was uite angry about what happened”. The second was that each digit of a number would be replaced by a 0. So a sentence that translated to “All 7 of us received $256,584.97 in the payout” would be subtitled as “All 0 of us received $000,000.00 in the payout”: I suspect that other people complained about this problem and they fixed it after initial showings of the film

11

Probably, but I’d have to think. Mystery Men, a comic book style comedy, is also the only movie from its director. Good, but not classic like Night of the Hunter.

12

It’s not crap. Sometimes there are little gems in there. Cartoons, old trailers, short films.

But even so, what would you have them do? No one wants movies to start at 12:37 or 1:17:30.

13

My guess would be that it was intentionally subtitled in some other language, and later, when English speakers started wanting subtitles on their English-language movies, someone just took the French (or whatever) subtitles and mechanically translated them all into English, without giving it much (or any) thought.

14

@RivkahChaya’s explanation seems the most plausible. They’re just artifacts from the bad old days of multiple film reels.

15

I have severe hearing loss, and I will say this:
1-Sometimes it is very hard to read text on a sign or other text shown in a film.
2-If you are reliant on the subtitles, captioning, you can miss signs or little visuals because your attention is on the subcaps
3-There are usually multiple languages available through the menu. If you pick a language other than English, you wouldn’t be able to read the sign. It would therefore not be that big of a deal to make your subcaps the same in all languages.

16

Oh, I like the legit screen gems.

But really, Ben racing a golf cart?

Or the TCM cruise ship ads? The wine?

Drives me nuts.

17

That’s why I prefer dubbing for foreign films.

I am in the very small minority on this board!