Charles Laughton (29 page)

This
dégringolade
did not pass unnoticed: ‘Why,’ asked the
New York Times
, ‘has he been permitted to dissipate his talent in arrant mugging within the past few years?’ What is astonishing is the speed of his decline, both actually, and in critical favour. 1939 (the year of
Hunchback
), a genius; 1941 (
It Started with Eve
), a joke (Garson Kanin reports that he and a friend went to see the film. In the opening sequence, Laughton, apparently on his death-bed, says,
‘I’m
so happy’. ‘Don’t you mean
hammy
?’ whispers Gar’s chum, and they crack up);
The Tuttles
is a low-water mark.
Tales of Manhattan
, also 1941, is an honourable exception in the decline, though the
New York Times
didn’t think so: ‘he is farcical in a manner which violated the mood.’ Seen today, his performance in this compendium movie is the most effective of all the half dozen stars, each with their own episode. The thread between episodes is a tail-coat, worn in turn by Boyer, Fonda, Laughton, Edward G. Robinson and Paul Robeson. Laughton plays an impoverished composer who finally gets a break when the Toscanini-like martinet (Victor Francen), in whose orchestra his best friend plays, agrees to programme his
Scherzo
. He conducts it himself, wearing the tail-coat his wife has bought for him from the pawnshop. As his baton-waving becomes more vigorous, the coat starts to split at the seams. The audience starts to titter, then to laugh; finally, in the Hollywood Manner, the entire auditorium is roaring with uncontrolled hysteria. Laughton, shattered by this, stops conducting and sits pathetically on the edge of the podium in his shirt-sleeves, having torn off the remains of the tail-coat. Francen-Toscanini has been watching all this from the box with icy rage. Suddenly, he stands. The audience falls silent as he takes off
his
tail-coat. Slowly at first, then increasingly quickly, every man in the audience does likewise. Laughton picks up his baton and resumes the
Scherzo
. Ovation, in the Hollywood Manner.

Laughton’s performance is delicate, precise, and touching. The character is one of his ordinary little men (to underline the point he’s called Charlie Smith) and he handles the part as cleanly and simply as his earlier Charlie in
St Martin’s Lane
. As before, his emotional honesty is affecting: his hopefulness while the conductor examines his score; his joyful communication of the good news to his family; his nervous anxiety before the concert; his exhilaration as he hears the score for the first time; and, supremely, his despondency as he sinks to the floor amid the derision of the audience – all this is truly and lightly played. It is, in fact, an excellent performance, full, as well as all its other qualities, of genuine high spirits. It never attempts the concentration of gesture and intensification of feeling that make his performance of Phineas V. Lambert in
If I Had a Million
, for instance, so deeply funny. It is a study of one little man which never reaches out to encompass all little men, but it is clearly the work of an immensely gifted player. It is hard to see what the
New York Times
was aiming at in its imputation of farcicality – apart from certain
helter-skelter
moments – but even these are entirely within the framework of the character and the situation.

There is no record of Laughton’s relationship with Duvivier, the director. In an extensive career, beginning and ending unremarkably, Duvivier had a middle period of the most glorious splendour, including some of the masterpieces of the French cinema:
Un Carnet de Bal, Fin du Jour, Poil de Carotte
. He had achieved outstanding success with what amounted to a regular company of actors, including one who had a certain resemblance to Laughton, Michel Simon, and who, like Laughton, was haunted by what he conceived of as his physical unattractiveness. Many of Simon’s performances seem, also like Laughton’s, to embody titanic emotions to a degree that shifts them from psychology into mythology. The resemblance with Laughton ends there, however, because Simon, after a brief brush with emotional relationships – an abortive marriage – became more or less a recluse (which Laughton never was) – and devoted himself to acting quite single-mindedly, even after a disastrous experiment with make-up which left him nearly blind. Acting was Simon’s destination, whereas Laughton was en route somewhere else.

It is pleasing, however, to imagine that Duvivier approached Laughton with some sensitivity – he was used to actors trying for complex results – even if the work they produced together was not among its respective authors’ very finest. (Elsa Lanchester, incidentally, gives an unusually affecting performance as Charlie’s tough, good wife.) The film in fact made a great deal of money and led to another, less successful compendium film,
Flesh and Fantasy
, with Boyer and Edward G. Robinson, directed again by Duvivier. But Laughton was not in it.

For Laughton, 1942 was dominated, cinematically and in more important other ways, by the war. America had joined the Allies in December 1941. Laughton had done everything in his power to promote that course, and now he threw himself with extraordinary passion into the drive to sell War Bonds. He went on a selling tour in August of 1942; on 1 September he took part, along with other stars in a series of rallies; and on 30 September he talked himself hoarse on a phone-in broadcast during which, starting at seven o’clock in the morning and ending at midnight, he sold $298,000 worth of bonds. His passion was evidently persuasive. He ended the broadcast with the exhortation that it was ‘a duty and a privilege to buy bonds – the last chance to save the flickering flame of
democracy
. God help you and your children if that flame goes out.’

The ideals of democracy, and particularly, it may be said, American democracy, meant a great deal to Laughton; also, like many wartime expatriates, he wanted to do everything he could to contribute to the war effort, ‘from guilt’, as Elsa said, ‘of being in the Hollywood sunshine’. Behind the passion of his commitment to these drives, however, lies something else: the desire for communication with the audience, direct communication, unmediated by a play or a character. He wanted to communicate what he had learned and was learning (for he never ceased to learn; to question was his supreme passion); and that was a sense of values. He had neither politics nor philosophy, but he had a most vivid apprehension of beauty and the rightness of things. Most of his career as an actor had been spent in exploring the disorders of the human spirit, exhibited in his own person. Already in his films he had started to quote, wherever possible, great statements about the human condition, the Gettysburg Address, of course, and the Bible. At these moments – in
Ruggles
, and
Rembrandt
, particularly – he departed almost entirely from character and even situation to celebrate great truths clothed in gorgeous rhetorical raiments.

In a 1937 article (in which he was once more defending himself as an actor), he recounts how on one of his journeys home from America, a crowd gathered to bid him farewell – ‘not, you understand, confirmed autograph hunters, whom I detest, but just a normal crowd of Americans, come to see their friends and relations off.’ They cheered him affectionately. ‘This obvious feeling of goodwill impressed me not a little, but far more important was the fact that, time and again, I found they were shouting out expressions from my films which I had gone out of my way to impress upon them. I felt that my work had not been wasted, that they all knew exactly what I had been striving after.’ That sense of communicating something important and memorable came to seem to Laughton the most valuable thing he could do – added to which, it made the work so much less lonely and painful. It was a worthy vocation and it was in touch with the human race, of which, Lanchester wrote, ‘he really never felt himself part.’ His work as an actor had gained him a kind of co-opted membership of it as a tragic fool, a court jester whose maimed body served as a means both of facing misfortune and laughing at it. Quasimodo was not only the culmination but also the paradigm of what he had been doing. Now he wanted to approach mankind from a different angle, bearing gifts of beauty and wisdom. He wanted to be a teacher and a prophet – and a lover.

. . .

After the completion of
They Knew What They Wanted
, he began to see how he might reach people directly. Dreading the usual promotion tour – receptions, parties, interviews, autographs, ‘well, Mr Laughton, what do you think of our little town?’ – he had suggested that he do some readings instead. It had been his habit to read out loud at the slightest prompting, or at none. Having neither capacity nor inclination for small talk, he would prefer to spend the time usefully by sharing his discoveries in the literary field – not by talking about books (that would be more small talk) but by actually quoting them. His physical relish of words was as great as, and identical in kind to, his passion for paintings. Sound, texture, rhythm, tone, shape were what he responded to with an aesthetic appetite that was both sensuous and spiritual. It was this, more than any meaning contained in the words, that he sought to transmit. He wanted to direct people’s attention to the beauties readily available to them.

The perhaps slightly surprised citizens of middle America took very well to his readings on that promotion tour. Laughton simply read a couple of poems, a section or two of the Bible, and, inevitably, ended with the Gettysburg address. The experience lodged deep in his brain. Peddling beauty, exalted thoughts and heightened language was much more agreeable than struggling with some squalid character, trying to invest paltry phrases with truth and force, and being publicly humiliated in the process. The isolation of the life, the feeding off himself, the constant revelation of his ugliness: all of this could be avoided. He could give the audience delight and enlightenment; they could give him acknowledgement and, yes, admiration; and the words themselves would give him all the inspiration, all the energy so patently absent from filmscripts.

The thoughts marinated in Laughton’s mind, taking – as did everything with him – their own good time before they were matured. He carried on reading privately – to Henry Koster, for example, the German director of
It Started with Eve
, forbidden by the curfew on aliens from going out at night; to Jean Renoir and his wife Dido (to whom he read Shakespeare); to soldiers in hospitals; and, something that made him ‘very happy’, according to Elsa Lanchester, to crippled and retarded children. He found to his delight that his auditors, whether famous artists like Koster and Renoir, or wounded GIs and backward kids, were spellbound and eager for more; eager, too, to find out more about the authors. He started to satisfy their interest; and so, in time, he became a teacher.

Routine

MEANWHILE, THERE WAS
money to be made, and that meant films.
Forever and a Day
was officially a war charity film – the first of them – the idea for which came from Cedric Hardwicke, and his prestige helped to persuade the seven directors, twenty-one writers and seventy-eight featured actors to participate. It was the Hollywood Raj’s big do, and in fact it made rather a lot of money, almost all of which went to various good causes.

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
.’