by Simon Callow
It is almost comic to contemplate the prospect of the author of these sentiments approaching the actor who was trying to make acting rival painting and music as an art, and who, in all innocence, was looking forward to a unique creative collaboration.
Von Sternberg, as Elsa Lanchester said, rose from his bed ‘like the phoenix,’ on the run no more. He was back in harness! Into the jodphurs and boots he climbed, on went the turban acquired en route in Java. He took the reins in his hand and drove like the very devil. Korda had not left him much time, but he strode about, galvanising every one, issuing commands, bullying, harassing, getting results! Making people jump! And every so often, this fat and shambling and self-opinionated actor would come up to him and ask him how he saw the character? And should he limp with the left foot or the right? And what did he think was the meaning of this speech, or of that? These trivial and tiresome questions were answered with injunctions to read the script, to read the novel, to go away until the shooting began, when he would receive his detailed instructions. But the actor wanted to talk. Intolerable. Von Sternberg, calmly, patiently, humoured him. ‘I was opposed to no method he might think valid for impersonating himself.’
Impersonating himself. The phrase expresses everything von Sternberg’s approach implied. ‘I became somewhat suspicious when he became a mystic. Apparently he was attempting to imbue his characterisations with meanings that an actor should not attempt to express, intent on soaring into a rarefied air where he could pass Dali, Picasso, Kandinsky, and Chagall in full flight … with genuine diffidence, Laughton asked how one should address the gods. I decided to test other methods and be as devious as was possible outside of a lunatic asylum. In order to address the gods, I said, if the words he was to haul out of his intestines were to be effective, he must make the audience feel that the hull of the galley was encrusted with barnacles that impeded its speed. As if galvanized, Laughton understood at once, and vouchsafed that every barnacle would be heard in every syllable, and that he could bring into his voice the brine, the tang of the salt in the air, seaweed, two or more dolphins, and the screech of the seagulls. He stormed out of the office as if chased by the Furies, and it appeared that now everything was in good shape, except perhaps, the director.’
The lines for battle were well and truly drawn, the director, straining at the leash, waiting to whip into shape this story and these actors (by now including Flora Robson, Emlyn Williams, and Ralph Richardson in the part Raymond Massey had turned down, according to von Sternberg, because ‘nothing on earth’ would persuade him to work with the actor he had directed in The Silver Tassie); and the actor, still, despite some rather unfriendly and patronising behaviour from his old friend the director, looking forward to their partnership in trying to give life to the hapless vocal and physical cripple he hoped to embody. He had already given some excellent help in the scene in which he had to address the gods, an almost impossible thing to get the feeling of: the ancient Roman gods so personal and so near, and yet still gods. Von Sternberg’s note had been excellent; neither intellectual nor technical: it had done what a note should do: it had released something in him.
He had, moreover, himself hit on something which conveyed some of the anguished, romantically bruised dignity of Claudius: King Edward VIII’s abdication speech: ‘the woman I love,’ and so on, recently released on a best-selling gramophone record. It was a key. It worked. Who knows why? It was a comfort, a little nudge into the part. Every day he played it, dozens of times, in his caravan, on the set, at home.
Thus armed, battle commenced. From the beginning it was evident to Laughton that he could expect nothing but cold command from von Sternberg. Still genuinely grateful for the kind services rendered at the time of the fistula, and respectful of his skills, Laughton never raised his voice against his director, never created a scene, was never once ‘difficult’. He simply couldn’t work in the conditions von Sternberg had created. The words of the part became meaningless to him, he was standing outside himself, nothing was filling his being: like his mind, it was a blank. He could hardly remember a line; he, who had been word perfect a week before, when he and von Sternberg had gone through the script together. Von Sternberg had been worried that he seemed expressionless, that his face had seemed amorphous, empty. He had (rightly) attributed this to the actor’s ‘artistic pregnancy’. Elsewhere he speaks of him ‘squirming like a woman in labour’. Now that Laughton wanted to deliver, he received no help. He would repeat the same scene over and over again, always losing his lines or suddenly being distracted by some trivial thing – an odd note in his voice – a light – a movement. Self-consciousness kills any inner life. Laughton would try desperate remedies: moving to another set for a different sequence, trying new moves to break the pattern. Nothing availed except momentarily. A kind of blushing modesty, a feeling of nakedness overtook him.
All of this was incomprehensible to von Sternberg. His greatest praise for Dietrich had been her ability to translate his ‘instructions’ into actions without explanation. His word was her command. ‘Given the proper motivation and some guidance, acting is nothing remarkable, providing of course, that the actor is an actor and has the necessary shamelessness to expose his emotions and antics to inspection. To give face to expressions used by millions of human beings all around us, day after day, requires only a relatively minor ability to mimic.’
Von Sternberg had discerned ‘a tendency toward masochism’ in Laughton and decided to test it. He set up a scene in which Claudius would walk down a street surrounded by a jeering mob, and specially chose the ugliest, most evil-smelling extras he could find, directing them to howl abuse at Charles as he passed. The lighting was specially designed to highlight their savage expressions; they were placed to hem Laughton in. ‘We began what everyone thought to be a rehearsal only. My diagnosis proved to be correct. The scene was fine and Claudius superb.’ Not surprisingly, as von Sternberg had at last done something actually to help Laughton. Of course it could have been done mechanically, by skill alone, by the actor working in isolation; but it is hard to believe that the scene would have been as charged as the performance revealed in the footage assembled by Bill Duncalf for The Epic That Never Was, his television documentary about the failed project. Thank God for Laughton and for what he was trying to do as an actor that this footage exists. Otherwise von Sternberg’s account and the insidious rumours of the detractors would have convinced us that all that was going on during that doomed shoot was a monumental case of primadonna-ism, an actor self-indulgent to the point of buffoonery wrecking the work of his fellow-workers.
Instead we can see that Laughton was struggling to give life to a performance of unprecedentedly searing pathos, to show a man mocked and spurned though sensitive, gentle and intelligent: a simple enough character who, by the intensity of his inner feeling, he was transfiguring into a paradigm of pain, a Dostoevskian creation, almost too painful to watch.
The twenty-five minutes or so of surviving footage are painful to watch in another way: it is almost embarrassing to eavesdrop on the public humiliation of this struggling man, constantly breaking off – ‘I’m sorry, I’ve lost it’, or ‘that’s the broadest London accent you ever heard in your life’ – as the extras and his fellow-actors shuffle nervous and bored in the background. When he does forget a word or a line, von Sternberg, off-camera, shouts it out – always a terrible reproach. If the director knows the line and you don’t … what’s curious is that as far as one can see up to the point Laughton breaks off, he seems to be giving a wonderful performance. Something obviously snaps in his brain, the thread is lost, belief is suspended. Self-consciousness overtakes him. Very often when an actor forgets his lines, it is because a voice inside his brain has whispered to him, ‘Wouldn’t it be dreadful if you forgot the lines?’ And that voice has generally entered the brain at the moment the actor loses contact, however momentarily, with the character in the situation, and, looking back to examine this or that line, turns, like Lot’s wi
fe, into salt. And this often happens when there is no contact between actor and director, and the actor becomes convinced that every time he opens his mouth it is a further source of displeasure. This shortly becomes paralysing, and unless the actor can get hold of some form of self-confidence (most likely anger against the director), it will only get worse; until, in the theatre, the director goes away and the performance can begin to exist. But of course, in a film, the director never does go away.
From the evidence of what has survived, Laughton was desperately in need of support because he had chosen to walk a very high tightrope indeed. The physical gesture of the performance is enormous: the stutters and the tics are nearly incapacitating, and the limp is one of utmost deformity, like a man walking along with one foot in a trench. The point is not that people do have just such terrible distortions in life, which they certainly do, but that behind them, inside them, is a quite different person, not a loon or a cripple, but a gentle, wise, and humorous man, a scholar and a poet, who has remained untarnished by his physical disadvantages and people’s crass and cruel reaction to them. It is this gap which creates the scale of the performance – the huge obstacles surmounted by a witty and shrewd spirit, and which makes the climactic speech in which Claudius finally takes command in the Senate such an overpoweringly emotional experience (‘One of the greatest performances in the history of the cinema”, Dirk Bogarde says in his commentary to The Epic That Never Was). We see the spirit totally overcome the flesh. It is a moment to bring forth cheers from an audience, because it celebrates, as Charles Laughton liked to celebrate, the triumph of reality over appearance. It becomes an epic moment because of the actor’s choices. Another man might have striven to show Claudius’ pain and suffering, which would have created sympathy, but would not been remotely as moving as what we see, because then we would have become involved in what Claudius was feeling instead of seeing what was being done to him. Equally, another actor might have tried to minimise, to rationalise, his physical distortions, to join the two sides of the character closer together. What Laughton does is to sound the furthest notes of the octave as loud and clear as possible, and thus to strike the chord of maximum resonance.
No such task was ever attempted by any actor in any other von Sternberg movie, except, of course, Jannings in The Blue Angel; but any comparison of the two performances leaves Jannings behind in a morass of face-pulling and sentimental manipulation. The actuality of Laughton’s performance remains shocking today.
But to von Sternberg the success of the scene was his: he had tricked the actor, as so often before, into giving a performance. Well, perhaps the trick would work again. He scoured the script for other instances in which Laughton’s alleged masochism could be activated in the film’s favour. And he found a scene in which Claudius had to be kicked through a door, fall on his face and say – it was his bridal night – ‘This is not how I would have chosen to appear before you.’ Laughton asked for someone actually to kick him into the room. ‘My assistant gladly volunteered to perform this service.’ Laughton was kicked into the room. He fell. And then he dried up. He couldn’t remember his line, his one simple and obvious line. The scene was repeated. Same thing. And again. If Laughton’s masochism was being given a night out, so was the assistant director’s sadism. Finally, they broke for lunch. ‘Laughton went off to eat as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.’ After lunch, same thing. And again. Von Sternberg sent for Korda; ‘my peculiar type of wizardry, if such it be, had come to an end.’
Korda’s quite different wizardry was equally unavailing. Filming was abandoned for the day.
Even if this account is, as usual with von Sternberg, both one-sided and distorted, there is no doubt that Laughton was behaving strangely. If so, it is hardly surprising. Constitutionally incapable of ‘just getting on with it,’ he had somehow, up to this point, been able to engineer situations in which he was able to function as a creative artist, somehow finding the equation between self-exposure and the technical frame within which to shape the material thus mined. Faced with an absolute refusal to acknowledge let alone abet the processes by which his creations were achieved, he was thrown into a state of paralysis. Temperamentally incapable of standing up to the harsh dictatorial style of von Sternberg, he adopted a defensive posture: he retreated into babyhood. In what amounts to a satirical parody of how von Sternberg wanted him to behave he was in effect saying: you want to tell me what to do? All right, tell me: everything, every movement, every gesture, every word, tell me when to get up and when to sit down. Tell me when to breathe. Obviously you feel that my brain, my contribution, are of no value, so I will withdraw both. Then you’ll really be in charge. This posture of Charles, a typical one, simultaneously passive and taunting, drove von Sternberg into a frenzy; it was a mockery of him and his methods; above all, it was an abrogation of his authority, as he had, finally, to admit by calling in the producer.
It was a terrible confrontation which, the moment it became a battle of principle, could be won by neither antagonist. Laughton wept the bitterest tears of his career every night when he went home; he was in agony; but he never gave up his stand: that the actor’s work, in its complexity, difficulty and sheer human cost must be acknowledged and abetted. It was the spigot’s revolt. Laughton was insisting that, as he had proved in innumerable dull and clichéd scripts, he was both the conduit and the source of the liquid. Von Sternberg, implacably opposed to the notion of a co-creator, could not allow this heresy to flourish.
The point of no return had been reached. The final showdown never happened, however, because of the famous car accident in which Merle Oberon, driving home from the studio one night, was injured. At first Korda, despite his love for Oberon, frantically called Hollywood to try to acquire the services of Claudette Colbert; but she wasn’t available. Meanwhile it became clear that the wounds Oberon had sustained were much less than at first appeared; but she was still hysterical from shock, and refused to continue shooting. She was calm enough to receive a visit from Herbert Wilcox, as reported by Philip Jenkinson. Wilcox was surprised at the modest extent of her damage: a facial bruise and a slightly twisted ankle; and more surprised when she said that shooting would have to be abandoned, not because of her, but because of ‘poor Joe’. ‘Where is he?’ Wilcox wanted to know. ‘Charing Cross Hospital Psychiatric Unit.’ Wilcox finally managed to contact him there, asking if he wanted to be visited. ‘Absolutely not,’ said von Sternberg, ‘I’m sick.’
So Korda pulled the plug. Oberon’s accident satisfied the insurance company; Korda was not the loser, financially. He nursed hopes for a remake of the film the following year. He told Robert Graves that it would have to be without Laughton: Korda, said Graves, ‘complained bitterly of Laughton and his intellectualism. It was worse with von Sternberg, who did not humour him.’ Laughton must obviously have been relieved; there was no question of him remaking any of the film, because when his contract expired a couple of weeks later he was due to take up a new contract immediately after, a contract which promised an entirely new direction in his unhappy career: he was to be co-producer of a new company, Mayflower Productions, with Erich Pommer, ex-head of the great German studio, UFA, and, by a nice irony, producer of von Sternberg’s first great success, The Blue Angel.
After leaving the Psychiatric Unit, von Sternberg continued on his travels: back to the Far East, above all Japan. Then, somehow, he found himself in France, trying to cast a London-based film of Germinal; at the same time he was setting up a film which would restore Austria’s good name in the world. In the grip of demonic energy, he returned to London. ‘A great surge of strength and power had taken hold of me; I was like an electric bulb which gleams with an intensity, too bright a moment before it is burned out … it is not difficult to perceive that I had wound up my inner spring too tightly … I looked out of the window to think it might not be a bad idea to take a little walk; but there was no time to waste, and I turned back to my desk. A few minutes later the concept
of time ceased to exist for me, something within me had snapped like an elastic that had been stretched too far.’
Slowly he recovered (‘a human being has reservoirs of energy deeper than the deep seas’); but his remaining career, except for his Japanese film Anatahan, is a dismal record of hack-work and co-direction. His main project after the war was a script he had written but which no one would back. It was called Seven Bad Years, the years of the title being the first of a man’s life, which, according to von Sternberg, determined the whole of the rest of it; the rest of one’s life was effectively run by ones’s seven-year-old self. Laughton may have been a mess, and difficult to handle; but his pathology was quite normal compared to that of the tiny emotionally stunted autocrat in whose nervous crisis I, Claudius is but an episode.
Mayflower
MAYFLOWER PRODUCTIONS WAS started with the utmost seriousness and the highest hopes. Pommer, in flight from Hitler, originator of the films (Caligari, Mabuse, Die Nibelungen, Metropolis) that had made the German cinema the most vital and the most beautifully produced in Europe, was a guarantee of integrity and high production values: Caroline Lejeune had written, in 1931, that ‘it would not be possible to present a complete impression of the better movie in Europe and America without some mention of Erich Pommer. He is that phenomenon so dear to the brighter journalism, a ‘mystery man’; the public does not know him, and even the men most closely associated with studio politics find it difficult to agree on the subject of his activities … his name across a film stands sturdily for box-office value, but it carries with it, at the same time, a definite promise of intelligence. It represents a certain scope of thought, a certain novelty and audacity of treatment; it represents a standard set high through many years of film experience, a product rigidly maintained above a certain demarcation line.’ In associating himself with Pommer, Laughton had scored a coup.
