by Simon Callow
If he read them, these words could hardly have failed to stir Laughton deeply, in their semi-pantheistic feeling, in their breadth of vision of the actor’s work – and in their sense of the elemental. What after all, was Laughton trying to do, if not to release the souls of his characters?
Whether through Boleslavsky’s direct influence, or the presence at close quarters of such a very large spirit (Boleslavsky is remembered even now by his old students at the Lab as an incandescent speaker, an inspirer), Laughton evokes Javert’s soul in Les Misérables with unforgettable power. The very first glimpse of him in the film is remarkable. He stands at the desk of his superior in the police force, listening to his dossier. The costume (Laughton devised it himself) creates an immediate impression of intense containment, of pressure: a short cloak over a tight tunic, long boots giving the actor (still slim: 34/35 were the thin years for Laughton – physically, that is – certainly not financially or artistically) the impression of having long, stiff legs; on his head a little cap, seemingly rammed tight on his skull, and framing the unsmiling, almost contourless orb of his face, glowing coldly with frozen misery and single-minded sureness of purpose.
It is now more than an appearance: it is an apparition. As the recital of facts rolls on, he remains perfectly motionless. Then the fact is announced that his father had been imprisoned, and served in a galley. The orb cracks – only for a second, but it is unforgettable, because it seems as if the whole man might split straight down the middle, such is the force of the impulse. Then the structure reasserts itself and when he speaks, it is with an even voice, tense but steady. Laughton uses a kind of London lower-middle-class accent, which quite acceptably wanders, under extreme duress, into Scarborough. Why not? He’s playing a Lyonnais who has moved to Marseilles: a newly-acquired accent does tend to slip away at moments of crisis.
Javert’s sense of duty, which both shackles him and prevents him from falling apart, informs Laughton’s playing of his scenes of confrontation with Valjean, above all the scene where he comes to him to offer his resignation because he has infringed regulations – he has lived by them, now he must go down by them. The curious feeling of someone about to burst apart is physically uncomfortable to watch. Never for a moment in Laughton’s performance does the audience share Javert’s lust for Valjean’s blood; instead they are transfixed by the spectacle of a man who has filled the vacuum created by his fear with a monstrous, inhuman destructiveness of which he is ultimately the victim. He has become his quest. In a way hard to analyse, Laughton constantly suggests the pain which gave rise to this obsession. As he spies on Valjean, the moon face transfigured with destructive longings, as watchful as a cat waiting to pounce on a bird, as ardent as a voyeur hypnotised by the object of his infatuation, as hungry as a dog ogling a plate of meat, he cuts a figure that is both chilling and pitiful, and which is always preparing us for the climax of both film and performance: the moment when Valjean surrenders himself, and Javert, at the hour of what should be his triumph, simply melts away into pity. It is a devastating moment, as steel turns to honey. With impeccable taste, the director chooses not to show the drowning of Javert, elliptically implying it with empty boots and swirling Seine.
‘This sequence was, in my opinion,’ Laughton wrote, ‘the finest thing I have ever been able to accomplish on the screen.’ He continued making films for another 25 years, but it is hard to disagree with what he says. ‘“What a tragedy!” I wanted the audience to exclaim, “to have one’s whole life overshadowed by a fanatical sense of duty?”’ This is exactly what they do exclaim; but it is not the tragedy of one man, a fictional character, that they marvel at. It is the tragedy of us all, of life itself, of, yes, the human condition. The ability to shift the audience from thinking Poor him! to thinking Poor us! must surely be a mark of greatness in an actor.
It is noteworthy that, on this film, as with so many of his most remarkable achievements, the circumstances of filming caused him great physical discomfort. Wading through the sewers, day in and day out, imagining the smells and dankness, focused him more and more on the agonies with which he was filling his being. It is hard to avoid the feeling that there was an element of self-punishment in Laughton, possibly with sexual overtones. Who can say, for sure? In fact, Laughton was highly sensitive to pain, and disliked physical discomfort. Perhaps pain was the quickest route to feeling; and feeling was the basis of his art. Quite clearly, he was haunted by guilt. ‘As far as we know,’ says Charles Higham, ‘Laughton had no sexual relations whatever in the years 1934–35,’ so it wouldn’t have been a simple guilt for actions. Perhaps for thoughts … no doubt a continuing legacy of Stoneyhurst, the triumph of a Catholic upbringing: perpetual unease, nameless doubt, existential anxiety. He had rejected confession, while retaining guilt; embraced the nettle, dismissed the dock-leaf.
And so it was left to his acting to cleanse his soul; and again, on Les Miseŕables, says Miss Lanchester, it worked: ‘he gave one of those cleansing performances that gave him a little peace.’
The film was well enough received: ‘Somehow the picture seems more vivid and important than the novel,’ wrote James Shelley Hamilton, ‘though Boleslavsky yields to his temptation to prettifying the scenes with unnecessary dabbling in mere effects of light and shadow.’ He had no hesitation about Laughton, however: ‘the astonishing revelation is that of Charles Laughton as Javert, a picture of a tortured spirit, fighting against something it cannot understand, for which one must go to the greatest works of art for a comparison. One wonders if Victor Hugo himself put into that character all that Laughton brings out of it.’ Critics – those who sensed what Laughton was trying to do – were straining for superlatives. For others (Otis Ferguson, for example) ‘he continues to be a baffling figure, impressive even in his inevitable overplaying.’ There is something in this performance that touches nerves so deep, that the spectator either submits to it or refuses it altogether.
After it, he returned to England where Elsa already was. Korda was trying to lure him back into the fold, and they started work on what proved to be a time-consuming wild goose chase: Cyrano de Bergerac, a long-standing passion of Charles’. Laughton was only in England long enough to help set the project up with Korda: the problem, as always – until, at any rate, Anthony Burgess’ miraculous version for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1984 – was the translation. They lighted on an admired poet of the time, author of The Uncelestial City, Signposts to Poetry, and a striking memoir of his Jewish childhood, Now a Stranger, Humbert Wolfe (not, as improbably reported by both Lanchester and Higham, Virginia’s husband, Leonard Woolf).
After setting the project up, Laughton returned to Hollywood at the behest of Irving Thalberg to play Captain Bligh in the film of Mutiny on the Bounty. Before he went he did his research. Lettie Greig, his cousin from Scarborough, visiting the Laughtons for supper, recalls his arrival, three hours late, in a state of uncontrollable excitement, having been to Gieves’ in Bond Street and discovered the original records for Bligh’s uniform – from 1789. The authenticity wasn’t the point; it was what it did to his imagination. Costumes had a particularly powerful effect on Laughton, one of the most useful levers to his creativity. Edith Head, queen of Hollywood costume designers said: ‘Put Charles Laughton in front of a three-way mirror and you were apt to get the whole play. Charles had the amazing ability to adjust his body to his clothes. You could put a suit on Charles and by his body control that suit could change amazingly before your eyes.’ Lanchester writes: ‘Charles could look at you from under a hat brim like nobody else … before any production, Charles would play with his new props – putting on a hat and taking it off, hanging it up and taking it down, at home, in his dressing room, or in the producer’s office. This was a time of fun for Charles and any audience around him … he knew he could captivate and mesmerise.’
During the honeymoon period of preparation, he could fool around with the stupendous instrument that was his talent; like a hunter picking off plaster du
cks with his gun to make children laugh. Alas, when the work started in earnest, the fun evaporated.
Mutiny on the Bounty was a novel by Nordhoff and Hall, the rights of which had been acquired by Frank Lloyd, actor, writer, winner of two Academy Awards, with a view to playing Bligh himself. He was dissuaded from this folly by the advance of large sums of money from MGM, for whom Thalberg now bought the project. It is alleged that Lloyd insisted that whoever play Bligh should do so in the bushy eyebrows for which he, Lloyd, was famous. This savage self-satire seems less likely than that Laughton was perpetrating another of those sly jokes which had served him so well as Mr Prohack and the Man with Red Hair. Certainly, Laughton had no time for Lloyd; but then, for once, nor did anyone else. Thalberg was involved in continuous fracas with him, mainly over his handling of the cast. ‘He was always good on sea pictures,’ said Geraldine Farrar. ‘I liked him as a director, but he had better luck with ships than people.’ Unfortunately, on Mutiny he had to handle two rather high-powered people with very little in common.
Clark Gable was unlikely casting for the eighteenth-century Englishman, Fletcher Christian, and felt so himself. He particularly dreaded wearing breeches. To the amazement of both himself and his studios, he had become the very image of American manhood, admired by guys and gals alike – ideal husband, lover, friend, boss, buddy. His acting was limited, but true; his powers of transformation negligible. Good looks and inimitable sexual charm were his strong suits; that, and the rare quality of relaxed masculinity. He was a heaven-sent partner to a succession of divas – Garbo, Crawford, Constance Bennett – but he was less easily matched with men. Good-natured and generous though he was, he was nervous about competition in the area where he felt himself vulnerable: acting; and in 1935, Charles Laughton was acting.
Laughton’s feelings about Gable, as may be imagined, hinged on appearance; though not, as is commonly assumed, a simple opposition of his ugliness with Gable’s good looks. Gary Cooper’s perhaps even greater beauty had not disturbed Laughton in the least: he had frankly admired him, both as an actor and in physical terms. Perhaps the key word, here, however, is ‘beauty’. Cooper, with his ravishing androgyny, full of lip, luxuriant of eyelash, gentle of manner, had – at least in his performing personality – found a perfect balance between his masculine and his feminine elements, which was no threat to Laughton. It was exactly the balance that he longed to achieve himself but which for most of his life resolved itself into a battle, rather than a blend. Gable, on the other hand – ‘certain as the sunrise,’ as his New York Times obituary put it, ‘consistently and stubbornly all man’ – was the very thing Laughton could never be; and also the very thing to which he was always deeply drawn, sexually. In his oblique way, as so often, he expressed some of the complication of his feelings in a comment to a newspaper: ‘Clark Gable dramatizes himself. He makes you feel full of pep. You see Clark Gable and you say, I’ll go out and have half a dozen dates.’
It could well be that this underlying feeling was responsible for the thing that distressed Gable so much during filming: his only real complaint against Laughton, with whom he otherwise got on very well: namely, that he wouldn’t look him in the eye. For Gable, to whom acting essentially meant re-acting, this was fatal. Having a clear and real relationship with his fellow actor was Gable’s life-line. If Laughton delivered his speeches sideways, into the ocean, he was lost. Laughton undoubtedly had good reasons of character and situation for doing so, though Gable was not the first to complain of it: Flora Robson, likewise an essentially ‘relating’ performer, had found it intolerable, too. It is, in fact, rather in the nature of Laughton’s view of his characters: each man a self-contained universe of pain. This was of no interest to Gable. Again and again he stormed off the set bitterly denouncing Laughton for trying to exclude him, cut him out of the scene. This was his technical naïveté, his innocence of the art of acting, his lack of inner resource.
As it happens, the conflict was very good for the movie. The relationship between Christian and Bligh is tense and competitive and full of underlying complexity; perhaps, in Gable’s case, the most complex piece of work he did until the performances of his last years, when life and disappointment and illness had added a layer or two to his persona.
Laughton’s performance is again remarkable for the vision he offers of a soul trapped by itself. His first appearance, replete with Frank Lloyd eyebrows, Gieves’ uniform, and mouth downturned with self-disgust and rage, introduces us to the whole cancer of repression, inner and outer. Here is a man who is no vulgar sadist; he is someone in whom rigid application of rules has filled his brain and cast out any vestige of tender feeling. There is no flicker of enjoyment in his harshness; he is serving an exigent god, punishing himself as much as his victims. The clipped adenoidal voice, godsend to a million mimics thereafter, perfectly expresses the pressure inside the man. The sense of an impending explosion is hypnotic, and makes every scene in which he appears dangerous and disturbing; against one’s instincts, one feels for him as much as for Christian – hating him and fearing for him simultaneously.
Almost the peak of the performance, because the most naked revelation of the cancered soul, is the scene in which the Tahitian chieftains step on board to greet the crew. Bligh attempts to be charming. It is an excruciating spectacle, brilliantly funny and painful, as he attempts to reverse the downward trend of his mouth, and somehow summon a smile. Again, there is the sense of the armour cracking, huge inner urges long since imprisoned surging towards the surface; but the lid is clamped firmly back on.
After the mutiny, aboard the little rowing boat in which he and the loyal rump of the crew have been set adrift, expecting to drown or die of dehydration, he hurls his famous defiance of Christian, and enters the music hall forever. It’s such a famous moment that it risks seeming to be a parody of itself, but, no, it transcends its imitations and remains one of the most enduring images of a brave villain, a man true to his lights, prepared to go to hell in the name of a false code. It, and the journey, during which the sun slowly fries the passengers of the little boat, are magnificently real, all the more, perhaps, for having been shot (not on the ocean, as were the early scenes on board ship, but in the tank on the MGM lot) not merely once but twice, because of an error in continuity. ‘We have conquered the sea!’ cries Laughton at the end of the voyage, and the cast and crew are reputed to have cheered and wept. It’s not hard to see why.
‘When I have a part like Father Barrett or Bligh, I hate the man’s guts so much that I always have to stop myself overacting and be real. Parts like that make me physically sick,’ Laughton told a journalist. The problem was to strike a balance between the character and his attitude to him. With Bligh, as with his best performances, the balance, or perhaps one should say, the tension, is perfectly found, so that not merely do you see the man, see what he has become – you want to do something about it. The effect of Laughton’s work at its best is to make the audience active instead of passive.
His relationship with Gable had warmed over the shoot. One day, according to Higham, Gable, as a supreme gesture of comradeship, had taken Laughton with him on his visit to a brothel. Laughton was apparently deeply touched (and presumably deeply anxious). On another day, Gable had found him gazing sadly at a fisherman, saying to himself, ‘I wish I were that man.’ They seemed by the end of the movie, at any rate, to have achieved a degree of understanding.
The shoot ended relatively happily. On the last day, Laughton assembled the crew and the cast and recited the Gettysburg address, to enormous applause. It increasingly became Laughton’s habit, at home and at work, in the streets and over supper, to quote, at considerable length, great pages from world literature. He apparently did so with complete unselfconsciousness, and they were received with attention and admiration. He had a comprehensive memory of large sections of the Bible, the novels of Thomas Wolfe, the masterpieces of Jacobean prose, and so on. He had a wonderfully resonant, if not very strong, voice, and he p
hrased with fine timing and a unique ability to sound the vibrations of meaning and association in a word. None of this makes these impromptu performances any the less extraordinary. It is most unusual, it must be stressed, for an actor to act when not being paid for it. Unlike pianists or singers, we are not ready at the drop of a hat to perform for the delight of our fellow-guests. Indeed, most of us would rather die than do so. But Charles Laughton obviously found it easier than making small talk, which he anyway regarded as a waste of time. So, without preamble, and assuming everyone else to be equally keen to do something profitable rather than twitter away, he would recite. And his shyness would disappear.
It is here that one can see for the first time the drive towards story-telling, or rather, being a story-teller, which finally became his preferred self-image.
