Charles Laughton (19 page)

His performance transcended the film, too, in another, unexpected way, which added greatly to his popularity in America, and further served to establish him as a kind of folk hero, as opposed to a mere actor. In the film, Ruggles somewhat improbably recites the Gettysburg address (another cause for indignation by Agate: ‘I am quite certain this sensitive artist would never have faced the London footlights as a shock-headed butler with a passion for reciting the speeches of Abraham Lincoln.’) He does so very beautifully, too beautifully, in the circumstances, perhaps, but the point is, the American public, like the cowboys in the film, proved not really to know the most famous of American speeches. The irony that it was an Englishman who returned the speech to the national consciousness was not lost on anyone. It embodies everything for which Laughton was beginning to prefer America to England, and the passion with which he accordingly performs it, is in large measure what lends it its quality of discovery: both of the speech and the ideas it contains. It is a notable example of rhetorical speaking – something to which Laughton was increasingly drawn.

Clearly, despite any physical inconvenience, Laughton had enormously enjoyed
Ruggles
. It must, indeed, have been a great relief from the pulverising task of opening the sluice gates of his id, and flooding his system with the contents – even if it was only then that he really functioned as a creator. With what heavy heart then must he have approached
Les Misérables
to play Inspector Javert. But his creative juices could not fail to respond to the character, so close to Laughton as to be almost a self-portrait – obsessed, repressed, fanatical, conscience-ridden. It’s one of his most overwhelming performances, now virtually lost to view due to the caprices of distribution.

The film as a whole is very successful. The script simplifies Hugo’s novel into a duel between Valjean and Javert, a sensible approach to the vast sprawl of the book. Frederic March as Valjean gives a ‘strong dramatic performance’ – not interesting, but solid, and clear and sincere. Cedric Hardwicke is full of sombre compassion as the Bishop of Beauvais. The film is masterfully lit by the great Gregg Toland; and the direction, unexpectedly but completely satisfactorily, is decidedly Slavonic, with Alfred Newman’s chanting monks on the soundtrack,
and
huge double profile close-ups alternating with swirling misty ensemble scenes. Captions dividing the film into Acts, almost stations of the cross, add a formal intensity which has nothing to do with Hugo’s book but is very powerful. All this was the contribution of Richard Boleslavsky, the director, whose relationship to Laughton is unrecorded, but upon which a little profitable speculation might be ventured.

Boleslavsky was responsible for a number of vivid dramatic films –
The Painted Veil, Clive of India
, and
The Garden of Allah
among them. His background, like that of another Russian emigré, Rouben Mamoulian, was the Moscow Art Theatre; he had been Laertes in the legendary Gordon Craig-Stanislavsky
Hamlet
of 1911, and, despite his limited success in the part, had continued to progress through the company until finally he was made director of the First Studio. During the Revolution, he served with the Polish Lancers (his family was Polish) and recorded his experiences in two autobiographical books,
The Way of the Lancers
and
Lances Down
, which were acclaimed as some of the finest writing to come out of the revolution. He returned to the Moscow Art Theatre, came to America with the company, and stayed to found the American Laboratory Theatre, forerunner of Strasberg’s Studio. Into its curriculum he introduced, for the first time, elements of the Stanislavsky System, and thus in the American theatre occupies the position of Moses: or perhaps John the Baptist.

In 1933, by which time he had directed many films in Hollywood, he published a short digest of his teaching in dialogue form. It’s called
Acting: the First Six Lessons
, and it is an enchanting, shrewd and entirely jargon-free document, still one of the most useful and accessible things ever written about acting. Although elementary in its form, it represents the later development of Stanislavsky’s teaching, in which the extreme concentration on emotion memory had evolved into a technique for working on the voice, the body, and – Stanislavsky’s and Boleslavsky’s favourite word, and we may assume, one of Laughton’s – the soul. ‘The soul of the artist, the source of all art,’ says Boleslavsky; and, in a famous passage from the end of the book: ‘Don’t look at me now, dearest friend, look into space and listen with your inner ear. Music, and the other arts which follow naturally, will be only an open road to the whole of the universe. Don’t miss anything in it. Listen to the waves of the sea … inhale their spirit and feel at one with them, even for an instant. It will make you, in the future, able to portray the eternal parts of universal literature …
above
all, don’t forget your fellow-men. Be sensitive to every change in the manifestation of their existence. Answer that change always with a new and higher level of your own Rhythm. This is the secret of existence, perseverance and activity. This is what the world really is – from the stone up to the human soul. The theatre and the actor enter this picture only as a part. But the actor cannot portray the whole if he does not become a part.’

If he read them, these words could hardly have failed to stir Laughton deeply, in their semi-pantheistic feeling, in their breadth of vision of the actor’s work – and in their sense of the elemental. What after all, was Laughton trying to do, if not to release the souls of his characters?

Whether through Boleslavsky’s direct influence, or the presence at close quarters of such a very large spirit (Boleslavsky is remembered even now by his old students at the Lab as an incandescent speaker, an inspirer), Laughton evokes Javert’s soul in
Les Misérables
with unforgettable power. The very first glimpse of him in the film is remarkable. He stands at the desk of his superior in the police force, listening to his dossier. The costume (Laughton devised it himself) creates an immediate impression of intense containment, of pressure: a short cloak over a tight tunic, long boots giving the actor (still slim: 34/35 were the thin years for Laughton – physically, that is – certainly not financially or artistically) the impression of having long, stiff legs; on his head a little cap, seemingly rammed tight on his skull, and framing the unsmiling, almost contourless orb of his face, glowing coldly with frozen misery and single-minded sureness of purpose.

It is now more than an appearance: it is an apparition. As the recital of facts rolls on, he remains perfectly motionless. Then the fact is announced that his father had been imprisoned, and served in a galley. The orb cracks – only for a second, but it is unforgettable, because it seems as if the whole man might split straight down the middle, such is the force of the impulse. Then the structure reasserts itself and when he speaks, it is with an even voice, tense but steady. Laughton uses a kind of London lower-middle-class accent, which quite acceptably wanders, under extreme duress, into Scarborough. Why not? He’s playing a Lyonnais who has moved to Marseilles: a newly-acquired accent does tend to slip away at moments of crisis.

Javert’s sense of duty, which both shackles him and prevents him from falling apart, informs Laughton’s playing of his scenes of confrontation with Valjean, above all the scene where he comes to him to offer his resignation because he has infringed regulations – he has
lived
by them, now he must go down by them. The curious feeling of someone about to burst apart is physically uncomfortable to watch. Never for a moment in Laughton’s performance does the audience share Javert’s lust for Valjean’s blood; instead they are transfixed by the spectacle of a man who has filled the vacuum created by his fear with a monstrous, inhuman destructiveness of which he is ultimately the victim. He has become his quest. In a way hard to analyse, Laughton constantly suggests the pain which gave rise to this obsession. As he spies on Valjean, the moon face transfigured with destructive longings, as watchful as a cat waiting to pounce on a bird, as ardent as a voyeur hypnotised by the object of his infatuation, as hungry as a dog ogling a plate of meat, he cuts a figure that is both chilling and pitiful, and which is always preparing us for the climax of both film and performance: the moment when Valjean surrenders himself, and Javert, at the hour of what should be his triumph, simply melts away into pity. It is a devastating moment, as steel turns to honey. With impeccable taste, the director chooses not to show the drowning of Javert, elliptically implying it with empty boots and swirling Seine.

‘This sequence was, in my opinion,’ Laughton wrote, ‘the finest thing I have ever been able to accomplish on the screen.’ He continued making films for another 25 years, but it is hard to disagree with what he says. ‘“What a tragedy!” I wanted the audience to exclaim, “to have one’s whole life overshadowed by a fanatical sense of duty?”’ This is exactly what they do exclaim; but it is not the tragedy of one man, a fictional character, that they marvel at. It is the tragedy of us all, of life itself, of, yes, the human condition. The ability to shift the audience from thinking Poor him! to thinking Poor us! must surely be a mark of greatness in an actor.

It is noteworthy that, on this film, as with so many of his most remarkable achievements, the circumstances of filming caused him great physical discomfort. Wading through the sewers, day in and day out, imagining the smells and dankness, focused him more and more on the agonies with which he was filling his being. It is hard to avoid the feeling that there was an element of self-punishment in Laughton, possibly with sexual overtones. Who can say, for sure? In fact, Laughton was highly sensitive to pain, and disliked physical discomfort. Perhaps pain was the quickest route to feeling; and feeling was the basis of his art. Quite clearly, he was haunted by guilt. ‘As far as we know,’ says Charles Higham, ‘Laughton had no sexual relations whatever in the years 1934–35,’ so it wouldn’t have been a simple guilt
for
actions. Perhaps for thoughts … no doubt a continuing legacy of Stoneyhurst, the triumph of a Catholic upbringing: perpetual unease, nameless doubt, existential anxiety. He had rejected confession, while retaining guilt; embraced the nettle, dismissed the dock-leaf.

And so it was left to his acting to cleanse his soul; and again, on
Les Miseŕables
, says Miss Lanchester, it worked: ‘he gave one of those cleansing performances that gave him a little peace.’

The film was well enough received: ‘Somehow the picture seems more vivid and important than the novel,’ wrote James Shelley Hamilton, ‘though Boleslavsky yields to his temptation to prettifying the scenes with unnecessary dabbling in mere effects of light and shadow.’ He had no hesitation about Laughton, however: ‘the astonishing revelation is that of Charles Laughton as Javert, a picture of a tortured spirit, fighting against something it cannot understand, for which one must go to the greatest works of art for a comparison. One wonders if Victor Hugo himself put into that character all that Laughton brings out of it.’ Critics – those who sensed what Laughton was trying to do – were straining for superlatives. For others (Otis Ferguson, for example) ‘he continues to be a baffling figure, impressive even in his inevitable overplaying.’ There is something in this performance that touches nerves so deep, that the spectator either submits to it or refuses it altogether.

After it, he returned to England where Elsa already was. Korda was trying to lure him back into the fold, and they started work on what proved to be a time-consuming wild goose chase:
Cyrano de Bergerac
, a long-standing passion of Charles’. Laughton was only in England long enough to help set the project up with Korda: the problem, as always – until, at any rate, Anthony Burgess’ miraculous version for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1984 – was the translation. They lighted on an admired poet of the time, author of
The Uncelestial City, Signposts to Poetry
, and a striking memoir of his Jewish childhood,
Now a Stranger
, Humbert Wolfe (not, as improbably reported by both Lanchester and Higham, Virginia’s husband, Leonard Woolf).

After setting the project up, Laughton returned to Hollywood at the behest of Irving Thalberg to play Captain Bligh in the film of
Mutiny on the Bounty
. Before he went he did his research. Lettie Greig, his cousin from Scarborough, visiting the Laughtons for supper, recalls his arrival, three hours late, in a state of uncontrollable excitement, having been to Gieves’ in Bond Street and discovered the original records for Bligh’s uniform – from 1789. The authenticity wasn’t the point; it was what it did to his imagination. Costumes had a
particularly
powerful effect on Laughton, one of the most useful levers to his creativity. Edith Head, queen of Hollywood costume designers said: ‘Put Charles Laughton in front of a three-way mirror and you were apt to get the whole play. Charles had the amazing ability to adjust his body to his clothes. You could put a suit on Charles and by his body control that suit could change amazingly before your eyes.’ Lanchester writes: ‘Charles could look at you from under a hat brim like nobody else … before any production, Charles would play with his new props – putting on a hat and taking it off, hanging it up and taking it down, at home, in his dressing room, or in the producer’s office. This was a time of fun for Charles and any audience around him … he knew he could captivate and mesmerise.’

During the honeymoon period of preparation, he could fool around with the stupendous instrument that was his talent; like a hunter picking off plaster ducks with his gun to make children laugh. Alas, when the work started in earnest, the fun evaporated.

Mutiny on the Bounty
was a novel by Nordhoff and Hall, the rights of which had been acquired by Frank Lloyd, actor, writer, winner of two Academy Awards, with a view to playing Bligh himself. He was dissuaded from this folly by the advance of large sums of money from MGM, for whom Thalberg now bought the project. It is alleged that Lloyd insisted that whoever play Bligh should do so in the bushy eyebrows for which he, Lloyd, was famous. This savage self-satire seems less likely than that Laughton was perpetrating another of those sly jokes which had served him so well as Mr Prohack and the Man with Red Hair. Certainly, Laughton had no time for Lloyd; but then, for once, nor did anyone else. Thalberg was involved in continuous fracas with him, mainly over his handling of the cast. ‘He was always good on sea pictures,’ said Geraldine Farrar. ‘I liked him as a director, but he had better luck with ships than people.’ Unfortunately, on
Mutiny
he had to handle two rather high-powered people with very little in common.