by Simon Callow
Nothing else favourable can be said of the film. The many episodes are tenuously threaded together by the theme of ‘the great house’, in which, over the centuries, the several stories are supposed to have taken place. In his episode, Laughton plays a most peculiarly attired butler, circa 1850, attending on a household in which a new-fangled bath is being installed by a pair of comic plumbers (Cedric Hardwicke and – one rubs one’s eyes – Buster Keaton). ‘Comic’ is an indication of intent rather than achievement. ‘Is there no one at RKO to tell Cedric Hardwicke when he is being unfunny? Or Charles Laughton when he is being plain bad?’ Agate’s exasperated comment is typical of those who remembered Laughton’s stage career. They felt something like bitterness at the apparent squandering of gifts. Of the film itself, Caroline Lejeune wrote in The Observer, ‘The most imposing thing about it is its harmonious consistency – the fact that so many diverse talents could work together to achieve something so monumentally and homogenously dull’.
American critics were more generous, condoning the absurd implausibility of the depiction of English life on patriotic and escapist grounds. ‘The story proves nothing in particular, except that old British mansions have fine ghosts and that there’ll always be an England so long as there is one sentimentalist left.’ (Bosley Crowther, New York Times)
There were no such kind words from the same source for Stand by for Action, Laughton’s next film, a most peculiar concoction concerning battleships and babies, which may have given Charles the cue for his performance of the Rear Admiral, ‘Old Ironpants’, as ‘a character out of HMS Pinafore’. ‘This is the sort of mock heroics,’ says Crowther, ‘which insults our fighting men.’ Charitably one assumes a sense of duty as the motive behind Laughton’s (and the other actors’) participation in the wretched farrago. That is exactly what is conveyed by the playing: a dutiful passage through hoops. There was nothing, absolutely nothing, for Laughton to engage with in the part; his performance remains dutiful until the last scene when (surely this must have been at Charles’ suggestion) he recites the entire Declaration of Independence, very well indeed. He suddenly connects. It, its sentiments and its language, obviously impassioned him; the character, never too sharply focused, simply disappears, and one is left with a great orator. Charles’ interests are quite nakedly displayed.
The movie (referred to privately by Laughton as ‘Fun Among the Holocausts’) was directed by Robert Z. Leonard – a studio workhorse who in his time had held together films such as Susan Lennox (with Garbo and Gable), The Great Ziegfeld (Myrna Loy, William Powell) and Pride and Prejudice (Laurence Olivier, Greer Garson) – and produced, inauspiciously enough, by the Brothers Dull: Leonard and Orville, Mrs Dull’s little boys. They and Robert Z. were responsible for Laughton’s next film, The Man from Down Under, which he retitled, in a letter to Perry Charles (‘if you show or mention this letter to anyone else, I shall personally crawl to New York City and will wring your God damned neck’), You Can’t Keep the Wallace Beery Tradition Down. Theodore Strauss reviewed it for the New York Times: ‘In the curious, clumsy and oddly lifeless story of a reprobate old Australian warrior and two refugee children adopted in the First World War, even Mr Laughton’s outrageously ebullient spirit seems tamed and listless. Perhaps it is his comment upon the naïvetés of the story, but the fact is that for once in his life, Mr Laughton is giving a performance that is simply ordinary. And certainly the film has little else to recommend it.’ Caroline Lejeune was more censorious, shocked, like many of the London critics, by the poor quality of Charles’ recent work: ‘One of the most painful screen phenomena of latter years has been the decline and fall of Charles Laughton from the splendid actor of The Private Life of Henry VIII, Mutiny On The Bounty and Rembrandt, to the mopping and mowing mug in The Man From Down Under.’
Straight on to the next one. There was no lack of demand for his services; but clearly Laughton had embarked on that fatal road which starts with the need to make money and the fear that one will never be asked again. The road leads to steadily declining fees and dwindling demand: the more you are prepared to play any old thing, the more any old thing is all that is offered you. From having parts specially constructed for you, you are called in to redeem underwritten parts: the result is almost always an appearance of strain, of contrivance, above all, of over-acting, which of course is exactly what it is. If the writing is under, the acting will be over – over and above the part. In Laughton’s case, such was the power of his screen presence that merely casting him, simply having him in the frame, places a weight on many of his characters that they can’t take. As Peter Ustinov later put it: ‘When Laughton was sitting quietly in a chair, not speaking, he was doing too much.’ In most of his films of this period – indeed, in most of the rest of his films, he was doing the bare minimum, hardly engaged at all. But it was still too much.
In The Canterville Ghost, he partly engages; with the paradoxical result that he seems to be doing less. This may have something to do with his having demanded, and secured, the dismissal of the director, with whom he claimed to be unable to work. This hapless individual was Norman Z. McLeod, veteran of the Marx Brothers (Monkey Business, Horse Feathers) and later to direct (is that quite the word?) Bob Hope (Road to Rio) and Danny Kaye (Walter Mitty). Laughton generally worked happily with comics’ directors; but not this time. It is an indication of his weight as a star that he was able to have the director removed. Not for much longer.
The replacement, possibly at Laughton’s suggestion, was the thirty-year-old Jules Dassin. He had been assistant director on They Knew What They Wanted, but was presumably not tarred with the Kanin brush. Laughton was co-operative and full of good, discreetly delivered suggestions. He took time and trouble with Dassin, and evidently taught him a great deal. This was a relationship in which he always thrived. The performance remains unfulfilled – the absurdities of the adaptation, pointlessly travestying Wilde, cannot have made the part easy to play – and there is a not wholly inappropriate air of a slightly tetchy uncle forced somewhat against his will to dress up for the children’s amusement. His scenes with Margaret O’Brien are affecting, however, and endowed, like similar encounters with Deanna Durbin and Maureen O’Hara, with the father-daughter tenderness which came from somewhere deep inside him. [Elsa Lanchester has recorded her decision, after discovering Charles’ homosexuality, not to have children by him. ‘A woman feels these things,’ she says. Later Laughton reproached her bitterly. By this stage, however, sexual relations between them had long ceased.]
The Canterville Ghost was well-enough reviewed. (James Agee, who later became Laughton’s friend, then collaborator, then enemy, dissented: Charles, he said, played the ghost in ‘the mock-pansy, mock-Shakespearian style,’ which is true enough, but not necessarily a bad thing. Wilde would have liked it.) It seemed, however, to suggest another ominous development: he, who had given flesh and blood to the most genuinely terrifying ogres of the screen, monsters from the collective unconscious, becoming a star of children’s movies, a sort of harmless ogre. In itself a perfectly decent performance, The Canterville Ghost cannot have reinforced Laughton’s self-respect.
In the circumstances, the telegram he sent to RKO on receipt of the script for This Land is Mine (‘what a tremendous challenge for a tired old ham!’) is fully understandable, if a trifle self-dramatising. The ‘old’ ham was in fact forty-four years old, and had been a professional actor for no longer than seventeen years – a modest period in the light of John Gielgud’s estimate that it takes twenty-five years to make an actor. It is an eloquent testimony of the low opinion of himself that Laughton had reached. He had lost contact with his vision of acting and with his sense of his talent. He was flailing around, adrift in celluloid.
He was right to be grateful for This Land Is Mine. The script (by Dudley Nichols) is clear, strong and intelligent, if structurally unbalanced; the central character, Albert Lory, is complex and touching; and the director was Jean Renoir. Laughton had known Renoir for so
me years; his ownership of The Judgement of Paris, Renoir père’s huge canvas, had been the starting point of their friendship. He was a witness at Renoir’s wedding, and had read Shakespeare to the French couple during their American exile. (This unusual service was apparently available to anyone, particularly those of foreign extraction. No one seems to have questioned it, simply settled down for regular infusions of blank verse, with occasional light relief from the King James version of the Bible. They were very serious sessions. Renoir entertainingly recalls, in his autobiography My Life, My Films, that cats and clocks were banned: absolute concentration was the order of the day.) Evidently the generosity of Renoir’s personality warmed Laughton, whom he regarded as a genius – a thing much more evident to Europeans than to Anglo-Saxons – Walter Slezak, who plays the Nazi Commandant in the film, wrote in his vivacious memoir, What Time’s the Next Swan? (he had been a Heldentenor in his earlier years): ‘I saw him seven times in Payment Deferred on Broadway. I had known nearly all the great actors – Kainz, Bassermann, Werner Krauss, Raimu – to me, he topped them all.’
Renoir’s purpose in making the film was ‘specifically for Americans, to suggest that day-to-day life in an occupied country was not so easy as some of them thought.’ His central character embodies the predicament of ordinary people. He intended the part for Laughton from the beginning; whether the actor influenced the writing or the concept is not recorded, but he might well have done, so personal is it to him. The performance is, with Rembrandt, the most simply human, as opposed to projected or heightened, he ever gave.
Lory is a coward, a nervous, pampered, overgrown child, tied to his mother’s apron strings, a teacher unable to control his class, hopelessly in love with a fellow-teacher (Louise Martin, played by Maureen O’Hara), terrified of the air-raids and unquestioningly obedient to the demands of the occupying force. The film charts his growth from cowardice to resistance, demonstrating the need for political commitment. In intent, it has an almost Brechtian feel to it, a kind of liberal and humanist version of Brecht’s play, The Mother, in which an essentially unpolitical woman learns that she must pledge herself to revolution. Of course, this being Renoir, the enlightenments are all given a personal and emotional base; nevertheless, the re-education of an unlikely subject is what This Land is Mine shows, and Laughton’s performance admirably clarifies this.
He plays with the utmost restraint: Albert Lory is, after all, a shy and inhibited provincial schoolmaster. The scenes with his mother at breakfast are miracles of observation and subtlety: as she smothers him with a kiss, he, still reading the paper, absently mouths a kiss back at her. He manages to maintain a conversation with her on the subject of her rheumatism while never skipping a word of the article he’s absorbed in. He suggests the combination of weakness and power that underlies relationships of emotional dependency. As the mother, Una O’Connor (the veteran Irish actress and a survivor, like Laughton, of the 1928 Silver Tassie), doesn’t match his particularity or precision. She is, however, the physical type to perfection, and bears a strong resemblance to photographs of Mrs Laughton, Charles’ mother, who was dominating in another vein, not smothering but exacting. Most remarkable in Laughton’s delineation of the relationship is his ability to suggest that underneath the vexation and the obsessiveness lies genuine love.
In the street on his way to school, he meets the girl he secretly loves. Her brother, pretending to be a collaborator, shows a copy of the underground paper to passing soldiers. Laughton’s attitude of barely daring to breathe, just hoping the whole incident will go away, neither being ingratiating to the soldiers, nor in any sense suggesting association with the ideals expressed in the paper, is the exact expression of the situation of the silent majority. His attitude is rendered even more vivid by the presence of the girl, in whose eyes he realises he has discredited himself.
What’s quite remarkable is Laughton’s communication of the man’s situation. As if in an X-ray, we see the whole problem: the political reality complicating what is already a difficult moment for him: trying to impress the girl. We see his paralysis, the result of a number of given factors, among them his personality. It’s moving and memorable not because we feel with him, but because we exactly understand his position.
At the school, he’s given a number of excisions the Germans have demanded from the textbooks dealing with Greek theories of democracy. Meekly, he passes them on to the class which he anyway can barely control: the kids are daubing a star of David on the face of a Jewish pupil. Lory is deeply distressed, and seems on the point of some kind of decision, some kind of protest, when the sirens wail. A spasm of terror passes across his face. As the rest of the school rushes out to the air-raid shelter, he runs to find his mother, who, he says, is terrified of the bombs. He finds her striding purposefully and fearlessly through the streets and we see the fear is his. He rushes with her into the shelter, fat little legs scurrying down the road. The scene in the undergound shelter is the most extraordinary in the film, and one of the most extraordinary things Laughton ever committed to the screen. The stoicism of the teachers, the defiance of his mother, the high spirits of the children, the radiant idealism of Maureen O’Hara, are contrasted with the abject terror of Lory: the fear of a child in the dark, a whimpering, bed-wetting, snotty and tearful terror, the sort of thing a grown man does not own up to – the sort of thing a grown actor doesn’t generally like to show. Laughton shows it so unabashedly that it is almost impossible to watch. It is cowardice made flesh, not the idea of it, but the actuality, and it provokes nothing but compassion, as if someone had found a way of demonstrating the pain of a migraine. All one can say is: how awful! What a burden. It is not exactly moving; it is, rather, enlightening.
Laughton preferred never to speak about his war, his time in the trenches. It seems inescapable that he chose this moment to exorcise some nightmare. His experience of war seems to have consisted of more than the simple ghastliness of death and killing. He seems – like so many – to have had to face something in himself. Maybe this was it. Certainly Laughton was not brave in many areas of his life, emotional, political, sexual. Perhaps at the centre of him was terrible physical fear. It is hard to know how otherwise he could have achieved the stabbing painful truth of this sequence.
In several scenes hereafter, Lory is shown finding a little courage: when the soldiers take the headmaster away, Lory, who has revered him as a father, spontaneously hurls himself against them, ineffectually hammering them with blows from his plump fists. His outburst is rewarded with a peck on the cheek from Louise. With a gesture that only an actor in total command of his expressive means would risk, he allows his hand to drift slowly towards the cheek that was kissed, as if it was drawn to it by magnetic impulse, while he stares fixedly ahead, only the slightest, the very slightest, flicker of what might be a smile, hovering about his lips.
Again, he’s having supper with Louise, when her hero brother bursts in, demanding that she and Laughton cover for him. The soldiery arrives; Laughton, having accepted a cigarette though he doesn’t smoke, manages, through coughing fits, to back him up. The coughing highlights his ineptitude at this kind of game.
Eventually, he’s put in prison under suspicion. He’s unexpectedly released the next day. When he returns to his mother, he’s a slightly different man: gentle, soft-spoken, but some spark has been struck in him. He and the headmaster were in adjacent jails, and talked the night through about liberty and democracy. The disarray of his clothes and unaccustomed stubble on his chin testify to his loosening up. He runs next door to tell Louise and her brother that he’s free but the brother has been killed, and Lory’s release leads them to accuse him of having traded the brother’s life for his freedom. His new expansiveness shattered, he runs out to the street, where his mother confesses that she shopped the brother. He runs to find the only man who could have put his mother in touch with the authorities: he breaks into his office to find him dead. He picks up the gun, and is immediately arrested for his
murder.
The film now passes from the realistic, if slightly schematised mode, to something more overtly inspirational. Lory appears in court, starts falteringly to defend himself. He starts to speak some home truths. The prosecution demands an adjournment; Lory is visited in his cell by the Nazi Commandant (Slezak), who silkily expounds his vision of the Aryan future. He promises to release Lory, so that he can get on with the great task: teaching the children of the future. Lory seems to agree; but then, from his prison window, he sees the headmaster being shot. The next day when he appears in court, he dismisses the attempt to, as it were, un-frame him, and makes a passionate speech urging the necessity of resistance. He is acquitted; and returns to the classroom, where he starts to teach his openly-weeping pupils from the American Declaration of Rights. He only gets to Article 6, when the soldiers come to take him away. As he goes, O’Hara takes up the book: Article 6: ‘The law is the expression of the will of the people.’
Naked and improbable though this ending is, against the odds it almost works largely due to Laughton’s performance. Contemporary reviewers all noted the absurdity of a Nazi court calmly listening to twelve minutes of alien propaganda. Renoir’s (and Nichols’) point was to show that the French, or occupied Europeans in general – the geographical location is never specified – were capable of heroism and resistance. So here, Lory’s appeals to the (native) judge are sustained when he is shamed by Lory’s accusations of spinelessness. In any case, Laughton varies the two speeches from the dock in the most masterly way. His command of the tirade was never more in evidence. He has Lory start nervously, groping for what he means to say, then surprising himself with his own eloquence. After his scene with the commandant, for which Laughton finds a new tone of amused politeness, and the glimpse of the headmaster being shot, he returns to court a changed man – an inspired orator. It is a far-fetched development in the character; but it is emotionally powerful, and indeed intellectually cogent. The radiance with which his newly-found convictions fills him, his new faith in himself and certainty in the need for action (‘We must stop saying that sabotage is wrong, that it doesn’t pay … it does pay. It makes us suffer, starve and die – but though it increases our misery, it will shorten our slavery’) is an astonishing transformation, and his acquittal is genuinely exciting because it means not only has he been freed, but the court and the people have regained their self-respect. It is fantasy, but it inspires: and the final scene in the classroom, more and more improbable, is deeply touching. In the circumstances of the film’s production, the words of the Declaration of Rights have a special resonance; but again, Laughton’s presentation of the new Lory, walking tall, strong and clear, the same character but radicalised from within, is what carries it. ‘Goodbye, Citizens,’ his parting words to the children, are the summation of the film.
