Robert Mitchum has one Oscar nomination in his career for The Story of G.I. Joe., but the nomination that eluded him was for The Night of the Hunter. It’s a 1955 American film noir thriller directed by Oscar-winning actor Charles Laughton about a serial killer (Mitchum) who poses as a preacher and pursues two children in an attempt to get his hands on $10,000 of stolen cash hidden by their late father (Shelley Winters and Lillian Gish co-star).

The screenplay by James Agee was based on the 1953 novel of the same name by Davis Grubb (which was drew from the true story of Harry Powers, who was hanged in 1932 for the murder of two widows and three children in Clarksburg, West Virginia). The film’s lyrical and expressionistic style, borrowing techniques from silent film, sets it apart from other Hollywood films of the 1940s and 1950s, and it has influenced such later directors as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Robert Altman, Spike Lee, Martin Scorsese, the Coen brothers and Guillermo del Toro.

Too dark to be received well upon its initial release (the reason why Laughton never directed again), The Night of the Hunter has been positively re-evaluated in later decades and is now considered one of the greatest films ever made. It was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry in 1992. The influential French film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma selected The Night of the Hunter in 2008 as the second-best film of all time, behind Citizen Kane.

Though he would play other memorable villains, notably in the original Cape Fear, this is Mitchum at his best: complicated, layered, seductive. He should have been nominated, and he should have won.

This article is part of a special year-long series of anecdotes, reflections and thoughts about the Academy Awards.