by Simon Callow
For The Old Dark House, Laughton was on loan to Universal; in a sense, he was on loan to the world of James Whale, as well. Stylisation was never a mode he cultivated: excess, certainly, but always to expressive end. The excess in Whale’s film is a reductio ad absurdum so complete that it transcends its self-parody to attain to an absurdist vision. Laughton’s art was always essentially a humanist one: his monsters were never born that way: they are never arbitrarily so: they were once otherwise, they could be again. Whale’s characters haven’t got a chance in hell. Mordaunt Hall (critic of the New York Times, not another character in the film – nor indeed the title part) welcomed the film with reservations – ‘one may wonder why the motorists who seek refuge in the old dark house did not continue on their way immediately after encountering two or three of its occupants’ – but was unqualified in his acclaim for Laughton’s performance. ‘It is a splendid portrayal.’
Paramount finally got their own script into shape by the time The Old Dark House was finished, and Laughton started to shoot the film he came to Hollywood to make: The Devil and the Deep, a vehicle.
It was to be Charles’ first appearance before the American public: he had been released to Universal on the understanding that The Old Dark House would not be shown until after The Devil and the Deep. Jesse Lasky, head of Paramount, had great faith in Laughton, and liked to say afterwards that he had discovered him. The film’s credits, after star billing for Tallulah Bankhead and Gary Cooper, end with the phrase: And Introducing the Eminent English Character Actor, Charles Laughton.
And Eminent English Character Acting, is, on the whole, what we get. It’s not Laughton’s fault that Tallulah’s performance, dismissed at the time by both critics and herself, now seems an extraordinarily original portrait of an unfulfilled and oppressed woman, bored and unhappy, oddly attached to the paranoiacally jealous husband that Laughton plays. No doubt the wheel of fashion has turned to Laughton’s disadvantage in this film, but now it is the uptight naval commander teetering on the brink of insanity who seems banal and obvious, while Bankhead’s doomed chain-smoking beauty, burnt out by the emotional violence which has been done her, snatching an anonymous night in the desert with Cooper (‘What do you want?’ he asks. ‘Never to have been born,’ she says) is startlingly real. Cooper, too, with his voluptuously gentle masculinity and nearly wooden delivery, is spellbinding in a way that Laughton, infinitely the superior technician, and in a sense the more commanding personality, cannot manage. It is impressive, in a stagey way, but in terms of his development as a film actor, it is prentice work.
He knew it, too. He immediately recognised in Gary Cooper something that was essential to film acting. ‘He gets at it from the inside, from his own clear way of looking at life,’ he said in an interview. For the rest of his life he always cited Cooper as the paragon of film acting, just as he continued to idolise Gerald du Maurier as a stage actor. His was the burden of the character actor: to turn yourself into a different actor for every performance – not merely to re-make the boundaries of your personality, but to shift your centre to accommodate them. Only then will the performance live – without that shift, the character will simply be an identification, not a reality.
His great achievement as an actor was to journey to the farthest reaches of his temperament and somehow make of the section of himself he was exploring, a whole man.
Not, alas, in The Devil and the Deep – except in certain scenes. The character he plays, Sturm, is shown in various social situations telling the same unfunny funny story, the telling being accompanied by a braying mirthless laugh. The laugh, and its relentless repetition, are brilliantly observed and reveal more of the man’s insensitivity and pain than the explicit scenes of confrontation. There’s a mechanical vivacity about the story and the laughter which creates an unforgettable image of a personality under pressure. Later, in the submarine, Laughton confronts Bankhead and Cooper. He falls into a sort of trance as he says to Cooper: ‘Must be a happy thing to look as you do. I suppose women love you. It must be a happy thing’ (a speech it is reasonably surmised Benn Levy wrote specially for Charles). As he speaks, his plump fingers stray onto his face, which he kneads into strange distorted shapes to make himself uglier than he is – a brilliantly original touch, painful to watch.
Sturm ends drowning in the sinking submarine. The scene called for hours of immersion in water, which Charles endured, even embraced, as he would so many physical trials in the course of 30 years of movie-making, in order to attain the reality of the character. He had a wretched time with Tallulah Bankhead, who had introduced herself by saying: ‘So you’re Charles Laughton. I hear you’re going to be in my picture.’ She despised the film, appeared to despise acting, and made no secret of her contempt for him. At every break in filming she played a record of Falling in Love Again. It is cruelly unfair that her continuance of this behaviour in front of the cameras should be so compelling, but that’s life – or rather, that’s show business, a phenomenon with which Charles Laughton had little connection.
Her comeuppance was, that it has taken fifty years for the quality of her performance to be recognised. As for Laughton: ‘Newcomer Steals Show’, said the Los Angeles Times. ‘His is the outstanding histrionic contribution,’ said the New York Times. He was set.
Paramount’s next project for him was The Sign of the Cross. Cecil B. de Mille had chosen Wilson Barrett’s play to mark his return to the studio on a new footing, and in his autobiography claims that when he saw Laughton in Payment Deferred in London, he knew that only he could play Nero. ‘He was a fat man in a heavy moustache dressed in drab business suits for his role as a Dulwich householder, as far removed as may be from the decadent splendours of Imperial Rome; but he was inevitably Nero to my eye, for I saw in Charles Laughton the incredibly wide range of talent which makes every role he plays seem as if it had been tailored just for him.’
These handsome praises are somewhat ironic in view of the fact that Laughton was now confident enough flatly to refuse to play the character the way C. B. wanted him to. One can again only marvel at the certainty of purpose and strength of will that enabled the thirty-three-year-old chubby Englishman (six years out of drama school) to take on the Tsar of All the Rushes, the prototypical Director as Field Marshall, complete with uniform, maker of some of the biggest – in every sense – films of all time. In fact, de Mille was not a bully, simply an organiser; and he was fighting a battle against the front office throughout shooting, so he acquiesced in Charles’ conception of the Emperor as feckless, theatrical, effeminate – as, to put it bluntly, an outrageous queen, even to the extent of furnishing him, as requested, with a totally naked young athlete to sit by his side during every scene. (Laughton had suggested Elsa to play the catamite, but de Mille, getting into the swing of things, proposed the young man.)
As ever, Charles had done his research, read his Sinkiewicz, too; but his conception of Nero had probably less to do with history or Polish literature than with a desire to avoid another heavy villain – which was de Mille’s notion of the character – a longing to be funny (which he always claimed to enjoy more than anything else) and finally a yearning to step out of the sexual closet, however briefly and however fictionally. Elsa Lanchester shrewdly observes that playing Nero probably did him more good than a year’s psychiatry.
The autobiographical nature of his acting thus continued. There is a wonderful freedom about his performance, his puffy white flesh – of which a great deal is on display – quivering with delight. His physical conception of the role seems to be heavily indebted to Aubrey Beardsley’s Salome illustrations – more particularly his cruel caricature of Oscar Wilde. Elsa calls the performance ‘Charles’ wild Wilde Nero’ and that’s just what it is. Agate, in his review, wrote: ‘As Nero, Mr Charles Laughton enjoys himself hugely, playing the Emperor as the flaunting extravagant queen he probably was.’ His contemporaries knew exactly what he was up to.
De Mille was allegedly in despair when the
audience laughed at the previews. Exactly what he’d intended, countered Charles. The brilliant notices and wonderful business (despite the crash of ’33) mollified de Mille to the point where he was able to write his mellow memories twenty-five years later.
It must be conceded that Laughton’s performance somewhat compromises de Mille’s moralising scheme: to hell with the Christians, the person we want to see is Nero, drawling epigrams, licking grapes, madly laughing. Peter Ustinov’s later performance of the same character (in Melvyn Leroy’s Quo Vadis) though witty in its own right, quite lacks the anarchy and the danger of Laughton’s monstrous perverse baby, strutting and fooling and (yes, of course) fiddling while Rome burns.
The babyishness of Nero is shared by many of his characters, especially – for satirical purposes – those in power or, more pathetically, the oppressed. It was as near as he came to depicting innocence. The actual vulnerability of childhood coupled with the fantasies of omnipotence which are its antidote were well understood by Laughton. In the case of Nero, he was also amused to allude to the Fascist dictators of the period: but his perception of all power was the same: a childish charade. He never allowed a ruler any dignity.
At the end of filming, de Mille asked him who he’d like to play next, and, with the cheek which had informed his portrayal of Arnold Bennett in Mr Prohack, he replied: ‘You’.
He’d done his two films for Paramount; in theory he was free to return to England. He didn’t. He signed for one more picture; and then another. He was beginning to get a sense of what he could do with the medium.
His next film, Payment Deferred (producer Irving Thalberg, director Lothar Mendes), did not greatly increase his knowledge in that regard, but it is an indispensable record of his stage work. It is quite startling, though not strictly a film performance (in Orson Welles’ definition, it dictates to the camera rather than inviting). The essential grammar of all Laughton’s subsequent performances is there: the heavy lids, the sense of barely contained energy, the sexual voluptuousness a millimetre below the surface, the sudden accelerandos and heart-stopping ritardandos. His mastery of the elusive territory between lower-middle and middle-middle class is as subtle and as striking as it would ever be. But it is the number of variations he manages to create in this stock character that is breathtaking. From testy paterfamilias, to downtrodden clerk, to homicide, to newly-awakened lover (in the scene with his vampish neighbour, ‘Madam Collins’) the range of his William Marble is extraordinary. If one of the essential attributes of great acting is to offer value for money, Laughton was already, at the age of 34, a great actor.
The film failed at the box office, but, according to Kine Weekly, ‘he proves, if proof were necessary, that he is one of the screen’s greatest actors.’
There were incidental consequences to the making of Payment Deferred: one was his association with Irving Thalberg, with whom he formed an immediate bond, and but for whose demise (three years later) his subsequent professional development might have been quite different.
The other was the departure of Elsa Lanchester. Her independent career and indeed existence had ground to a halt. She was ‘the wife’, both socially and in reality: at the rate Laughton was working she can have seen little of him: late at night or early morning. Visiting him at the studio would not be a good idea. Nothing is more distressing for an out-of-work actor than to visit a place of others’ work. Elsa’s bright acerbic self would not take well to sympathetic enquiries. They may not even have known that she was an actress.
An unemployed actor in Hollywood is a citizen without a state. When the part of Winnie Marble in Payment Deferred – her part in both London and New York – went, despite Laughton’s championship of her, to Maureen O’Sullivan, she simply went back to England, to look for a new house for them, to pick up a little self-respect.
Charles plunged into the next massive role: Dr Moreau in the film of H. G. Wells’ novella, now called – why? – Island of Lost Souls. The shoot was full of physical discomfort, the director Earle Kenton (despite the cinematographer, Karl Struss’ description of him as ‘the most intelligent man I ever worked with’) was pompous and bullying, and the part of the obsessed and sinister scientist was disturbing.
In it, as it happens, Laughton gives one of his very best performances. Perhaps the discomfort of the location (Catalina Island), the fog in which Struss immersed everything, and above all the presence of the restless and cooped-up animals created a kind of world of the imagination in which his creativity throve. He creates a frightening picture of a gentleman-monster, dabbling with the genetic basis of life, somehow suggesting that he himself is one of his own half-animal/half-humans. The impression, which Laughton was particularly skilled at suggesting, that his clothes and indeed his very body can barely contain overwhelming impulses and desires, creates a dimension in Moreau which is both frightening and sympathetic. He goes towards his ghoulish task with such relish. In a James Whale movie this would be funny or merely off-the-wall; chez Laughton it’s a manifestation of the life-force, albeit a perverted one.
His last stand, whip in hand as the animals and mutants turn on him, is pitiful and terrible. It’s hard to think of another actor who could bring it off.
The whole film is remarkably concentrated and powerful. Bela Lugosi is fine as Moreau’s mutant servant who leads the revolt of the mutants. Despite the publicity campaign’s Nationwide Search For The Panther Woman, the film was not a success. It was not released in England, where the censor banned it, claiming that its events were ‘against nature.’ ‘So is Mickey Mouse,’ Lanchester wittily observed.
As a kind of bonne bouche Laughton ended his first stint of film-making with one of his funniest and most economical performances: Phineas V. Lambert in If I Had a Million, Ernst Lubitsch’s compendium movie tracing the effect of an unexpected windfall on eight different people. Laughton’s sequence, directed by Lubitsch himself – each episode had its own director – immediately became a classic, and has remained so. It couldn’t be simpler, but there is a kind of genius in Laughton’s restraint.
He plays a clerk sitting at a desk, one of hundreds (in a shot anticipating Billy Wilder’s similar one in The Apartment). The letter informing him that he’s been given a million dollars arrives on his desk and is dealt with in due course. Nothing on the clerk’s bespectacled, droopily moustached face betrays a flicker of reaction. He punctiliously lays the letter to one side, folds it, and places it in his pocket. He gets up, walks the length of the office to the corridor. He waits for the lift. He enters it. He ascends. He disembarks, walks down the corridor. He arrives at a door, he enters. Another door. He enters that. Again. Finally he arrives at the door of the President of the corporation. He knocks. He’s told to enter. With exactly the same phlegmatic moon-face that he’s borne all along, he blows a raspberry and departs. End of sequence.
Even now, when the film is shown, audiences generally cheer at this point. It is the perfect instance of the revenge of the underdog – in its comic mode. Laughton created many variations, tragic and comic, on that theme, but the pacing, the dead-pan, the even keel of the If I Had a Million sequence is a sort of perfection, in the league of the great silent comedians. Like many of them, he creates the laughter by his very expressionlessness: the audience supplies the thoughts. This power of suggestion, rather than statement, is not usually associated with Laughton (though certainly, of course, with Lubitsch). Laughton himself said that the whole journey to Hollywood had been justified by working with Lubitsch. Their styles and preoccupations blend so perfectly that it is impossible to separate their contributions.
À propos of If I Had a Million Elsa Lanchester regrets, in her book, that Charles didn’t work with more great directors – or, she says, great men in any sphere. This seems a little harsh on someone who made films with Renoir, Hitchcock, Wilder, Preminger, and who was a close friend of Henry Moore, Albert Manessier, and Bertolt Brecht, but certainly it is sad that Laughton never worked again with Lubitsch.
(There is an amusing postscript to the making of Laughton’s section of the film. The producers were informed that the English censors would not accept the final raspberry: it would be necessary to make an alternative ending. Laughton himself proposed the replacement gesture: an unequivocable Vs up sign. He must have been as surprised as anyone to hear that the censors accepted this and it was duly made, causing shocks of delight among English audiences who could scarcely believe their luck.)
It is worth recalling again that Laughton had by the end of 1932, his first year in Hollywood, completed six major films, playing opposite and alongside world-famous stars (If I Had a Million alone boasts Charles Ruggles, W. C. Fields, Gary Cooper, George Raft). He had been acclaimed every time, generally deemed to have ‘stolen the film’ on each occasion. He was unquestionably A Star, though he didn’t yet realise the full significance of that, either in terms of the power it bought him, or the public acclaim he would begin to receive.
What is most remarkable is not his meteoric rise, astonishing though that is, but how well he handled it. The poise and the ease of his performance in the Lubitsch film is almost unbelievable from a young Englishman, just turned thirty-three years of age, with only six years professional experience behind him, gifted neither with great beauty or great social savoir-faire. Faced with overpowering personalities, men used to being obeyed and women used to being deferred to, a publicity machine unparalleled in world history, the promise of limitless wealth and unimaginable fame, his focus never veered from the work in hand. He concentrated on getting better and more truthful with every performance.
