Charles Laughton

by Simon Callow

  Laughton’s intention was to revolutionise film-making. He was no actor-manager, planning a series of vehicles for himself; on the contrary, reported Film Weekly: ‘he believes and hopes the star system will gradually die out’. Instead ‘team work among actors in films should develop … if a permanent company could work together as in a repertory theatre they would create something new and exciting.’ He believed, moreover, that the writer was central to the development of the medium, that Shakespeare, Molière and Chekhov had written their immortal plays for a known company of actors and actresses. The same system should exist in films. ‘When the new medium starts to produce its own writers, then will begin the period of great movies.’

  As for himself: ‘I’m not going to play any more emperors or figures of genius. I don’t like it – ‘exposing the extraordinary instead of illuminating the ordinary.’ I’m going to look for more human parts to play. The Blighs and Barretts can have a rest for a while.’

  So the great experiment began. He flung himself into the unaccustomed role of executive, appearing daily at his office, sporting tie and suit and shoes not merely laced up but actually polished. He and Pommer (a third partner, the shrewd Scot, John Maxwell, who had built up the ABC chain and was a central figure in many deals of the British film industry of the thirties, was not concerned with artistic policy) assembled a programme with a distinctly middle-brow slant. Writers, if not exactly Shakespeare, Molière or Chekhov, were well represented: Somerset Maugham (Vessel of Wrath); Clemence Dane (St Martin’s Lane); and Daphne du Maurier (Jamaica Inn). There was some semblance of a permanent group of actors: Robert Newton and Tyrone Guthrie, for example, would appear in two films each, as would Elsa Lanchester; and Laughton, though a central figure in all three (he was, after all, the company’s main asset) had surrounded himself with very good actors in sizeable and meaty roles.

  Things started well enough with Vessel of Wrath. The adaptor of the Maugham story, Bartlett Cormack, was also designated director, but the strain of a major location shoot led him swiftly to the bottle, and Pommer took over. The result is the most visually stylish and most coherent of the Mayflower films – rather beautifully shot, in fact, both on location in the South of France, and on Tom Morahan’s convincing jungle sets, with Jules Kruger’s photography creating the shadows which were the hallmark of UFA films. Robert Newton, in the days before the words ‘Arr, Jim lad’ had ever passed his lips, makes an interestingly world-weary district commissioner with a fitful French accent; Tyrone Guthrie plays a bird-like caricature of a missionary, madly exaggerated but funny and vivid; while Lanchester plays the missionary’s sister, the longest, most central role of her career. Happily, it’s also one of her best. Laughton is Ginger Ted, the beachcomber of the American title, an agreeable sot and reprobate, who spends most of the film avoiding Elsa’s reforming ministrations. Their relationship – again with an autobiographical thread: it was she who had put Charles into the suit, tie and shoes of his producer’s uniform after all – is played with some passion and realism, and does rise to a real encounter between the opposed forces of hedonism and Christian do-goodery (much hated by both Laughtons). His performance, in particular, is a real celebration of easy carnality as the native women of the island to which he is exiled caress and pamper him. The film contains an indictment of colonialism of a romantic kind, as Lanchester strides through the milling natives, trying to force Christianity on them. Its last scene presents a witty reverse of the film’s main situation when Ted and Martha (Lanchester) return from the East Indies to run a hotel in suburban England – strictly teetotal, at Ted’s insistence.

  All in all the piece is charming and fun and very well made and perfectly honourable. The Brave New World of Film it wasn’t, however. Laughton made a point of admiring his Ginger Ted in preference to other characters he’d played: ‘I think it is my most significant role to date’. Which is just silly. ‘I am a little weary of playing heavy, humourless characters,’ he said, quite understandably, but the part lacks the tension of Laughton’s relationship to it – as in If I Had a Million, for example – and thus fails to be memorable.

  His account of the genesis of the role is interesting in this connexion: ‘Vessel of Wrath resolved itself into a much broader comedy than we at first intended. I thought, when I started work on the characterisation, that the pathos and the humour would be fairly divided, but Ginger Ted turned out to be a much funnier character than we had anticipated … I have learned never to force a characterisation into a specified mould, but allow the character to build itself up from the material. Ginger Ted, I discovered, evoked more laughter than sympathy, so I let him go his own way.’ It is hard to imagine Bligh, or Rembrandt, or Nero being arrived at in this way.

  Producing as well as acting in a movie (or play, for that matter) is a curious and unsatisfactory combination of duties. It requires the development of a sense – the planning, budgeting, organising sense – which is best left to another person. Directing and acting in the same film, though not without its disadvantages, is simply a bringing together of two complementary aspects of the creative work. The producer has to concern himself with how that creative work can be realised with the minimum compromise; the word compromise should not even be in the vocabulary of the other two. For Laughton, however, Mayflower must at first have seemed an ideal opportunity to divert his huge energies away from the exhausting and nearly dementing labour of giving birth to major performances; acting would be just one of his activities; the pressure would be off.

  He was right: the pressure was off – but was also gone from the centre of his performances. This still left a lot, but it meant that they became particular rather than universal, and Laughton became a character actor, purveyor of personality studies instead of matrices of the human experience.

  Contemporary criticism of Laughton was generally enthusiastic (‘he is first-rate’ said the Spectator); ‘he carries nearly the whole burden of the film, moving through an almost visible fog of alcohol and perspiration’. ‘Grand all through it,’ said Otis Ferguson, ‘he got into his part with such relish you could almost smell him.’ These tributes to his fleshliness had a particular significance in 1938. ‘There is great skill in (Laughton’s) insolence and a nicely calculated vulgarity which is very near that gusto we have been missing so much in British films. Viewed as a comment, not on missionaries, but on those wretched Women’s Leagues of America who have been taking the corpuscles out of American films, Laughton’s performance has a certain importance,’ wrote John Grierson in World Film News. Otis Ferguson too observed that ‘part of the blessing of this film is its unbounded appreciation of some joys of life to which movies are making us rapidly unaccustomed.’ But in England, particularly, the film was judged by tougher criteria than usual, because much hinged on the outcome of Laughton and Pommer’s experiment. ‘With the continued storm over the new Quota Act the moment is critical for British films. If at this juncture our studios can prove their mettle, much will be done to restore City confidence in the future,’ Stuart Legg observed in The Spectator. He continued: ‘Vessel of Wrath has many desirable qualities. It is sanely and economically produced, its technical standards are high, but it lacks the vitality of the big films.’ Grierson wrote even more sharply in a article that amounts to a public warning to the partners:

  I like Laughton very much, for he is a brilliant fellow, but I like the future of British films even more. He will not mind, therefore, if I suggest an elementary lesson in the categories. The trouble with Laughton is that he is good at several very different things. He has skill in tragedy and has an ambition to play King Lear. He speaks rhetoric with a flair almost unique among modern actors, and though there may be mannerism in the way he slides across a full stop, no one will forget his reading of the Bible in Rembrandt. He is, moreover, a dangerously good and upsetting showman in his capacity of lagging on a cue and exaggerating an acting trifle behind the back of his director. No scrum-half ever played the blind side of a referee m
ore knowingly. Add to these talents the equally various ones of being good at comedy and quite brilliant at slapstick and you have a deadly mixture of virtues.

  In any single film you can’t possibly have the lot. Lear cannot possibly at the same time act the Fool, and Macbeth take his place among the porters. That precisely is what Laughton is forever doing. He does not understand economy and, by the mere process of being everything in starts and nothing long, is the greatest saboteur a film could have. It may all come from his anxious desire to add everything of himself to the value of the film. But the damage is certain. Laughton one at a time would be the wonder of the day. Five at a time he is a producer’s headache.

  I have quarrelled a great deal with people over Vessel of Wrath. But I soon found we were quarrelling over very different things. I viewed it as principally slapstick and was prepared to forgive the odd departures into drama and sentiment. My arguers had viewed it as drama and were bewildered by the fact that it was mostly slapstick. See the film as, nearly, in the category of Laurel and Hardy, and you will see Vessel of Wrath at its best. But this does not absolve Pommer and Laughton from making up their minds more decisively next time. Knowing Laughton a little, I think he should come through. A strategic retreat from his own talents is what is called for.

  This trenchant analysis foreshadows Laughton’s increasing reluctance to play a character, his yearning somehow to play all the characters, to play the whole film.

  Their next offering, St Martin’s Lane, had much less coherence than Vessel of Wrath, stemming from failures of both writing and direction. The idea – from Charles – has a certain charm: set in the community of West End buskers, it charts the rise of one of them to stardom and riches, while another remains behind, lost in hopeless love. The notion of popular entertainment was always close to Laughton’s heart, and the sections with which he’s connected – the busking scenes – are full of affection and fun. The film is one of the first to have scenes shot on location in the centre of London, which lends it atmosphere and authenticity. Clemence Dane, the writer, said: ‘We desired to make a classic of London street life, so that everyone should cry out: “This is home!” “This is the true London!”’ And to some extent they succeed. Tom Morahan’s St Martin’s Lane itself is a brilliant recreation. Things begin to go wrong with the arrival of Rex Harrison – despite a delightful performance by him (Laughton had visited him backstage at the Criterion Theatre where he was playing in French Without Tears telling him: ‘you’re very good in this Rex, you play the part as if you were wearing a sword’ – an interesting, and, Harrison felt, a perceptive remark). He plays an improbable upper-class songwriter who falls in love with the girl busker of the group, writes a musical for her, makes her a Great Star, and marries her. Laughton’s busker watches her from a distance, she having rejected him, then auditions for her next show, but he’s no good, and he tails sadly away. All are somehow reconciled by the last frame.

  For all the success of the low-life scenes, the high-life scenes are so poorly written, crazily plotted and played, and the musical sequences are so tackily botched, that the entertainment quotient of the film is slight. Even the busking sequences are rendered somewhat bizarre by the presence in them of Tyrone Guthrie, a credible if burlesqued missionary in Vessel of Wrath, but here an almost expressionist figure, gangling, hawk-eyed and apparently possessed of no busking skills whatever. He is very striking, sitting up in bed in his lonely attic when the girl comes looking for Charlie (the Laughton character) and delivering himself of a stinging rebuke on the nature of friendship, but it’s utterly out of key with the tone of the film – insofar as it may be said to have one. Essentially it’s a mess – which must be laid at the door of the director, the genial, bottle-happy Tim Whelan, an American in London, ex-script-writer and sometime director to Harold Lloyd (which, given Laughton’s constant hankering after slapstick, must have been what got him the job). His grip on the film is, to say the least, loose: in the musical sequences, positively slack.

  But how could Laughton and Pommer – with their avowed sense of the central significance of the script – have gone into production with such a hodge-podge? Well, of course, a thousand reasons, the usual thousand reasons, but it was ominous that their high ideals should so swiftly have produced a film which is as inconsequential, as ill-thought-through and as inept as the general output of the film industry. It failed exactly as they failed, from the same causes and the same waste of time and money. Clemence Dane, in a letter to Pommer, catalogues the unceasing vacillations of the partners. They didn’t really know what they wanted.

  There are consolations in the film: one is the almost spectrally suave performance of Harrison; a second is the girl: Vivien Leigh, not at the very outset of her career, but sufficiently unknown for this film, transatlanticized into The Sidewalks of London (no wonder it was a flop!) to be her calling-card to Hollywood (it was after a viewing of it that Selznick decided on her as Scarlett O’Hara). Her performance is, on one level, inept beyond words. The Cockney accent is quite unacceptable, she plays peevishness and petulance throughout, she can’t really sing and lurches from one emotion to another without even a gesture towards character. Against this must be set her astonishing face, a squeezed rose, exotic and fresh at the same time, unconventional by standards of the time but flawless. Moreover, she contains within her a spirit of anarchy, a real danger and unpredictability, that is almost Lulu-like: a daemon, a siren, a pussycat with the sharpest claws and a tongue that spits like a lynx.

  She is phenomenal; which is always better than being competent or solid. She does nothing to help a shaky script, however. Some of the phenomenality of her performance could derive from the life-style which her biographer, Anne Edwards, charts. She was at the passionate start of her affair with Olivier, and most of her nights were filled with things other than sleep – this may account for the hectic quality of her acting. She was apparently repelled by Laughton, and dreaded a sexual advance which she would have to reject; he for his part was deeply shocked by her liberal use of four-lettered words. His sense of propriety was and remained essentially Victorian: he didn’t like to hear words of that kind used by someone who belonged to the same sex as his mother.

  His performance of the oddly named Charlie Staggers is beautifully judged, human, warm, funny, sentimental, real, in fact surprisingly modern. His is the only Cockney accent in the film that would be acceptable today, or recognisable even, and the whole pitch of the performance, particularly considering that he’s playing a performer, with all the limitless potential for mugging that offers, is exceptionally restrained. It’s touching, too: Charlie knows he’s not good-looking, but he dares to hope. The scene where Leigh tells him to ‘look in the frying-pan’ which he uses as his mirror if he wants to see why she could never marry him, and the scene in which he auditions for the swanky West End backers of her musical and quietly wanders away to spare her embarrassment, bring a tear to the eye. In its economy and accuracy the performance is a complete refutation of any accusations of self-indulgence or tricksiness. It is, especially in its context, an admirably straightforward piece of work.

  The delicacy of Laughton’s performance was noted – ‘one of the finest, if not the best – sympathetic performances Charles Laughton has ever given on the screen … Mr Laughton is the meticulous, sensitive artist in this instance.’ (Richard Sheridan Ames); though the resistance of some critics was not to be overcome by any such crude expedient as his giving an excellent performance: ‘Whether he is really a finished actor or no I leave to you. I have thought sometimes in the past that Laughton was acclaimed for much of that specious, arresting but obvious, grossly physical playing. This is a comparatively restrained and certainly a felt performance. Yet it seems to me the actor still puts physical mannerisms in the way of our seeing inside the character, so to speak. Be that as it was, few actors could bring to the role what Laughton does,’ Bert Harlen told readers of Hollywood Spectator. You can’t please some of the people any of
the time.

  Despite decent notices and a stupendous première at the Odeon Leicester Square, at which 5,000 people massed for the arrival of the stars, it did only moderate business. Much hung on the success of the third film, Jamaica Inn. Laughton drew on his personal acquaintance with him to sign Alfred Hitchcock, on the brink of his American career, to direct it. It was a coup. Hitchcock was the man of the hour, having completed The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Thirty-Nine Steps and The Lady Vanishes in the past three years. He brought a sense of tautly-controlled style quite lacking from contemporary British films – not least those produced by Mayflower. Curiously, he seems to have accepted the film before having read the script. The moment he did, however, he tried to get out of his contract; was, it is said, prepared to sell his house in order to do so. But Laughton cajoled and persuaded and begged; and finally, Laughton prevailed. A new script was commissioned – Clemence Dane had been responsible for the despised first version – from Sydney Gilliatt, Hitchcock’s collaborator on The Lady Vanishes; but that was not completely satisfactory, either. The problem was Laughton’s character, the squire, Sir Humphrey Pengallan. To avoid offending the church-going section of the population, the parson could not be the villain, as in the novel; so Sir Humphrey became the smugglers’ master-mind. Much re-thinking was called for, to which end, J.B. Priestley was put on the payroll, to work exclusively on Laughton’s part. Once again, the prophets of writers’ cinema were embarking on a film without that essential, a coherent and workable script.