Charles Laughton (43 page)

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.

Interestingly, Lilian Gish was anxious during filming that Laughton might have undercut Preacher’s evil, and told him so. Laughton’s reply, ‘For Mitchum to play this all evil might be bad for his future … I’m not going to ruin that young man’s career,’ though humorously meant (and an echo of what he’d said on two previous stage shows), indicates a certain protective, fatherly feeling, confirmed by Elsa Lanchester’s remark: ‘Charles was patient
with
him because Mitchum was going to be one of his children.’

Miss Gish herself brings to her rôle everything Laughton wanted: her scrubbed, sturdy radiance and power of nurture are the perfect polarity to Mitchum’s greasiness. She is the spirit of absolution and healing in the film, and discharges her function as no one else could have done, with a kind of secular sanctity which cannot be forged. As for the children, they too are perfect; which is something of a mystery, because Laughton kept as far away from them as possible. His special loathing was reserved for the little girl, Sally Bruce, but he didn’t have much time either for Billy Chapin as John after Mitchum had given Billy a note: ‘Do you think John’s frightened of the Preacher?’ ‘Nope’ said Billy Chapin. ‘Then you don’t know the Preacher and you don’t know John.’ ‘Oh really?’ said Billy. ‘That’s probably why I just won the New York Critics’ Circle prize.’ ‘Get that child away from me,’ roared Laughton. Thereafter, Mitchum directed the boy – with the most remarkable results. Odd paradox, that Laughton should have failed to create any rapport with the children, when it was his vision that the entire film should be a child’s nightmare.

Consciously framing the film with Lilian Gish surrounded by children, apparently among the stars, suspended, as she rehearses the comforting and warning words of the Bible, Laughton then shows the novel’s story if not precisely from the children’s point of view, certainly in the children’s terms. It is, in a way, a fairy story (‘really a nightmarish sort of Mother Goose tale,’ said Laughton): the children’s father dies, his place in their mother’s bed is usurped by an interloper who threatens them, their mother disappears, they run away from home, all the time hanging on to their real daddy’s secret. Finally they are found and rescued by a new mother, a kindly, sufficient mother, the bad daddy is removed, and they live happily ever after, stronger and wiser. That is the backbone of the story; Laughton chooses to tell it in a way which is neither realistic nor arch, but with intense, simplified poetry, which corresponds to the children’s state of emotional intensity. It would be more accurate to say
child’s
state, because it is John who sees and hears everything: it is John’s wide-open eyes which see the wonderful creatures that sit along the riverbank at night; it is John who wearily sees Preacher on the horizon, just as he thinks he’s thrown him off. The adults all behave in typical ways, gossiping or getting drunk, or, as in the lynching scene, baying for blood. The escape from the mob of Gish and the children is a scene which was particularly dear to Laughton: the image of Lilian Gish shepherding her cares had some very personal meaning for Charles – something to do with mothers, with nurturing and belonging; to attempt to relate it to his bruised psyche would take us into areas we are not competent to explore; sufficient to note the intensely personal feeling which informs the handling of everything to do with Lilian Gish in the film.