Duras's films have attracted much critical attention since Madeleine Borgomano's 1984 study of her cinematographic texts, but her work specifically as a film critic has not. I intend here to analyze one somewhat eccentric but enlightening example of her film criticism, her article ‘La nuit du chasseur’, often referred to but which, to my knowledge, has never been examined in detail. The article was published in 1980, 25 years after the release of Charles Laughton's film The Night of the Hunter which is its subject. It opens with this extraordinary assertion: ‘I always forget the beginning of the film’ (‘J'oublie toujours le début du film’). And although Duras insists she has seen the film four times, she proceeds to make numerous errors with respect to its content, even when telling us (perhaps unsurprisingly) what she claims to have forgotten. ‘I forget that the real father has been murdered’ (‘J'oublie que le vrai père a été assassiné’), she asserts, although the father in the film was not murdered but tried by a court and executed for having killed two people in an armed bank robbery. She admits to confusing the father with his murderer. In reality, the Preacher (the central character, played by Robert Mitchum, whom Duras takes to be the father's murderer) at no point attempts to kill the father. Whether or not Duras saw the film dubbed into French, or with French subtitles, or in the original English version without subtitles (and thus even allowing for possible mistranslations or a linguistic misunderstanding on her part), such errors are not easy to explain, especially given the quite unambiguous, if rapid, movement of the story line during the opening scenes of the film. Nor can one readily believe Duras's claim that many others have admitted to her a similar confusion of the father with the (supposed) assassin. One may be tempted to conclude that such a claim is manipulative, an attempt in the introductory paragraph of the article to instil a certain doubt in the reader (by force of numbers) in order to forestall any censure of the uncommonly subjective approach to the film that follows.