Charles Laughton

by Simon Callow

  Renoir wrote:

  He was intelligent and he wanted to know why he was being asked to do things. He had every right to know, and I appreciated the concern and concentration he showed all during the filming … Charles was both intelligent and gifted, with an instinctive genius for acting.

  Renoir had only one crisis with Charles during the work: in the scene where Lory sees the headmaster being shot, he has to cry out, holding onto the bars of his prison window, ‘Professor Sorel, Professor Sorel!’ First of all, Laughton grasped the bars so passionately that they came away in his hands; but once they had been shored up, he became blocked: ‘Where is he? Where is he? I can’t see him.’ The cut-away shot of the Professor was of course shot at a different time and place. A real impasse seemed in the offing, but Renoir was inspired to say, ‘In your head, Charles.’ It satisfied the actor, and the shot was done in one. In the final film, this is the least convincing moment in Laughton’s performance. Some large emotion is certainly going on, but it seems inappropriate. The printed screenplay offers this direction: ‘… he opens his eyes and looks, the frenzy going from his face which seems to fill with strength and resolution. It is as if the explosions of their rifles had smashed through a window in his mind and now he sees a new and unknown world.’ This is one of those stage directions that writers compose in their attic; any attempt to realise them would only end in osteopathy. (They so often, as here, read like reviews of the performance before it has been given.) The general drift is clear, however, and it is most distinctly not what Laughton does. Possibly this was a rare instance in this film of his old malady: a loss of belief in his own ability to believe. With him it was almost a moral thing: he felt ashamed of not connecting imaginatively. Not for him the latter-day cry of ‘I can’t feel it!’ No, his imperative was to see. Actors, awash, for the most part, with emotions, are often deficient in the area of connecting with meaning. Never, or rarely, Laughton.

  Slezak, who ‘adored the man’, offers a colourful glimpse of Laughton aged forty-four: my dear boy this, my dear boy that, very much the grand old man, dispensing advice, short lectures on wine and art, readings from the classics, a little heavy-handed professorial humour (‘You need help with the scene? What’s the matter – no talent?’). One thread of observation is especially interesting: Laughton’s ability – uncontrollable urge – to play all the parts. ‘A torrent of emotion burst out of him, he laughed, he was menacing – he lived every part. It was a dazzling display of virtuosity.’ On another occasion, Slezak asks for help with a scene. Laughton suggests an approach. It’s brilliant. Renoir accepts the first take – very rare for him, apparently – and Slezak thanks Laughton. ‘Of course, my boy,’ says he, ‘there are several different ways of doing it,’ and he reads it three more times, each with a different attack, a different interpretation, and a new characterisation. ‘I was ready to turn in my Equity card.’ There is no sense in this report, or other similar ones from other actors over the years, that Laughton was showing off, but rather that the myriad possibilities were teeming around inside him and had to be let out.

  Slezak relates a most striking incident. He, Slezak, was doing the close-up shots for a scene they’d just done together. Laughton stood alongside the camera, as he needed to, not in the shot at all. He insisted that Slezak must be able to see his eyes. ‘I began my close-up, which was practically a monologue, and saw that Laughton’s eyes were filling with tears; he pressed a hand against his mouth as if to prevent himself from crying out. His face became contorted, and when the scene was over he collapsed in his chair with a groan. I rushed over to him. ‘Charlie, are you all right?’ I thought he was in pain. He looked up – worn, exhausted, spent – and whispered: ‘Oh, my dear boy, it’s so difficult to keep it simple!’

  Keeping it simple is what Laughton supremely does in This Land is Mine. It amounts to a new sort of performance, prefigured, I suggest, by his Rembrandt. In it, maximum expressiveness, the intensification of the image, the iconisation of the experience, is not the aim. His Lory is not an archetypal figure but a model of behaviour. The personal connection which Laughton obviously made with the character has, if anything, enabled him to achieve an exceptional clarity. Instead of fashioning colossal statues, he has here made something much more life-scale. If this was a pattern he was going to follow, he would more than before be dependent on good scripts, because his giant projections of the pre-war years were largely made by his own flesh and blood. This more analytic, more conscious approach could only apply to a text which offered material for analysis, for demonstration. With one modest exception, he never found those texts; not in film. He had to look elsewhere.

  The reviews of the time, though generally well disposed on account of the worthiness of the enterprise, and the standing of Renoir, fail to notice any change in Laughton’s style. Agate was cutting: ‘I regard this film as dull, prolix and unamusing. It ends with Laughton reading the American Bill of Rights to his pupils. I fear Charles’ habit of reading the Magna Carta and such-like manifestos is growing on him; some one should break him of it. At the same time, it is the best thing he does in the present performance, which for the most part is boring, unattractive and even unappetising.’ Agate had never spoken of Laughton like that. The film’s relative neglect in the Laughton oeuvre is serious. It is one of his most interesting and best, a new road sadly unexplored.

  ‘In my heart of hearts,’ wrote Charles to a friend, ‘I think that it is the most important thing written on the war to date in any form at all – novel – movie – play – political treatise or what have you … I am hoping that public thought is sufficiently advanced to take the lesson it has to teach on the chin … the film flouts all rules laid down for a successful picture. There is a hell a lot of talk – not Shavian – that is to say, not pure argument, but talk brought out of people by the pressure of their situation and their suffering.’ To the same friend he wrote: ‘There is a love story in me and Maureen O’Hara, and as I go to my death at the end of the picture, Maureen kisses me, not in daughterly devotion, but with physical passion.’ In the picture, Lory achieves beauty through courage; and so does Laughton. In an ironic aside he writes ‘I remember reading a note on Thalberg’s desk, upside down – I have trained myself to do that, have you? It bore the legend, “Laughton must never get the girl.”’

  Another new road opened up before him during the making of This Land is Mine. His friend Perry Charles suggested that he might have a radio programme of his own. Laughton was mightily tempted: ‘Frankly, I am very ambitious about the radio.’ He had considerable experience of the medium, with his friend Norman Corwin, who produced the series Pursuit of Happiness. Corwin wrote ‘in radio, only Orson Welles and Martin Gabriel were in the same class when it came to handling rhetoric and language that flexed the imagination.’ Moreover ‘I had no hesitation in casting Laughton, an Englishman to be cicerone to material as American as hotdogs and the teaparty, for he had the capacity to be as lyrical or as colloquial as the texts required, along with other qualities between, above and beyond.’ But this offer of Perry Charles was different. He was to talk as himself. ‘I feel that I have something to say … that I could develop a definite point of view toward people, as myself. (You are one of the only two people in the business who know that I can hold an audience in my own personality). I don’t of course mean standing up and knocking the –––– out of them.’ He was reaching out for some new form of expression. He had something to say, and he wasn’t being allowed to say it in his other work. But he decided against it on characteristic grounds. ‘I have three pictures to do next year, and a radio script really and truly is a full-time job. You can’t just sit back and leave it to writers. You know yourself people like Allen, Benny, Bergen, and so on, spend all their energy on their radio scripts. You may say that Benny and Bergen make pictures, too, but they make pictures with their left hands … and you know, Perry, I am the kind of guy that can’t do anything with his left hand.’ His movie commitments took up
five or six months of the year. They didn’t satisfy him, but he couldn’t do them part-time. ‘The whole problem of leading a decent self-respecting life in the movies is one of how to keep one’s functions exercised and occupied without over-straining yourself so that you are done for in a few years.’ He was desperately looking for a new outlet; but this was not to be it.

  The reception of This Land is Mine did nothing to halt the decline of Laughton’s reputation; nor did his next film, The Suspect, directed by Robert Siodmak, which both Laughton and Lanchester, and indeed Siodmak, regard (wrongly, I believe) as one of his best performances.

  Charles Higham recounts the curious working relationship that prevailed between Laughton and the director, later a great friend and member of the Bard-reading circuit. Siodmak, it would seem, decided to pre-empt any possible temperamental outbursts on the part of his star by having an even greater one himself. The strategy evidently worked: Laughton regarded him as insane and was watchful in his presence. This strange situation may account for the generally subdued tone of the film, which is very well shot, rather well acted (particularly by the admirably caddish Henry Daniell, wolf-featured, with a corrugated mouth running from ear to ear) but just a bit of a damp squib. Given the propensity of the script to avoid actual drama, and to build teasing fragments of tension which quickly disappear, it is somehow unfortunate that Laughton should have chosen to play the central character quite as damped-down as he does. The result is overall somewhat monochrome, a psychological thriller with neither thrills nor psychology. Admittedly Laughton’s restraint finally pays off: his poised inscrutability under questioning becomes rather fascinating; and the film’s ending, in which Marshall, Laughton’s character, is tricked into thinking that an innocent will hang for his crime, is genuinely gripping. He slowly leaves the boat on which he and his family were about to escape to Canada. His slow impassive walk across the pebbled quay is beautifully shot, and ends the film with a memorable image of a born loser, doomed by his temperament not to be able to take the steps necessary to relieve him of his misery.

  In general, however, the New York Times’ verdict stands: ‘Too genteel.’ The Manchester Guardian, admiring Charles, said: ‘He has never been easy to cast. In spite of a long list of middling films, he can still emerge as a fine player of complex characters.’ In other words, not bad for a tired old ham. The list wasn’t that long. Yet. The Guardian concluded its review with praise so faint it is almost inaudible: ‘interesting without being too clever.’

  Charles’ real creative focus, in any case, was elsewhere. Late in 1943 he at last formed a professional relationship which demanded of him everything he knew and was longing to give. He met Bertolt Brecht.

  Brecht

  ‘IT WAS SOON after returning to Santa Monica in March 1944 that Brecht met Charles Laughton, who fell in love with him,’ states Ronald Hayman, unequivocally. Salka Viertel, at whose house in Maybery Road they met, writes that Laughton was ‘hypnotised’ by Brecht. Conversely, James K. Lyon in his definitive Bertolt Brecht in America describes Laughton as ‘the single most important person for Brecht in his American exile’.

  Certainly they fell on each other with the passion of two people who want something only the other can give, something desperately desired and long lacked: in Brecht’s case, a production, in Laughton’s, a rôle. Brecht, at this point in his exile, would have collaborated with any star he thought he could hitch a production to (he had been speaking to Luise Rainer, star of The Good Earth, about putting on The Caucasian Chalk Circle – had indeed written it on the basis of her enthusiasm to play in Klabund’s original Chalk Circle) whilst Laughton was pining like some great animal denied proper exercise.

  What began as mutual self-interest, however, quickly turned into something infinitely rich and rewarding, both personally and creatively, if not, in the last analysis, professionally.

  The very fact that their meeting took place at the Viertels’ salon might have suggested to Brecht that Laughton was not like the common run of American actors; but Laughton, though not easy socially, always wanted to be near artists – painters, composers, poets, playwrights; and Salka Viertel had somehow created a space where that most un-English and largely un-American phenomenon, the community of artists, could flourish. The only other Englishman he might have met there was Chaplin, who knew Laughton well, but with him, much as he admired his comedic techniques, Brecht could find no rapport. As so often, the admired does not recognise himself in the admirers’ description. Chaplin had no hunger for ideas: he liked to talk, and had, as Norman Lloyd, then a young actor-producer, observed, ‘living-room routines, designed to dazzle.’ Laughton, who had no small talk, would only speak when he had something to say. Brecht was a man of few words, conversationally, but those words were precise, pithy, provocative. Laughton detested cant and pomposity; he loved intelligence and frankness. The authentic voice was what Laughton was always listening for; through the hubbub of the dispossessed intelligentsia of Europe, he must have heard it loud and clear from Brecht’s mouth.

  In a very simple sense, the man from Augsburg and the man from Scarborough understood each other. A certain bluntness, a certain cussedness, a penchant for questioning, an impatience with sartorial and social observances were theirs in common – as were capacity and inclination for hard work, admiration of craftsmanship, love of learning. There are further points of connexion: each had a wife who ran the house, while lovers hovered in the background, occasionally awkwardly entering the domestic frame; each was dependent on collaborators, preferring to work in harness than alone; neither had the gift of friendship. There was work and there was sex, and everything else was somehow a waste of time; only learning and its concomitant, teaching, could claim equal status, to make up Reich’s famous trinity, Love, Work and Knowledge.

  But there were differences. The greatest difference was crucial: self-confidence. Through years of revilement and exile, Brecht never for a second lost faith in his work, nor in himself. ‘Do you know who I am? I am Brecht!’ he screamed at Luise Rainer, ‘and you are nothing.’ She was at that moment one of the most famous actresses in the world, and he was an unperformed and penniless emigré. This self-confidence of course extended to his sexual life, and must, indeed, to a large degree, have accounted for it. The confidence enabled a ruthlessness which often appeared in the guise of slyness or disingenuousness. All this was very different for Laughton. He was certain of nothing, not even his acting. Elsa Lanchester reflects that now Laughton’s films are being shown again on television, his performances seem much better than he considered them at the time. ‘It is sad that he always denigrated himself.’ Nothing was any good, neither when he was making the film nor when it was finished. Sexually it was worse. Never was he able to approach a man sexually without the expectation of rejection. He was plagued with feelings of guilt and inadequacy.

  The balance sheet of difference and similarity serves as a prelude to a consideration of how it is that Charles Laughton and Bertolt Brecht, on the face of it radically contrasted artists, should have collaborated so happily. Who would imagine that Charles Laughton would be held up by Brecht as consummate exponent of his acting theory; or that the creator of Captain Bligh and The Hunchback of Notre Dame would say of Brecht: ‘I believe there is Shakespeare and then Brecht’? The matter is of interest in illuminating both Laughton’s acting and Brecht’s theory. Towards the end of his life, Brecht, impossible as ever to pigeon-hole, wrote: ‘My theories are altogether more naïve than one might think – more naïve than my way of expressing them might allow one to suspect.’ He was dismayed by the academic industry that had grown up around him, still more by the dreadful work it had engendered. ‘It must be due to my way of writing, which takes too much for granted. To hell with my way of writing!’ The long years of exile from theatre practice, coupled with an attempt to systematise the New Theatre which would make the New Society possible, resulted in a body of theoretical writing of great beauty and intellectual excitement, bu
t of limited applicability. The terminology itself – Verfremdungseffekt, Gestus, Epiktheater – has thrown a sometimes impenetrable veil over the plays. It’s particularly interesting, then, that Brecht said of Laughton: ‘He didn’t need any kind of theoretical information about the required “style.”’ Laughton was a spontaneous Brechtian actor.

  Brecht had admired Laughton’s work before he met him, especially his Captain Bligh and Henry VIII. He was very struck by the chicken-eating scene. It is, as it happens, a little sequence which contains a number of elements that might be described as Brechtian. The king, speaking about the decline of manners, greedily scoffs chicken legs, discarding the bones over his shoulder. It’s funny because of the contrast between what’s being said and what’s being done – the contrast draws attention to the incident, puts the speech in special focus. This is a classic Verfremdungseffekt – nothing to do with the mistranslated alienation (for which the German is Entfremdung), Verfremdung being the-making-strange, the-making-foreign, seeing in a new way, from a different angle. There does exist an English word for this, but it is unlikely to gain wide currency, even though it was coined by Dickens. ‘Mooreeffoc’, it is, and it’s simply the word ‘coffeeroom’ seen from the other side of the glass pane on which it’s written. In conversation Brecht gave another very clear notion of what we should perhaps just call V, as the German seems so formidable and unfunny: ‘in order to see one’s mother as a man’s wife we need V; this is provided, for instance, when one acquires a stepfather.’ In the case of the chicken-eating interlude we’re dealing with a Gestus; in Martin Esslin’s definition, ‘the clear and stylised expression of the social behaviour of human beings towards each other’; in Brecht’s own formulation, ‘a theatrical conception: what Garrick did when as Hamlet he met his father’s ghost; Sorel when, as Phèdre, she knew that she was going to die … it is a question of inventiveness.’ One might bring it even further down to earth and call it ‘business’ – significant business. This particular business in Henry VIII, like some wonderful shorthand, tells us that the king is a man of appetite; that notions of what manners are thought to be have changed over the centuries; that there is a class of persons waiting to pick up the royal débris. It’s memorable, it’s clever, it’s meaningful. The moment also fulfils the central requirement of epic theatre. Epic theatre, says Brecht, is where the spectators don’t cry out (in Needle and Thomson’s formulation) ‘“How true!” but “How surprising!”; not “Just as I thought!” but “I hadn’t thought of that!”’ Even fifty years after its première, when all social attitudes (to monarchy, for example) have transformed and the risqué elements in the film no longer shock, this sequence creates a frisson, catches the audience by surprise. And finally, but perhaps most Brechtian of all, it is definitely Laughton doing it. Remarkable though the physical transformation is, there is no sense of the actor losing himself, Stanislavsky-style, in the rôle, or placing a mask over his own face (something that Laurence Olivier was much inclined to do). We are not merely witnessing, we are being shown something. It is not being explained to us – we have no idea why the king behaves like this or what he feels about it – it is simply being dangled in front of us: ‘what about this, eh?’ Later, in Zurich, in his dense and sometimes abstract Small Organum for the Theatre, Brecht enunciated a principle: ‘the actor appears on stage in a double rôle, as Laughton and as Galileo; the showman Laughton does not disappear in the Galileo he is showing; Laughton is actually there, standing on the stage and showing us what he imagines Galileo to have been.’