Charles Laughton

by Simon Callow

  Laughton’s Kidd is splendidly centred, the most straightforward character, barring only Henry VIII, that he ever created – strong, clear, forceful, dangerous. His assumption of a slightly off suburban London accent is witty and appropriate; his revelation of the depth of his ambition quite chilling; his rage and pride at bay when finally confronted, animal and fearsome. Reservations only apply to the final tirade at the gallows, for which one might have expected a severe reproach from Agate; but no: ‘Laughton is grand throughout; he shows again one of the first qualities of the great actor, whether of stage or screen – that power of compulsion which makes it impossible for you to take your eyes off him.’ So he was a ‘great actor’ again. The New York Times, regarding the film as ‘strictly Charles Laughton’s vehicle’ applauds him for being ‘as much the posturing comedian as the blood-thirsty buccaneer.’ The performance is full of relish (which is something of a relief after his most recent offerings) but it’s no spoof; is rather, a vigorous and realistic account of a criminal confidently expecting and working for ennoblement. There’s no record of whether Brecht ever saw the film or what he thought of it if he did, but Laughton’s demonstration of the interaction of the criminal with the Establishment mentality might have idly led him to speculate what kind of a Mackie Messer the Englishman might have made.

  It is a prime example of what might be called Laughton’s second period as an actor. Comparison with his mariner from the first period, Bligh, makes the development of his approach to acting very clear. Bligh became a universal symbol of the cruelty bred by repression, a kind of Francis Bacon-like image of distorted emotion and warped authority. Expressionist is the word for the impacted power, the concentration and intensity of that performance. Kidd, by contrast, is entirely linear, the character laid out for examination, a prototype rather than an archetype of behaviour. Brecht was fond of citing Richard III as an example of the way in which his characters functioned, celebrating and demonstrating the way in which he achieves his ends, which is exactly what Laughton does here. Instead of Bligh’s soul, we are made privy to Kidd’s mind. It is a most remarkable development.

  Because of Him is another matter altogether, Laughton’s reunion with Deanna Durbin. Again directed by Henry Koster, the film, like Miss Durbin, is much less nimble than its predecessor; but it is of exceptional interest in Laughton’s output for a number of reasons, most of them quite unconnected with the film itself. In it he plays a classical actor of some expansiveness, an extraordinary amalgam of Donald Wolfit, Beerbohm Tree, and, well, Charles Laughton. The opening of the film is itself a Laughton connoisseur’s item: ‘John Sheridan’ ’s last performance of Cyrano de Bergerac. We get only the last few lines in longshot, a curtain-clinging bow, and a scene in the dressing-room where he hangs his nose up for the last time; but there is a distinct frisson about all this in view of his close involvement in the part for a good two years in the thirties. Similarly, when Sheridan spends the weekend holed up with an old chum he regales him with quotations from King Lear – the play which obsessed Laughton for many years. There is moreover a fascinating scene in which he rehearses a play: he is shown as both temperamental and searching; the director/writer finally walks out on him – another sly insertion of Laughton’s? Earlier, too, there’s a preposterous but funny scene in which he rises from his sickbed to confront reporters with a nearly Joycean stream of boulevard cliché. For the rest, the film is pawky, Miss Durbin sings her way out of trouble in the usual manner, and spends an excessive amount of time in a state of plump tearfulness.

  ‘On the whole, Because of Him is a pleasant enough divertissement, chiefly because Mr Laughton had the wisdom to toss restraint out the door,’ said the New York Times (Thomas Pryor). ‘His performance is magnificently expansive. In less polite society it might be whispered that Mr Laughton is hamming all over the screen, but his grandiose acting is in keeping with the general exaggerations of the plot.’ In fact, seen now, the effect is not at all hammy; his John Sheridan, vast bulk swathed in a cloak and topped by a fedora, is more of an affectionate hommage to the actor-managers of Laughton’s youth, an Oscar Asche, perhaps, or, indeed, Tree himself. Certainly, in the rehearsal scene, he is shown to be a serious and scrupulous artist. By now, however, the label had stuck: ham it was, and everything he was to do from now on would be judged by that: it might be good ham, it might be bad ham, it might be indifferent ham, but no matter what subtlety, delicacy, or indeed harshness, he might introduce, it would never be detected, because hams aren’t delicate, subtle or harsh: they are just hams.

  For self-respect he turned eagerly back to Brecht. Finally, at the end of 1945, they had a version which satisfied them. Brecht being Brecht, there would be more re-writes, sometimes behind Laughton’s back, which would then be re-re-written by Laughton and Brecht, but essentially the text now arrived at, radically different from its first (1938) version, was ready for production. The crucial changes resulted from Brecht’s strong reaction to the dropping of the A Bomb at Hiroshima, an event which he felt epitomised the divergence of science from the life of the community. He grafted this perception onto Galileo, tracing the split to Galileo’s recantation. Laughton, whose initial response to the news of the bomb had been ruthlessly protective of the play (‘Bad publicity, old man’), was passionately disgusted by the unleashing of this terrible power – he used to tell an ironic anecdote about an encounter with a man who said he didn’t go to the theatre because he couldn’t stand the bad language. ‘And what do you do for a living,’ asked Laughton. ‘I’m a nuclear scientist,’ the man replied – but he resisted laying the blame at Galileo’s door. There remains in their version a slight uneasiness in this area; but essentially, it’s an excellent, playable, tight piece of playmaking. The notes they made, according to James Lyon, show that Laughton, ‘a proponent of the mighty phrase, tended to inflate or elevate the text, while Brecht attempted to reduce the language to its leanest form.’ The combination of these two modes produced a version which, unlike many translations from Brecht, is neither jejune nor stilted; neither self-consciously plain, nor self-consciously poetic.

  From now on the main task was to get the play on. Brecht created a beautiful memorial to their collaboration in ‘Letter to the Actor Charles Laughton’:

  Still your people and mine were tearing each other to pieces when we

  Pored over those tattered exercise books, looking

  Up words in dictionaries, and time after time

  Crossed out our texts and then

  Under the crossings-out excavated

  The original turns of phrase. Bit by bit –

  While the housefronts crashed down in our capitals –

  The façades of language gave way. Between us

  We began following what characters and actions dictated:

  New text.

  Again and again I turned actor, demonstrating

  A character’s gestures and tone of voice, and you

  Turned writer. Yet neither I nor you

  Stepped outside his profession.

  Galileo

  IN DECEMBER OF 1945, Laughton started private readings of the version of Galileo over which he and Brecht had so long laboured. He read, in wonted fashion, to anyone who would listen: ‘wounded servicemen, fellow actors, millionaires, agents, lovers of art’ according to an entry in Brecht’s journal. ‘Not a single boo or reservation, so it seems.’ The reaction at these impromptu and perhaps unlooked-for sessions were noted and adjustments were made. Other more formal gatherings were convened; one for Eisler, the Viertels and Feuchtwanger among others; another, more importantly, for Orson Welles, who immediately expressed an interest in directing it. Brecht liked him and his response, and was confirmed in his enthusiasm by a visit to Welles’ spectacular and, in the event, spectacularly disastrous production of Around the World in Eighty Days. With half a mind on the carnival scene from Galileo, Brecht was thrilled by the circus sequence Welles had introduced, complete with animals and acrobats. Laughton appar
ently shared Brecht’s enthusiasm, although he had privately sounded out other possible directors, including, unimaginably, Alfred Lunt. ‘The nearer the hour to rehearsal, the more scared I become of being directed in the play by anyone but an actor.’ Did he regard Welles as an actor or as a director? Despite the débâcle of his relationship with Hollywood, the collapse of his political career, and the over-ambition of his present stage venture, Welles was very much the thrilling young man in a hurry, still only 30, the boy genius, the Renaissance man de ses jours. Whatever the temporary setbacks, his confidence and charm were supreme, carrying all before them. This must have been very hard for Laughton to handle.

  So!’ wrote Welles in a jaunty postscript to one of his letters to Charles ‘you find my confidence in my own charm overbearing, do you? Go fuck yourself!’

  Powerful, rich and famous though he might have become, Laughton’s caution, intellectual inferiority complex, and slow-moving cussedness remained intact. What position could he adopt in relation to this whirlwind? He could be neither teacher nor pupil. Welles would simply make him feel dull and old, blinking foolishly as Welles performed his verbal, artistic and actual conjuring tricks with Laughton not quite seeing how he did it but obscurely sensing a fraud somewhere. From the beginning of the venture, there seems to have been a sense of strain. Welles became impatient with Brecht’s obstinacy: ‘Brecht was very, very tiresome today until (I’m sorry to say) I was stern and a trifle shitty. Then he behaved.’ At first Welles resisted Laughton’s participation as co-producer – upon which Brecht was properly insistent – then acceded – but he kept becoming involved in various other projects and putting off Galileo. Laughton and Brecht in, it must be admitted, a fairly amateur way went behind Welles’ back and did a deal with the impresario Mike Todd, who was to supervise the entire production. Laughton, with his perennial insecurity, urged Brecht on: ‘That’s protection. That’s what you need’. They had either failed to check out or not thought important Todd’s previous dealings with Welles, which had been extremely abrasive – Todd had pulled out of Around the World in Eighty Days and precipitated Welles’ never-ending financial problems with it. Welles refused to be involved in the venture if Todd was, and told Laughton so; or rather, told his assistant to tell Laughton so. Laughton’s reply (‘I do not appreciate your habit of using a third party to do the calling’) complains of the procrastination: ‘Either the play was going on on the earliest possible day or I had to do a movie. Time at my age is dear.’ Laughton was 47. Money, rather than time, was the real issue. The parts and the emoluments were dwindling. Laughton wrote to Welles: ‘The rest of Mike’s letter seems plain nonsense, including a passage which says ‘When Orson does a play (I speak from experience) he really does it.’ I was under the impression we were to collaborate all three on the idea of production and so on for the new and difficult play, otherwise how could I also function right? You are an extraordinary man of the theatre and therefore I flatly do not believe that you cannot function as a member of a team.’ This utter misjudgement of Welles is equally an illumination of Laughton: he was a genuine team-worker, partly from fear and insecurity and dread of the aloneness and responsibility of creation, partly from his sense of the vastness of the task – any artistic task. Welles’ Promethean dynamism was quite alien to him. Had he not stumbled badly with Prospero?

  ‘You are the best man in the world,’ he goes on, ‘to put the Church of Rome on the stage, to mention only one aspect of the play. This appears to me to matter. Cannot this important thing between you and Todd be worked out? Todd has never spoken ill of you to either of us. The strongest word he has used is ‘afraid.’ That also is nonsense when there is the play to be told. Brecht greets you, Charles.’

  Whether the word ‘afraid’ was Todd’s word or Laughton’s may be doubted; but there’s no doubting the passion and sincerity of his last phrase: ‘there is the play to be told’ – a fine phrase that Brecht would certainly have approved of. The telling of the play was Laughton’s whole ambition, to which everything else was subservient. To Welles, it may have seemed exciting, fun, a challenge, ‘one of the greatest productions of the contemporary theatre’, in other words, more glory; but for Laughton it was the way forward for the future – the future of the theatre, but equally, perhaps, the future of mankind. To Alfred Lunt Charles had written: ‘It seems that Brecht is our man and is launching the theatre back to us on the old Elizabethan terms.’ ‘This is a new play, and it is of such stature! It is as important as, if not more important than, reviving the classics.’ He and Brecht had sustained such a productive collaboration on the basis of their common vision of the importance of the theatre; Welles, it seemed to Laughton, was a playboy. On that their partnership foundered, not on Mike Todd (who, as it happens, decamped shortly afterwards, when Brecht and Laughton discovered to their horror that he sought to costume the play with Renaissance sets and costumes hired from the studios).

  During these one-foot-forward, two-feet-back manoeuvres, Laughton looked to films to provide income, not only for himself, but for Brecht, too. Drafted onto Arch of Triumph to replace the unwell Michael Chekhov, Laughton demanded substantial re-writing of his rôle as a sadistic and drunken SS officer in pre-war Paris. In order to lend some particularity to the stock figure of Harry Brown’s script, he proposed an intensive examination of Mein Kampf, which he undertook with Norman Lloyd, the director’s assistant, and a bottle of whisky. The results of their research were then turned over to Brecht. Not a line of what Brecht wrote found its way into the script; that wasn’t the point: he got paid, as did Hanns Eisler, hired as German accent coach, also at Laughton’s suggestion. Alas, neither accent nor script have the remotest vestige of authenticity, let alone interest. The film, Lewis Milestone’s reunion with Erich Maria Remarque (director and author of All Quiet on the Western Front together again) is a limp saga, possessing distinction only in the visual sphere, the responsibility of William Cameron Menzies, greatest of all Hollywood art directors. ‘In this slow, expensive film Charles Laughton is absurd as the Nazi brute’ (Bosley Crowther). Not absurd, but severely out of focus, like the Eisler-taught accent, which seems in its burr Dutch rather than German; or the odd, rolling walk. The monocle flashes sadistically away, but there is neither menace nor sympathy, because this Haake is neither a monster nor real. Something looks as if it might happen in the drunk scene, but nothing does. It seems that Laughton had seen the potential for something interesting which he had neither time nor perhaps encouragement enough to achieve.

  The search for a director for Galileo continued, from Elia Kazan, who, Brecht said, seemed promising because he admitted he hadn’t the least idea how to do the play (‘so he might learn’) to Harold Clurman. But Brecht distrusted Clurman (‘a Stanislavsky man’). ‘You will try to get “atmosphere”; I don’t want atmosphere. You will establish a “mood”; I don’t want a mood … you cannot possibly understand how to approach my play’. ‘At this,’ says Clurman, ‘I roared, “My name is Clurman!”’ Despite the mastery of emigré exchanges evinced by this last reply, he was clearly not going to hit it off with Brecht, who turned instead to Joseph Losey, Laughton’s one-time stage manager from The Fatal Alibi. Losey was one of the first Americans Brecht met, in Moscow, in 1935. Their acquaintance continued during Brecht’s first American visit, when he saw and admired Losey’s Living Theatre productions, thoroughly Brechtian in manner at least. He was staying in the apartment in New York Brecht had taken with his mistress Ruth Berlau during the second half of 1946, so perhaps seemed like the bluebird in Brecht’s backyard; doubly so when he introduced Brecht to Edward Hambleton, a young Maecenas from Texas, who agreed to put the play on.

  By curious coincidence, Losey had a Laughton connection as well: he had been stage manager on both London and New York productions of Payment Deferred, and had stayed around to work on Last Alibi, the Broadway version of Alibi. His relationship with Laughton seems not to have been especially warm, but he admired him both as an actor and as an
intelligent man, and seems not to have resented the clear indication that although he would be the nominal director, Brecht and Laughton were very much in charge. This somewhat surprising fact, in view of Losey’s considerable track record in both theatre and radio, and his current contract with RKO, whose enlightened head, Dore Schary, had released him on full pay to do the play, is a measure of his admiration for the play and his respect for both men. He was, after all, not a baby – thirty-seven – and notoriously strong-willed and peppery. In the extensive preparation that followed he acted as handmaiden to the two doughty collaborators. This work, the casting, designing, composing, continued through to the middle of 1947. It might have been possible to go ahead earlier, but Laughton had a film offer which he felt obliged to take. He needed the money urgently: again his garden was crumbling, more ominously than ever this time: it carried a pre-Columbian wind god with it. He set vigorously to work on The Paradine Case, his reunion with Alfred Hitchcock after their unhappy experience of ten years before. Hitchcock was no happier with this film than the earlier one, but this time his displeasure had nothing to do with Laughton, who was now neither leading man nor producer. The trouble this time was David Selznick, the film’s producer and, as it happens, screenplay writer, who had vexed Hitchcock deeply by imposing Alida Valli and Louis Jordan on him in the central rôles. His interest was confined to constructing the Old Bailey setting in such a way that he could shoot scenes simultaneously from various angles. The scenes between Laughton and his wife (a magisterially compassionate Ethel Barrymore) and Laughton and Ann Todd are the ones that seem to engage Hitchcock – presumably because of the misogyny at the heart of them, to which Laughton gives full weight. His Lord Horfield is a concentrated study of malevolent authority, both on the bench and at the supper table, threatening and mocking, the glinting monocle deployed once more to good effect (though it had to wait for Witness for the Prosecution to reach its apotheosis). Nonetheless the performance doesn’t quite live. There’s something soporific about it (quite possibly intentional) that does nothing to counteract the lethargy instilled by the rest of the film, an expensively half-hearted effort.