by Simon Callow
At the end of an unenthusiastic account of John Brown’s Body (on grounds of poetic worthlessness and over-complication of staging) Eric Bentley made a remarkable analysis of Laughton’s current state:
It matters nothing that Mr Laughton’s work cannot be defined as good drama or good theatre – provided it be good something. My real complaint is that it is, for this artist, not good enough, and my hunch is that it is an evasion. An evasion of theatre. Mr Laughton walks round and round theatre like a dog that cannot make up its mind to sit down. He tries the movies. He reads aloud in hospitals. He recites the Bible to schools. Or on TV. He invents the Drama Quartette. He trains a Drama Trio. Meanwhile, he falls in love with literature and therefore with Thomas Wolfe. It is all an evasion.
Evasion is certainly the word for his performance in Hobson’s Choice. As for the rest, he hardly had time to think. He was riding a switchback called Paul Gregory.
Laughton returned to America to discover that Gregory had, for once, overreached himself. His generally reliable instincts had led him to Herman Wouk’s best-selling novel, The Caine Mutiny, and in order to persuade Wouk to sell him the rights, he signed up Henry Fonda to play the prosecuting counsel, Greenwald; before, that is, he had the rights. This proved persuasive, and Gregory then somehow got RKO, who were at that moment setting up the film that Edward Dymytryk directed and in which Humphrey Bogart played Captain Queeg, to allow him to put the play on before the film was released. The setting up of packages was Gregory’s special gift and this was one of his best. On the strength of it he booked and sold out 67 out-of-town dates. Despite the large cast, it was another minimally-set, easily-tourable piece of the kind he and Laughton had done so well with. The only difference this time was that there was no Laughton. Gregory offered it to various directors, including Harold Clurman (whether he cried ‘I am Clurman!’ by way of refusal is not recorded). Finally, he took a gamble on a respected actor who was just starting to direct movies: Dick Powell. The gamble failed, as was immediately evident to everyone in the cast, though, not, as is so often the case, to Powell himself.
The script had been fairly directly drawn, by Wouk himself, from the chapter in the novel which describes the court martial. It read at four hours, and had no dramatic shape. Powell had experience neither of the theatre nor of editing scripts. He seemed not to see that there was a problem, concentrating on tiny details. When he got them right, he’d say ‘Print it,’ as if it were a movie. Charles Nolte, playing Lieutenant Keith, said that he seemed to be under the impression that if there were any problems, they could all be sorted out on the cutting-room floor. The cast’s anxiety was not at all relieved when they saw the unmistakable bulk of Charles Laughton appearing at the back of the rehearsal room. He was Gregory’s partner, after all. This could mean the closure of the show before it had even opened. Instead, of course, Laughton took over, the same day Powell was summarily dismissed. ‘Dick, I have some bad news for you.’ ‘Is Fonda going to leave?’ ‘No,’ said Gregory, ‘you are.’
Laughton’s priority was to get the script right. Over one weekend he hacked an hour out of it. His instinct, according to all reports, was infallible; but his manner was brutal. He shook the play and the cast by the collar, without regard for feelings.
Charles Nolte, keeping a diary of the production, gives a vivid account of what it was like to be directed by Laughton.
He looked out between his puffy skin, and I could only see little slit eyes, cold pale blue, between the folds of flesh, ‘You have a terrible vocal habit, absolutely terrible. MUST get rid of it at once. You’re UNLISTENABLE, absolutely intolerable. I can’t hear a word you’re saying when you open your mouth. Utterly impossible, do I make myself clear?’ All too clear. I sat rather stunned, while across the table Jack Challee drummed softly with his pencil. Nobody else spoke a word, and I didn’t open my mouth. When we read the scene again, he launched into me once more. The others retired discreetly to the TV screen and the World Series, but I felt sure they could hear. ‘This upward inflection, where did you get it? Didn’t anyone ever tell you about this before? It’s something which must be corrected at once. Now I won’t harp on this because it’ll probably make you feel self-conscious, but you MUST work on it.’ We were alone. The blood had drained from my face. ‘Say something! Tell me what you did today’. I haltingly started to talk. We got on the subject of sailboats, why I’ll never know. He mimicked my voice-pattern, rising inflection on certain words. ‘You hear that? It’s false. It means I’m not sincere, I’m not telling the truth. It’s bad.’ And an audience simply WILL NOT listen to it! Rid of it, get rid of it.’ He hunched over: ‘You must have more than a beautiful body and face to be in the theatre, unless you’re content to be a whore. There’s more to it than that! You understand me, you understand what I’m trying to say?’
Three cast members walked out; bitter resentment and distrust were engendered in some, not least Fonda, who felt that his friend Lloyd Nolan, playing Queeg, was, as a result of the cuts, being handed a starring part, while he was having one taken away. To placate him, Laughton concentrated greatly on the last scene, a sort of coda to the trial in which Greenwald, having won the case for his client, throws a glass of wine in his face as a mark of contempt for the liberalism and anti-authoritarianism he feels he represents. Fonda both demanded and resented the inclusion of this scene, and indeed nursed a deep sense of grievance against Laughton throughout. This finally broke at a rehearsal on tour when, Laughton having made an observation on some military detail, Fonda said: ‘What do you know about men, you fat, ugly, faggot.’ Laughton never spoke to him again, even when, in Advise and Consent (1961) they acted together.
The play fulfilled its triumphant tour, and when it arrived in town, in June 1954, Laughton received his traditional encomium. Under the heading, ‘Austerity the keynote,’ George Jean Nathan wrote: ‘Integrity and restraint mark Charles Laughton’s direction throughout. A man of long experience with ‘readings’, Laughton has great respect for the author’s text. He never overdoes, never sacrifices an honest but straight remark for a cheap laugh, never distracts from the lines by directorial embellishments.’ His work on the text had obviously been remarkable. He and Wouk had worked together for hours and days on end until they had a play instead of a script. The published text is dedicated to Charles. In Tell Me a Story, Laughton writes about a moment in their work together:
I was feeling uneasy about the play. It was not bolted together. Certain short passages in the play needed expanding to serve as arrows, pointing to the climax. One morning I tried to tell Herman what I was thinking and I failed to communicate with him. It is almost impossible to be articulate about the form of a work of art. You have only to listen to the drivel people talk in front of paintings in a museum to know this. When I am not articulate I sound long-hair-pretentious and impractical. Herman got edgy. I got edgy. And neither of us liked this.
‘Let’s go and look at pictures,’ I said. I have often found the harmony of good painting will restore my balance and I hoped it would have that effect on Herman too. We went to the Boston Art Museum, which has a great oriental collection. We were standing in front of a Japanese screen. The screen is in black and white and the main pattern is composed of monkeys with long arms in the branches of trees. The monkeys are painted in tones of grey. Across the screen from left to right, small birds are flying in a descending arc. The birds are painted in deep black and, so to speak, seal the pattern of the picture.
I said, ‘The birds are missing.’ I looked at Herman. He was blushing.
‘Damn you, Charles, damn you,’ he said and he burst out laughing. The screen had said what I had been unable to say.
The following day we had a script with the necessary emphases beautifully written. They contained some of the best thoughts in the play. Then the play held together.
His comment to Wouk is so like so many things he said about his own performances: had it not resulted in remarkable results, it would have seeme
d like purest bullshit; because it did, it merits attention. He was obviously trying to by-pass the literal brain, both as an editor-director and as an actor; trying to winkle out the organic life. Evidently, with Caine he succeeded (it was equally successful when Franklin Schaffner staged the production for television). But in a sense, Fonda was right. It and its world were nothing to Charles. He had functioned as a play doctor, performing his drastic surgery with skill and relish; and, of course, there is a peculiar exhilaration about putting right someone else’s mistakes. But his service to the play and its author led him, for structural reasons and in order to keep his star happy, to put his name to a play whose climax appears to be a denunciation of values which Charles espoused, and an exaltation of values he utterly rejected: militarism, command, hierarchy. Eric Bentley was not the only critic to find this last scene regrettable; he put his objections more wittily than most:
Inasmuch as The Caine Mutiny Court Martial says that a wicked captain deserves a vote of thanks, it might well have been entitled Captain Bligh’s Revenge. Luckily, Mr Laughton and Mr Wouk are artists, and, as such, have not been able to resist the temptation to make their wicked captain as offensive in the modern (i.e., the neurotic) way as Captain Bligh was in the old satanic-melodramatic way. The result is, they create a character and unfold a tale, which no amount of conservatism, new or old, can spoil.
He had the good grace not, in print at any rate, to wonder what Brecht would have made of it all, though there is a – slightly shaky – case to be made for the apparent confusion of values requiring the audience to try to resolve it for themselves; but, as Bentley says,
If you don’t take the play seriously, none of this matters: the first part is a thriller, the last scene gives you a moral to take home to the kids. That the two sections are not organically related need disturb no one who is unalterably determined to have his cake and eat it.’
Gregory’s plans for Laughton had, it seems, only begun. ‘I wanted to bring Charlie into focus as a top director and have him quit performing; the performances were what were killing him; he needed to find something where he could direct one or two things a year and make all the money he needed. That was the goal I had for Charles. With me producing and him directing, and when he didn’t direct, we’d be co-producers.’ It was always Gregory who found the projects; he knew his Laughton, and they generally proved irresistible to him. The Night of the Hunter, a novel by Davis Grubb, had been on the best-seller lists early in ’54, and Gregory snapped it up, seeing the whole project, as usual, in one. They would make a film of it, Charles would direct, and the leading character, the murderous Preacher, would be played by Robert Mitchum. The book was, in fact, right up Laughton’s street, rather self-consciously cadenced prose, evoking a Southern world of oppressive communities, simple emotions, hymns, picnics, decency and destruction. He later made a recording of excerpts from the book in which, backed by the film’s soundtrack, he makes a very persuasive case for its virtues, though it has not, according to those who know, ‘worn well’. It certainly tells its tale powerfully and hauntingly; ‘American Gothic,’ as Carrie Rickey calls it, in which the deadpan, hypnotic voice of the story-teller is always present. So Laughton was definitely on; and the moment he offered it to Mitchum, so was he. The extraordinary combination of these two men was a success from the start: ‘this character I want you to play is a diabolical shit,’ said Laughton. ‘Present,’ replied Mitchum. He was their banker: United Artists put up the relatively meagre sum involved ($700,000) on the strength of his name. Laughton then cast Shelley Winters, his sometime pupil and recent Oscar nominee (for A Place in the Sun), to play opposite Mitchum, to Mitchum’s considerable disgust; but his trust in Laughton seems to have been absolute.
Laughton had a strong hunch that the appropriate visual world for Night of the Hunter was D. W. Griffith’s, and accordingly re-ran all his movies. Quite apart from the power of the films themselves, he was overwhelmed by the work of Lilian Gish who, in her unassailable virginity, delicate but indestructible, touched some deep place in him. Charles Higham perceptively describes her as Kabuki-like, and there is something of the onnegata about her; but Laughton’s response to her was more than merely aesthetic – one of the indelible memories of his life was having seen her in Broken Blossoms in France, just after the Armistice had been declared. He said he had fallen in love with her then. Her grace, her girlishness, her lack of sexual threat may have combined to form an image of the eternal feminine, an anima, almost, some idealised version of his own feminine self, perhaps. Anyway, he cast her, and when, in her infinitely courteous way, she asked him why he wanted her in the film, his reply would have pleased Brecht: ‘When I first went to the movies they sat in their seats straight and leaned forward. Now they slump down, with their heads back or eat candy and popcorn. I want them to sit up straight again.’ Their meeting was only slightly marred by the presence of the film’s screenwriter, James Agee, in a state of charmless inebriation; but he soon left them. He remained with the film a little longer, just long enough, according to Paul Gregory, for Charles ‘to have a vision and some inspiration to write his own script … out of the terrible disagreements with Agee’. On the face of it, the author of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was the ideal man to adapt Davis Grubb’s novel. His skills as a screenwriter were not to be sniffed at, either, on the strength of The African Queen; but everyone in Hollywood except, apparently, Laughton and Paul Gregory, knew that he was drinking himself, in short order, into the grave. The script he handed to Laughton after a summer working by the pool at the house on Curson Avenue was 350-pages long, and, according to his biographer, not an adaptation at all: ‘he had re-created a cinematic version of it in extraordinary detail. He specified use of newsreel footage to document the story’s setting and added any number of elaborate, impractical montages.’ Shooting was only weeks away, so Laughton took on the screenwriting himself. Thus manœuvred into a position of sole creative responsibility, he proved himself a master. The script is good enough to have been passed off for years (in Five Film Scripts by James Agee) as the work of a seasoned genius. As a first screenplay it’s a triumph both of structure and sustained tone. To put it mildly, he knew what he was doing.
Stanley Cortez was his chosen cinematographer. Famous for his dandyish ways (‘the Baron,’ he was nicknamed) and his advanced technical experiments, he was happy to share his knowledge with Laughton. ‘I used to go to Charles’ house every Sunday for six weeks before we started and explain my camera equipment to him, piece by piece. I wanted to show him through the camera what these lenses would and would not do. But soon the instructor became the student. Not in terms of knowing about the camera but in terms of what he had to say, his ideas for the camera.’ They understood each other very well. Cortez was something of a poet; something of a wild man, too: ‘To hell with all this caution! To hell with this “academic” approach!’ he exclaims in Sources of Light. ‘There are times when nature is dull: change it.’ Like Laughton, he got his inspiration from outside his own discipline. ‘I often will revert to music as a key for a photogenic effect.’ They spurred each other on. ‘Apart from Ambersons, the most exciting experience I have had in the cinema was with Charles Laughton on Night of the Hunter … every day I consider something new about light, that incredible thing that can’t be described. Of the directors I’ve worked with, only two have understood it: Orson Welles and Charles Laughton.’
Laughton was fortunate, too, in his choice of second-unit directors, Terry and Denis Sanders, whose documentary film A Time out of War eventually won an Oscar. ‘Brother Sanders!’ he greeted the twenty-year-old Terry, fresh out of UCLA; ‘Brother Laughton!’ the young man cried back. He sat them down and drew precise, if spindly, line drawings of every shot he wanted – the relation of everything to everything else in the frame, and that is what they shot, on location in Ohio: the ravishing overhead shots of the children as they drift down the river. All the rest – the haunting nature scenes on the riverbank, owls,
frogs, rabbits and all, were shot in the Studio; the tank on Stage Fifteen in the case of the riverbank. ‘When I tell people that, they turn white,’ writes Cortez. His technical inventions on the film are numberless, and give rise to scenes the like of which barely exist in the American cinema. The results, however, are invariably simple and poetic in feeling; nowhere a trace of conscious virtuosity. The legendary sequence in which Shelley Winters drowns in her car was achieved with extreme ingenuity and much hardware; the effect is simple, lyrical, and haunting.
Laughton’s collaborative instincts worked at every level. Terry Sanders recalls his simplicity on the set, consulting, appreciating. ‘He spoke very quietly, but you sure listened. He made you feel you were important, and this was important.’ Lilian Gish wrote: ‘I have to go back as far as D. W. Griffith to find a set so infused with purpose and harmony … there was not ever a moment’s doubt as to what we were doing or how we were doing it. To please Charles Laughton was our aim. We believed in and respected him. Totally.’ Elsa Lanchester wrote that ‘The filming of Hunter was a compassionate time for Charles, and he found that he was able to bring out his compassion in his performers.’ Certainly the film is exceptionally well acted. Shelley Winters, despite Mitchum’s disfavour (‘Shelley got what she deserved, lying there dead at the bottom of the river’), shows, underneath her sweet demeanour, a welling erotic current of a piece with the constant eruptions of sex, real, irrepressible sex that bubble up into the story. Her playing of the scenes themselves may sometimes be questionable, but the intensely expressive sensuousness is a great contribution to the film. As for Mitchum, he has frequently maintained that it’s his best performance, and that Laughton was his best director. Laughton’s belief in him, his conviction that ‘Bob is one of the best actors in the world’ is unlikely to have made much difference to this man whose inability to accept praise is notorious; what probably did the trick was Laughton’s discovery in him of a private self different from the public one. ‘All this tough talk is a blind, you know,’ he told Esquire magazine. ‘He’s a literate, gracious, kind man, with wonderful manners, and he speaks beautifully – when he wants to. He’s a very tender man and a very great gentleman. You know, he’s really terribly shy.’ They had recognised in each other a man at war with himself. When Mitchum, incensed by Paul Gregory, had urinated in the radiator of Gregory’s car, Laughton phoned him: ‘My boy, there are skeletons in all our closets. And most of us try to cover up these skeletons … my dear Bob … you drag forth the skeletons, you swing them in the air, in fact you brandish your skeletons. Now, Bob, you must stop brandishing your skeletons!’ But Laughton brandished his own favourite skeleton to Mitchum. ‘I don’t know if you know, and I don’t know if you care, and I don’t care if you know, but there is a strong streak of homosexuality in me,’ he told Mitchum as they bowled along the freeway. ‘No shit!’ cried Mitchum. ‘Stop the car!’ Who knows what Mitchum’s skeletons are – that is to say, what the original skeletons are; there are plenty of acquired ones which have been all too well publicised. The interesting thing is that Laughton, normally ill at ease with uniformly masculine men was very comfortable with Mitchum, and that Mitchum’s performance in Night of the Hunter is to a striking degree delicate, seductive, soft-eyed. Even in the scenes of greatest menace, there remains a sinuousness most unlike the monolithically machistic performances which form the bulk of his work. The laconic, smiling, almost humorous quality he brings to Preacher in no wise distracts from the menace; it only enhances it.
