Two smaller screen appearances then fell into line, one in a film noir, entitled "Naked Alibi", 1954, with Sterling Hayden and Gloria Grahame and another bit role in the famous screen musical "There's No Business Like Show Business", again starring Dan Dailey with Donald O'Connor and Marilyn Monroe, before the boy gained his next memorable screen attentions as the young son of historic clergyman Peter Marshall in "A Man Called Peter" and Victor Mature's screen son in his second film noir: "Violent Saturday", both of which were released in 1955. In between he continued to appear in standard television series such as "Waterfront", "The Millionaire", "Cheyenne", and "My Friend Flicka", and various TV theaters, anthologies and dramas. When Charles Laughton personally cast Billy Chapin for the role of young John Harper in his 1955 film classic "The Night of the Hunter", the boy was already considered an "acting technician" among the child performers of his time. After a private meeting with Billy in his Hollywood home, Laughton told Davis Grubb, the author of the original story: "What I want is a flexible child, and the boy is exactly that." Later, Laughton publicly offered praise especially for "...the strength of [Chapin's] innate ability to understand the construction of a scene, its impact and its importance." Vintage sources claimed that Laughton might find it difficult to direct Chapin, as well as Sally Jane Bruce, who played his younger sister (Pearl Harper), but contemporary sources and rediscovered archival material from the production of "The Night of the Hunter" prove that, aside from a few intergenerational tiffs, the old man and the boy got along wonderfully, even if, according to these sources, Robert Mitchum, who played the bogus preacher Harry Powell, in fact took over some directing tasks. Though now considered a classic, "The Night of the Hunter" was a critical and commercial failure when released, "because of its lack of the proper trappings." The film was an inductee in the 1992 National Film Registry list. Chapin's final big screen appearance came just a year after "The Night of the Hunter", as young Jody Burrows in the 1956 B-Western "Tension at Table Rock", starring Richard Egan. From then on his film career declined until he was acting solely on television, where his career eventually ended late in 1959 in an episode of the long-running family series "Fury" (1955–60).