by Simon Callow
It may have been ‘perhaps the best scene in the whole picture,’ but the price was too high, both for the film and for Laughton. He never again made that kind of fuss over a performance, because he never again tried so hard. Except for This Land is Mine and Advise and Consent, with both of which he had, for different reasons, a strong personal identification, he increasingly saw films as a source of easy money – ‘paying for ice for father’s piles,’ as he and Elsa Lanchester used picturesquely to describe it.
Laughton made a significant remark to Kanin at the rather subdued end-of-shoot party. ‘What’s so terribly, terribly sad about all of this is that some day you’ll come to know what a damned nice fella I really am.’ He was beginning to like himself – wanted to be liked by others. His art of acting, which consisted of driving himself relentlessly to reveal unpalatable aspects of his personality, was not calculated to endear him to anyone. So he began to withdraw from it. To be loved was more important. Perhaps on They Knew What They Wanted he was already looking for release from the behaviour his relationship to his art demanded of him. Some years after the film, he and Kanin were both at a supper party. Kanin, asked how he handled difficult actors, ‘heard the pompous side of me take off,’ he says. ‘“Well Frances,” I said, “Take charge. Never lose control, not for a moment. Let them know that either they’re going to do what they’re supposed to do, or else get rid of them at once. That’s the only way.”’ Charles looked up from his soup and said, “Why didn’t you?”’
They Knew What They Wanted was produced by Erich Pommer; it is the last fruit of his unhappy collaboration with Laughton. ‘Mayflower’, the name of their company, turned out to be oddly prophetic: they had both emigrated to America. Pommer stayed for a few more years until, in 1946, he returned in U.S. uniform to Germany to help reorganise the shattered film industry. Elsa Lanchester reports that Pommer’s son claimed that he had been killed by Laughton’s impossible temperament. If so, it was a long-drawn out death: he outlived Laughton by four years.
Charles’ next film presented a very different face of Laughton, both as actor and as man: It Started with Eve, whipped cream topped with sugar and drenched in chocolate sauce. It’s not a very agreeable experience, watching it today, but Deanna Durbin, whose vehicle it was, is pleasantly straightforward on the plump brink of womanhood, and Charles is larky. He seems to be having fun; indeed, there is every evidence that he was having fun. He got on famously with Durbin – another daughter substitute, like Maureen O’Hara and, later, Margaret O’Brien – and they liked to play practical jokes on Henry Koster, the good-natured director, a Durbin veteran (Three Smart Girls; One Hundred Men and a Girl; Three Smart Girls Grow Up). ‘Thanks to Charles,’ Deanna wrote, ‘I discovered that making pictures could be fun, lost my tenseness, and discovered that Hollywood and making pictures were not the most important things in the world.’ It was exactly what Laughton had been discovering for himself. The result in his case is a performance which is fun, but not funny – not seriously funny at any rate, so his work becomes a mere diversion. This is a new development in his work. It is the flip-side, the Bank Holiday, as Oscar Wilde might say, of his sulking. It is still a formidable talent, but frivolously used.
He plays an aged millionaire who is revived on his deathbed by the life-enhancing sight of Miss Durbin, apparently his nephew’s fiancée. She isn’t, is in fact a last-minute substitute for the real one, but when he’s back on his feet, he demands to see her. The film resolves into the story of his attempts to bring her and his nephew together. He effects this with great twinkle. It is, in fact, a considerable physical transformation on his part – he seems tiny, thin and incomputably ancient: the very image as it happens, of the late Lord Stockton (Harold Macmillan). It is said that Deanna Durbin wasn’t introduced to him by name on the first day of filming and passed the entire day wondering where Charles Laughton was. There are many good physical gags (with cigars, and, particularly, an up-ended sofa) and he finds a wonderful wavering voice for the character. The performance is suffused with the quality that is said always to have eluded him: benevolence. It is, in a word, charming.
The Tuttles of Tahiti, which followed It Started with Eve, is more dispiriting, as the talent itself is in question. Jonas is a sleepy, mildly whimsical descendant of Ginger Ted, surrounded by his enormous family of toothsome Tahitian youths, distant descendants, perhaps, of Fletcher Christian (the film is based on a novel by Nordoff and Hall, authors of Mutiny on the Bounty) but hardly of the irredeemably Caucasian Laughton. There are, of course, pleasant interludes, especially in his scenes with Florence Bates, an amateur actress, with whom Laughton, always attracted to the simplicity and directness that eluded him in his own personality, struck up a friendship. There are the obligatory eating and chase scenes – showing him, as usual, in the one, shamelessly indulgent, in the other, comically fleet of foot, but there is no animating spirit. He acts like a little boy persuaded to play, but determined not to enjoy it. Laughton is often accused of mugging, implying a certain relish, an actor unrestrainedly indulging his favourite tricks, but that is a false definition of the word. Mugging is what an actor does when he is not engaged. He manipulates his mug into shapes, instead of reconstructing the impulses which would create those shapes. In The Tuttles, Laughton is mugging. There is, moreover, no connection between his performance and the ideas of the piece (such as they are). Generally, good acting spontaneously engages with the ideas of the script: Laughton, in his performances of the thirties, evinced a positive genius for doing so. His Jonas, alas, is a mere blur of hastily assembled characteristics.
Again, as in They Knew What They Wanted, the sense of resistance comes off the screen. Neither physically nor as a personality was Laughton capable of being dull or routine. Unsatisfactory as a performance, his Jonas nevertheless exists as a substantial phenomenon: another actor’s discomfort in a rôle might pass unnoticed, but Laughton’s is palpable. It is as if, like one of Woody Allen’s characters in The Purple Rose of Cairo, he would like to step out of the screen and be released from his celluloid prison. It is, indeed, as if playing this character in this film were an indignity, a humiliation that had been imposed on him.
This dégringolade did not pass unnoticed: ‘Why,’ asked the New York Times, ‘has he been permitted to dissipate his talent in arrant mugging within the past few years?’ What is astonishing is the speed of his decline, both actually, and in critical favour. 1939 (the year of Hunchback), a genius; 1941 (It Started with Eve), a joke (Garson Kanin reports that he and a friend went to see the film. In the opening sequence, Laughton, apparently on his death-bed, says, ‘I’m so happy’. ‘Don’t you mean hammy?’ whispers Gar’s chum, and they crack up); The Tuttles is a low-water mark. Tales of Manhattan, also 1941, is an honourable exception in the decline, though the New York Times didn’t think so: ‘he is farcical in a manner which violated the mood.’ Seen today, his performance in this compendium movie is the most effective of all the half dozen stars, each with their own episode. The thread between episodes is a tail-coat, worn in turn by Boyer, Fonda, Laughton, Edward G. Robinson and Paul Robeson. Laughton plays an impoverished composer who finally gets a break when the Toscanini-like martinet (Victor Francen), in whose orchestra his best friend plays, agrees to programme his Scherzo. He conducts it himself, wearing the tail-coat his wife has bought for him from the pawnshop. As his baton-waving becomes more vigorous, the coat starts to split at the seams. The audience starts to titter, then to laugh; finally, in the Hollywood Manner, the entire auditorium is roaring with uncontrolled hysteria. Laughton, shattered by this, stops conducting and sits pathetically on the edge of the podium in his shirt-sleeves, having torn off the remains of the tail-coat. Francen-Toscanini has been watching all this from the box with icy rage. Suddenly, he stands. The audience falls silent as he takes off his tail-coat. Slowly at first, then increasingly quickly, every man in the audience does likewise. Laughton picks up his baton and resumes the Scherzo. Ovation, in the Hollywood Manne
r.
Laughton’s performance is delicate, precise, and touching. The character is one of his ordinary little men (to underline the point he’s called Charlie Smith) and he handles the part as cleanly and simply as his earlier Charlie in St Martin’s Lane. As before, his emotional honesty is affecting: his hopefulness while the conductor examines his score; his joyful communication of the good news to his family; his nervous anxiety before the concert; his exhilaration as he hears the score for the first time; and, supremely, his despondency as he sinks to the floor amid the derision of the audience – all this is truly and lightly played. It is, in fact, an excellent performance, full, as well as all its other qualities, of genuine high spirits. It never attempts the concentration of gesture and intensification of feeling that make his performance of Phineas V. Lambert in If I Had a Million, for instance, so deeply funny. It is a study of one little man which never reaches out to encompass all little men, but it is clearly the work of an immensely gifted player. It is hard to see what the New York Times was aiming at in its imputation of farcicality – apart from certain helter-skelter moments – but even these are entirely within the framework of the character and the situation.
There is no record of Laughton’s relationship with Duvivier, the director. In an extensive career, beginning and ending unremarkably, Duvivier had a middle period of the most glorious splendour, including some of the masterpieces of the French cinema: Un Carnet de Bal, Fin du Jour, Poil de Carotte. He had achieved outstanding success with what amounted to a regular company of actors, including one who had a certain resemblance to Laughton, Michel Simon, and who, like Laughton, was haunted by what he conceived of as his physical unattractiveness. Many of Simon’s performances seem, also like Laughton’s, to embody titanic emotions to a degree that shifts them from psychology into mythology. The resemblance with Laughton ends there, however, because Simon, after a brief brush with emotional relationships – an abortive marriage – became more or less a recluse (which Laughton never was) – and devoted himself to acting quite single-mindedly, even after a disastrous experiment with make-up which left him nearly blind. Acting was Simon’s destination, whereas Laughton was en route somewhere else.
It is pleasing, however, to imagine that Duvivier approached Laughton with some sensitivity – he was used to actors trying for complex results – even if the work they produced together was not among its respective authors’ very finest. (Elsa Lanchester, incidentally, gives an unusually affecting performance as Charlie’s tough, good wife.) The film in fact made a great deal of money and led to another, less successful compendium film, Flesh and Fantasy, with Boyer and Edward G. Robinson, directed again by Duvivier. But Laughton was not in it.
For Laughton, 1942 was dominated, cinematically and in more important other ways, by the war. America had joined the Allies in December 1941. Laughton had done everything in his power to promote that course, and now he threw himself with extraordinary passion into the drive to sell War Bonds. He went on a selling tour in August of 1942; on 1 September he took part, along with other stars in a series of rallies; and on 30 September he talked himself hoarse on a phone-in broadcast during which, starting at seven o’clock in the morning and ending at midnight, he sold $298,000 worth of bonds. His passion was evidently persuasive. He ended the broadcast with the exhortation that it was ‘a duty and a privilege to buy bonds – the last chance to save the flickering flame of democracy. God help you and your children if that flame goes out.’
The ideals of democracy, and particularly, it may be said, American democracy, meant a great deal to Laughton; also, like many wartime expatriates, he wanted to do everything he could to contribute to the war effort, ‘from guilt’, as Elsa said, ‘of being in the Hollywood sunshine’. Behind the passion of his commitment to these drives, however, lies something else: the desire for communication with the audience, direct communication, unmediated by a play or a character. He wanted to communicate what he had learned and was learning (for he never ceased to learn; to question was his supreme passion); and that was a sense of values. He had neither politics nor philosophy, but he had a most vivid apprehension of beauty and the rightness of things. Most of his career as an actor had been spent in exploring the disorders of the human spirit, exhibited in his own person. Already in his films he had started to quote, wherever possible, great statements about the human condition, the Gettysburg Address, of course, and the Bible. At these moments – in Ruggles, and Rembrandt, particularly – he departed almost entirely from character and even situation to celebrate great truths clothed in gorgeous rhetorical raiments.
In a 1937 article (in which he was once more defending himself as an actor), he recounts how on one of his journeys home from America, a crowd gathered to bid him farewell – ‘not, you understand, confirmed autograph hunters, whom I detest, but just a normal crowd of Americans, come to see their friends and relations off.’ They cheered him affectionately. ‘This obvious feeling of goodwill impressed me not a little, but far more important was the fact that, time and again, I found they were shouting out expressions from my films which I had gone out of my way to impress upon them. I felt that my work had not been wasted, that they all knew exactly what I had been striving after.’ That sense of communicating something important and memorable came to seem to Laughton the most valuable thing he could do – added to which, it made the work so much less lonely and painful. It was a worthy vocation and it was in touch with the human race, of which, Lanchester wrote, ‘he really never felt himself part.’ His work as an actor had gained him a kind of co-opted membership of it as a tragic fool, a court jester whose maimed body served as a means both of facing misfortune and laughing at it. Quasimodo was not only the culmination but also the paradigm of what he had been doing. Now he wanted to approach mankind from a different angle, bearing gifts of beauty and wisdom. He wanted to be a teacher and a prophet – and a lover.
. . .
After the completion of They Knew What They Wanted, he began to see how he might reach people directly. Dreading the usual promotion tour – receptions, parties, interviews, autographs, ‘well, Mr Laughton, what do you think of our little town?’ – he had suggested that he do some readings instead. It had been his habit to read out loud at the slightest prompting, or at none. Having neither capacity nor inclination for small talk, he would prefer to spend the time usefully by sharing his discoveries in the literary field – not by talking about books (that would be more small talk) but by actually quoting them. His physical relish of words was as great as, and identical in kind to, his passion for paintings. Sound, texture, rhythm, tone, shape were what he responded to with an aesthetic appetite that was both sensuous and spiritual. It was this, more than any meaning contained in the words, that he sought to transmit. He wanted to direct people’s attention to the beauties readily available to them.
The perhaps slightly surprised citizens of middle America took very well to his readings on that promotion tour. Laughton simply read a couple of poems, a section or two of the Bible, and, inevitably, ended with the Gettysburg address. The experience lodged deep in his brain. Peddling beauty, exalted thoughts and heightened language was much more agreeable than struggling with some squalid character, trying to invest paltry phrases with truth and force, and being publicly humiliated in the process. The isolation of the life, the feeding off himself, the constant revelation of his ugliness: all of this could be avoided. He could give the audience delight and enlightenment; they could give him acknowledgement and, yes, admiration; and the words themselves would give him all the inspiration, all the energy so patently absent from filmscripts.
The thoughts marinated in Laughton’s mind, taking – as did everything with him – their own good time before they were matured. He carried on reading privately – to Henry Koster, for example, the German director of It Started with Eve, forbidden by the curfew on aliens from going out at night; to Jean Renoir and his wife Dido (to whom he read Shakespeare); to soldiers in hospitals; and, something that
made him ‘very happy’, according to Elsa Lanchester, to crippled and retarded children. He found to his delight that his auditors, whether famous artists like Koster and Renoir, or wounded GIs and backward kids, were spellbound and eager for more; eager, too, to find out more about the authors. He started to satisfy their interest; and so, in time, he became a teacher.
Routine
MEANWHILE, THERE WAS money to be made, and that meant films. Forever and a Day was officially a war charity film – the first of them – the idea for which came from Cedric Hardwicke, and his prestige helped to persuade the seven directors, twenty-one writers and seventy-eight featured actors to participate. It was the Hollywood Raj’s big do, and in fact it made rather a lot of money, almost all of which went to various good causes.
