Charles Laughton

by Simon Callow

  Back, with relief, to Rembrandt. As only before on Henry VIII, Laughton was closely involved in every detail of the filming, present at design discussions with Korda’s brilliant brother, Vincent, at lighting discussions with the melancholy but inspired cameraman, Georges Périnal, and at casting sessions, where he put forward the names of many of his erstwhile associates at the Old Vic – Roger Livesey and Marius Goring among them. Elsa was to play Hendrickje Stoffels. (Other members of the strong cast include John Clements, Raymond Huntley, and, in one of her few film roles, Gertrude Lawrence.)

  The shoot was not easy, and Korda suffered greatly with Laughton. ‘It has been a terrible film for me and Alex,’ he told a newspaper. But for once the problem was not one of interpretation, nor was he filling himself with ugly and painful emotions; the problem on Rembrandt was simply to attain the utmost simplicity. ‘How we fought and suffered in the first weeks when we were still feeling our way. It had to be so simple, so serious, never a sign of acting.’ It is that rare thing in Laughton’s output, a naturalistic performance. Of course, it is supra-naturalistic as well: magnified, intensified, crystallised. But for once (twice, actually: in a later film, This Land is Mine, he attempts the same thing) he doesn’t isolate elements of his experience to create a concentrated model of a soul gone wrong; instead he simply exists – a man, complicated, many faceted, living and breathing. Unlike other Laughton characters, he seems to have a life off-screen. Acting was not a dirty word for Laughton, and he knew exactly what he meant by it: the projection of great and warring forces onto the framework of a character. In Rembrandt, he wanted to do something quite different. He wanted to celebrate his own love of beauty, his creative aspirations, his sense of humanity. His Rembrandt, I believe, is an idealised self-portrait; just as Albert Lory, the character he plays in This Land is Mine, is another self-portrait, only a critical one.

  His Rembrandt is a detailed, sensitive, heart-breaking performance, quietly pitched, with not a trace of exaggeration. It is also one of the very few filmed recreations of an artist that actually convince. Laughton at the canvas is possessed by the concentration only ever seen in a painter’s eye. He took up painting during the making of the film, but the external details are the least of it: what he astonishingly conveys is the act of translation, the process by which the object depicted becomes line, form, and colour. Every scene he plays is filled from within with complex reality: his exasperated, uncomprehending dealings with the burghers, his tenderness with the blind beggar he uses as a model, above all in the scenes with Elsa Lanchester as Hendrickje Stoffels. She never did anything better; they never did anything better. His grave playfulness is perfectly matched with her radiant openness, and the scene in which she suddenly dies is as poignant as the pointless death of some small animal.

  Korda, Lanchester reports, grudgingly admitted that she had played the part well. She felt, with understandable bitterness, that Korda didn’t like her or her acting, and that she was only ever useful to him as a bait for Charles. He even went so far, she claims, as to set up, and even begin to shoot, a film with her in the lead which he immediately abandoned when Laughton signed his contract for Rembrandt. That seems to be going to lengths. Miss Lanchester also believed that Korda was chief among those, ‘the Laughton-snatchers,’ who wished to keep Charles and her apart, and that it was the Laughton-snatchers who finally poisoned their relationship. She looks on the period of Rembrandt as a happy time for them. She had recently had what was to prove the greatest success of her career, the double-role of Mary Shelley and the bride in James Whale’s The Bride of Frankenstein. From now on, everything was to be in the shadow of Charles. She observes, en passant, that she wrote the little tune that Hendrickje sings, and that Charles had advised her not to take credit for it; people would think she was trying to be grand.

  It would appear, despite what she felt, that the processes of mutual destruction which increasingly characterised their relationship were well under way.

  The film in which Laughton gave his exceptional performance, was not a success, either critically, financially, or, in the last analysis, artistically – despite Korda’s enterprising marketing: he offered a free ticket to anyone owning a Rembrandt. It was greeted with respect by the critics, and the undoubted success of the design – a stylisation of Dutch seventeenth-century engraving, a kind of black and white toy town – and the lighting – Rembrandt’s and Vermeer’s tones and textures somehow conveyed in black and white – were acknowledged. But it’s poorly shaped, the rhythms are dull, and there is a flatness about the whole thing. All this must be laid at Korda’s door. He was disheartened by the failure; that and the struggle with Laughton temporarily killed his interest in directing (he didn’t attempt to do so again until Lady Hamilton in 1941). In reality, he wasn’t ever interested in making films as Laughton understood the job. If it wasn’t going to be fun, what was the point? He preferred to swap jokes and stories with Gertrude Lawrence, who regarded film acting as a quick way to make cash; to the extent that she hadn’t bothered to learn her lines, having them written out on the sleeves of her cuff. Such was the shrieking and the howling proceeding from Lawrence and Korda that Laughton had screens put round the soundstage where he was working. Dreary and pompous, they must have thought him; and in a way he was. But he was trying to do a very difficult thing. The final film tells it all: Gertrude Lawrence plays Geertje Dirx as a conventional stage shrew, a harsh-tongued villainess, while Laughton …

  ‘Only by laying himself bare to the bone could any actor hope to play the part. Only Laughton, I believe, of all screen actors, could hope to play it so movingly and so well … he has taken the golden passages like a psalmist. Rembrandt is his great part, his matriculation; full of the intimate moments that test an actor’s integrity to the highest … probably the finest acting performance ever recorded on celluloid.’ (C.A. Lejeune.)

  But the film disappoints, because, despite many fine passages in the script (by several hands, but principally attributed to Carl Zuckmayer, already author of The Captain of Köpenick and The Devil’s General (although the memorable scene in which Rembrandt reads the Bible was, predictably, interpolated by Laughton), the scope of the film is circumscribed by Korda’s boulevard instincts. The film should have been titled The Private Life of Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn; structurally, it is simply an account of the painter’s relationship with his various women, through which certain other episodes are woven. By the end of it one feels cheated of a full exploration of the central character. Which is frustrating, because Laughton, in this film, offered the perfect raw material. In a newspaper interview, Charles took the unusual step of criticizing Korda for not having the courage to show Rembrandt’s circumstances as they really were; for sentimentalising.

  No doubt Korda was eager to get the Laughtons off his hands for a while. After the film he gave them the permission he had withheld a year earlier (they were both under contract to him) to play in Peter Pan in the West End. Laughton had seen du Maurier in the original production times without number, and had for many years longed to do it himself; was perhaps keen, too, for Elsa to have a leading part. At first Barrie was opposed to the Laughtons: principally to Laughton, who, he feared, would ‘terrify the children.’ A call from Elisabeth Bergner, however, allayed his doubts, and they proceeded. He attended a rehearsal, at which he squabbled with Elsa Lanchester over the changes she wanted to introduce into the conventional conception of Peter. She saw him as – in her own words – ‘a dominating little snit who orders people around’ and had drawn a most surprising comparison with the now (1937) fully risen Hitler – ‘another little dictator’. This was the ‘something’ which Agate found had ‘gone wrong’ with her Peter, ‘which she has obviously conceived along the lines of her Ariel. It is not elfin but eerie, like some little boy cut off in the blossom of his youth, untrousled, disappointed, unanealed. A sinister green make-up hasn’t helped matters.’ As for Charles: ‘his Hook falls short both in the pictorial and the scarifying
quality. There should be something of eighteenth century dandyism about this master pirate. Hook should look like some old print, and doesn’t.’

  It seems that this was an instance (almost unknown up to this date but later, alas, to become more common) of a half-hearted performance on Charles’ part. The problem with the Laughton method is that it requires total commitment to come off. Almost without exception his failures are failures of involvement, resulting in soporific, underpowered performances, which are lamentable, but by no means hammy (the usual criticism of him). The opportunities for hamminess in Captain Hook are unlimited; clearly Charles availed himself of none of them. The reasons may be many; Barrie’s injunction not to terrify the children could be one, though it would be unlike Laughton to be cowed by a mere living author (only dead ones really inhibited him). He almost certainly would have been inhibited by attempting a part which he had seen performed many times by his idol, du Maurier – a terrible burden on any actor, trying to shake off another actor’s inflexions, business, interpretation. Of all the motives for accepting a part, admiration for what someone else did with it is the most treacherous. Curiously, too, Laughton didn’t perform the great double of Hook/Darling, thus depriving himself of Barrie’s most trenchant stroke, the nightmarish underpinning of his superficially fey tale: father is really a monster; the monster is really father.

  Close reflexion on the nature of the role reveals why it is, in fact, a rather unsuitable part for Laughton altogether. It is, as Agate suggests, a high comedy role, a parody of the very stage villainy that Laughton had spent the great part of his career startlingly transforming into genuine evil, with roots in pain and frustration. Real evil in that sense would be completely out of place in Peter Pan; and Laughton wasn’t on the kind of terms with himself that would allow him to stand apart from his own creations to the extent of sending them up – yet. A self-relishing villainy, eye-glinting, lip-smacking, villainy, celebrating its own wickedness, was not something Laughton was able or interested, at this stage of his life, to do.

  Perhaps after all, it was Barrie’s observation that did it, because if Laughton had let go, had inhabited and transformed Hook as he had done Bligh, he might have given the little ones some very nasty nightmares; and if he had begun to submit to Hook’s fear of the crocodile, he might have given them to himself. So he put the brakes on, and was neither fish nor fowl.

  Guthrie later wittily wrote of the production: ‘Hook, a heavyweight Don Quixote, became the hero of the evening. It was when Peter Pan came on that little children hid their faces in their mothers’ skirts and strong men shook with fear.’

  Elsa then went off to frighten children in the regions, with a different Hook (George Hayes); and Charles moved on to the next project Korda had found for him. Having failed to animate a Ruggles-like venture called The Ghost Goes West, which René Clair was to direct – indeed later did, with Robert Donat – and another, to be based on Romola Nijinsky’s book about her husband, with Charles as Diaghilev and Anton Dolin as the dancer, Korda finally found a property quite perfect for his resident genius, which at the same time had sufficiently spectacular elements to woo back the great international audience he had been courting since Henry VIII: Robert Graves’ masterpiece, I, Claudius.

  Crisis

  THE REST IS history, though as told, a somewhat enigmatic chapter thereof. The chapter can be written from several viewpoints: I, Claudius represented the conjunction of many separate crises: Korda’s financial crisis (with, as a sub-crisis, his amorous difficulties with Merle Oberon); the growing crisis in Laughton’s acting; and the crisis in Josef von Sternberg’s mind: not to put too fine a point on it, his nervous breakdown.

  Korda had no intention of ever directing Laughton again. His first impulse had been to engage William Cameron Menzies, fresh from his double triumph as director and designer of Things to Come (though not a box-office success, one of the few enduring masterpieces from Korda’s stable). But he had run into trouble with Marlene Dietrich on Knight without Armour: he had not been able to lay hands on the balance of $100,000 that he owed her. She had agreed to waive the outstanding amount if he would use von Sternberg, the mentor she never failed to acknowledge, though estranged from him as a lover. Von Sternberg, she implied, would perhaps do for Merle Oberon what he had done for her; that is, make her immortal. Korda needed little prompting on either count. His innovative business principles of bluff and blather and charm and cheat had resulted in a number of very interesting films and monstrous debts, and he simply could no longer raise Marlene’s $100,000. Moreover, his love affair with Oberon was entirely dependent on his advancing her career in a decisive manner. He persuaded her that I, Claudius was being mounted for her and that von Sternberg would arrange her entrée into the Gallery of Fame.

  Laughton, too, was delighted. Quite apart from the eternal debt he owed him in the matter of the phantom spirochetes, he admired von Sternberg as an artist; one of the few American film-makers to explore the possibilities of film as a visual medium. Moreover, his well-sustained reputation as a Svengali attracted Charles, too. Having received, as he felt, no help whatsoever from Korda, the toast of the green-room, he was eagerly on the look-out for someone who would help him through the increasingly difficult agonies of creation; someone, at the very least, who would share his perception of the task; in short, a fellow-artist. Surely von Sternberg, who had already shown himself to be kind and practically considerate, as well as an artist of the most demanding sort, would be the very man.

  So Laughton went blithely off to the London Clinic where von Sternberg happened to be installed, a large bunch of grapes and a History of the Roman Empire in his hand, a smile on his face, and love in his heart. He told von Sterrberg that he longed to work with him. He admitted that he was difficult to direct, but that he, von Sternberg, would have no difficulties, ‘his difficulties would vanish into thin air.’ And off he went.

  Why was von Sternberg in the London Clinic in the first place? His memoirs simply state that he had been flown over from Bali to be operated on by ‘the King of England’s surgeon.’ It was an interruption of a tour of the Far East he had abruptly undertaken after the completion of the eccentric house he built in the middle of the American desert: ‘No sooner was the house completed than I knew that it was not far away enough from everything I wished to leave behind, and I looked around to see where else I might find refuge from the etiolated ogres I had evoked.’ In other words, he was on the run.

  In seven years and seven films he obsessively worked through his complex relationship with Dietrich, creating a series of versions of her, ravishingly framed and set, in which her fatally passive beauty was seen to have destroyed the ruined men who loved her. The cycle came to an end with Capriccio Espagnol, banned in Spain, and retitled The Devil is a Woman by the head of Paramount, Lubitsch, who then sacked its director. His always rocky relationship with Dietrich came to a full stop. Sternberg’s emotional and physical exhaustion must have been extreme. He then executed two journeyman pieces, a Crime and Punishment with Peter Lorre, quirkily played in modern dress (with a ludicrous Mrs Patrick Campbell as the pawnbroker); and The King Steps Out, a Fritz Kreisler operetta starring Grace Moore, which betrays no single trace of von Sternberg’s touch.

  ‘I had had enough,’ he quite understandably writes. He went and found the ‘barren and forlorn landscape’, in which he built the house of steel and glass to which he withdrew. ‘While it was going up, I planted a thousand trees.’ But, as he says, it was not far enough away. So he fled as far as he could go, to the other side of the world.

  And then he came to London, to hospital, for reasons of health, possibly physical and possibly mental, the man who, born Jo Stern into an ordinary Viennese Jewish family, had, by his absolute mastery of the technical elements of film-making, become king, emperor, dictator; who had uncompromisingly used the screen to dramatise his claustrophobic, obsessional view of life and, more particularly, love. He was now an emperor without an empire and
he had no screen on which to inscribe his bleak message. His old friend Alexander Korda, disheartened by the failure of the film he directed, creatively run down, offered him ‘full partnership in all his enterprises,’ which von Sternberg declined, and the script of I, Claudius to direct, which he accepted. It was a subject that interested him: ‘to show how a nobody can become a god, and become a nobody and nothing again, appealed to me.’

  If he’d discussed this view of the character with the actor who was to play it, he would have met opposition, for Laughton’s view of men and life, though pessimistic, was neither reductive nor negative; but he didn’t. Why should he? Laughton was an actor, a not very remarkable one: ‘who was this comparatively minor actor whose antics had to be taken so seriously? An actor is rewarded with attention out of all proportion to his services. An actor is turned on and off like a spigot, and like the spigot, is not the source of the liquid that flows through him. The intelligent actor knows this and submits without a question. The problem was only to see that the values that bounced back from the material were under my control. And these values rarely depended on the actor. What became visible was produced by an interplay of light and shadow, of foreground and background, point and counterpoint, inclusion and exclusion of content, a balance of pictorial and acoustic impact. And how is that to be conveyed to an actor?’