Charles Laughton (11 page)

It was a medium to appeal to him in many ways. Perfectionist that he was, he was always doomed to frustration in the theatre. Physical limitations, of space, facilities and himself, compromised his achievement. He was deeply interested in, and disappointed by, the realisation of detail in the theatre: the cut of a costume, the join of a wig. Film offered completely new possibilities of physical freedom and quality of craftsmanship. As far as he was concerned, it offered him two golden advantages that he exploited to greater effect than any actor in the history of the cinema: the close-up; and the re-take. The close-up enabled him to explore even further the nature of his special gift, perceptively identified by John Mason Brown: the art of making thought flesh. ‘Movie acting is simple,’ Laughton later said to Marius Goring (only a year later, in fact, flushed with his discovery of the new medium). ‘Feel it in your
guts
, and then let it dribble up through your eyes’. That plump mask might have been expressly designed to be framed by a cinema screen. ‘I’m certainly lucky,’ he told
Picturegoer
in 1935. ‘Imagine a face like mine photographing so well. My features cut through the screen like a knife through cheese. It’s sheer good luck – but who would have believed it?’

His shameless exploitation of the right to re-take became a joke in the industry: a rather expensive joke in some cases. In the theatre where time is limited by the need to get the whole play more or less
right
by opening night, a compromised result has often to be accepted, often for the good of all. The chance to re-take offered by movies is a perfectionist’s heaven – and hell: to an actor of Laughton’s fertility, it is tantamount to a recipe for madness. His acting faculty was a thing constructed of a million nerves, a-quiver with impulses. Every impulse, as it passed through him, provoked an adjacent impulse: an entire new set of vibrations was sounded, each with implications. So easy to become lost in a baroque tissue of resonating tendrils. But it is exactly this ability to form a character out of a thousand living cells which together form a breathing, complex organism that fitted him so wonderfully for the screen with its microscopic sensitivity. Watching him can be like watching film of plant life: nature’s kingdom in a man. The linearity which makes Laurence Olivier for the most part such a disappointing film actor, but so exhilarating to see on stage, is entirely absent from Charles Laughton, as an actor and as a man. There are no straight lines with him: everything is composed of a myriad of tiny arrows, each pointing in a different direction. Hence the illusion of life itself.

The Benn Levy script,
The Devil and the Deep
, was delayed, so Laughton was ‘lent’ by Paramount to another studio – Universal – for his first Hollywood movie, another Levy script, and barely American at all. The story was by J. B. Priestley, most of the cast were English, and when they weren’t – like Raymond Massey and Melvyn Douglas – they spoke with English accents; the setting was as English as the fog in which the eponymous house is enveloped. The film was directed by James Whale, fresh from triumphs with
Journey’s End
and
Frankenstein
, but before that an associate of the Laughtons in various capacities: stage manager of
Riverside Nights
, habitué of the Cave of Harmony, and portrayer of Crispin’s epicene son Herrick in
A Man with Red Hair
. It was with him that they dined on their first night in Los Angeles. ‘You’ll love it here,’ he told Charles. ‘I’m pouring the gold through my hair and enjoying every moment of it!’ With their not dissimilar Northern English backgrounds, Laughton and Whale had radically different tastes. Laughton embraced High Art, Whale High Camp, in which style
The Old Dark House
is the uncontested masterpiece. It is an uncharacterisic début for Laughton: usually florider by far than any of his fellow-actors, in this film, he is virtually the straight man – not by any restraint on his part; far from it – he is splendidly full-blooded as a class-conscious Yorkshire businessman. Simply that never before or since has a director assembled such a cast of living gargoyles: Ernest Thesiger, with his air of a scandalised
vampire;
Boris Karloff, monumentally inarticulate; Eva Moore as Thesiger’s sister, deaf and scowling; Elspeth Dudgeon as Thesiger’s 102-year-old
father
. That Laughton makes any impact at all in his straightforward role is a remarkable achievement. Priestley had written the piece as an experiment in endowing the horror-story with ‘overtones of psychological symbolism’. Laughton humanizes the conventional character, refusing to allow either writer or director to manipulate him. His bluff gaucheness at what must certainly be the most awful dinner party in the history of movies (waited on by Karloff, presided over by Thesiger, offering potatoes as if they were lice, and dominated by Eva Moore, cramming food down her gullet in fistfuls) is properly funny; but what marks the performance as distinctively his is his pointing up of something he always went after in a part: the plight of the underdog – in this case, as again, so often, the social and the sexual underdog.

The speech in which he describes his loathing for the bosses whose sneering drove his wife to suicide, and him to becoming a capitalist himself in revenge, is full of real feeling, the more remarkable because he allows it to emerge from his bluffness, and then to disappear back into it. Another actor might have sought to explain the character in terms of his bitterness; not Laughton. He simply states it: there is this, and there is this. You add it up.

Another original colour that he contributes is in the scene where his mistress, the good-time girl Gladys duCane tells him – rather unexpectedly, it must be said, in the development of the narrative – that she’s going to desert him for the Melvyn Douglas character. He receives the news firstly with anger, then resignation, then – the Laughton touch – an odd, bashful tenderness: an affectionate forgiveness, which, in the prevailing preposterous context, is touching.

Laughton had no very warm feelings for any of the cast (though of course he had previously been directed by, and was later himself to direct, Raymond Massey). He never cared for Karloff; as for Thesiger … Elsa Lanchester describes a dinner-party she gave in Hollywood which sounds not much less awkward than that in the film. Rogers, the chauffeur-cook, had made and served the meal. When he brought in the main course, lamb, Thesiger spotted the slightly green apples accompanying it, and pointed at them. ‘Arsenic apples!’ he cried.

For
The Old Dark House
, Laughton was on loan to Universal; in a sense, he was on loan to the world of James Whale, as well. Stylisation was never a mode he cultivated: excess, certainly, but always to expressive end. The excess in Whale’s film is a
reductio ad absurdum
so
complete
that it transcends its self-parody to attain to an absurdist vision. Laughton’s art was always essentially a humanist one: his monsters were never born that way: they are never arbitrarily so: they were once otherwise, they could be again. Whale’s characters haven’t got a chance in hell. Mordaunt Hall (critic of the
New York Times
, not another character in the film – nor indeed the title part) welcomed the film with reservations – ‘one may wonder why the motorists who seek refuge in the old dark house did not continue on their way immediately after encountering two or three of its occupants’ – but was unqualified in his acclaim for Laughton’s performance. ‘It is a splendid portrayal.’

Paramount finally got their own script into shape by the time
The Old Dark House
was finished, and Laughton started to shoot the film he came to Hollywood to make:
The Devil and the Deep
, a vehicle.

It was to be Charles’ first appearance before the American public: he had been released to Universal on the understanding that
The Old Dark House
would not be shown until after
The Devil and the Deep
. Jesse Lasky, head of Paramount, had great faith in Laughton, and liked to say afterwards that he had discovered him. The film’s credits, after star billing for Tallulah Bankhead and Gary Cooper, end with the phrase: And Introducing the Eminent English Character Actor, Charles Laughton.

And Eminent English Character Acting, is, on the whole, what we get. It’s not Laughton’s fault that Tallulah’s performance, dismissed at the time by both critics and herself, now seems an extraordinarily original portrait of an unfulfilled and oppressed woman, bored and unhappy, oddly attached to the paranoiacally jealous husband that Laughton plays. No doubt the wheel of fashion has turned to Laughton’s disadvantage in this film, but now it is the uptight naval commander teetering on the brink of insanity who seems banal and obvious, while Bankhead’s doomed chain-smoking beauty, burnt out by the emotional violence which has been done her, snatching an anonymous night in the desert with Cooper (‘What do you want?’ he asks. ‘Never to have been born,’ she says) is startlingly real. Cooper, too, with his voluptuously gentle masculinity and
nearly
wooden delivery, is spellbinding in a way that Laughton, infinitely the superior technician, and in a sense the more commanding personality, cannot manage. It is impressive, in a stagey way, but in terms of his development as a film actor, it is prentice work.

He knew it, too. He immediately recognised in Gary Cooper
something
that was essential to film acting. ‘He gets at it from the inside, from his own clear way of looking at life,’ he said in an interview. For the rest of his life he always cited Cooper as the paragon of film acting, just as he continued to idolise Gerald du Maurier as a stage actor. His was the burden of the character actor: to turn yourself into a different actor for every performance – not merely to re-make the boundaries of your personality, but to shift your centre to accommodate them. Only then will the performance live – without that shift, the character will simply be an identification, not a reality.

His great achievement as an actor was to journey to the farthest reaches of his temperament and somehow make of the section of himself he was exploring, a whole man.

Not, alas, in
The Devil and the Deep
– except in certain scenes. The character he plays, Sturm, is shown in various social situations telling the same unfunny funny story, the telling being accompanied by a braying mirthless laugh. The laugh, and its relentless repetition, are brilliantly observed and reveal more of the man’s insensitivity and pain than the explicit scenes of confrontation. There’s a mechanical vivacity about the story and the laughter which creates an unforgettable image of a personality under pressure. Later, in the submarine, Laughton confronts Bankhead and Cooper. He falls into a sort of trance as he says to Cooper: ‘Must be a happy thing to look as you do. I suppose women love you. It must be a happy thing’ (a speech it is reasonably surmised Benn Levy wrote specially for Charles). As he speaks, his plump fingers stray onto his face, which he kneads into strange distorted shapes to make himself uglier than he is – a brilliantly original touch, painful to watch.

Sturm ends drowning in the sinking submarine. The scene called for hours of immersion in water, which Charles endured, even embraced, as he would so many physical trials in the course of 30 years of movie-making, in order to attain the reality of the character. He had a wretched time with Tallulah Bankhead, who had introduced herself by saying: ‘So you’re Charles Laughton. I hear you’re going to be in
my
picture.’ She despised the film, appeared to despise acting, and made no secret of her contempt for him. At every break in filming she played a record of
Falling in Love Again
. It is cruelly unfair that her continuance of this behaviour in front of the cameras should be so compelling, but that’s life – or rather, that’s show business, a phenomenon with which Charles Laughton had little connection.

Her comeuppance was, that it has taken fifty years for the quality of her performance to be recognised. As for Laughton: ‘
Newcomer Steals Show
’, said the
Los Angeles Times
. ‘His is the outstanding histrionic contribution,’ said the
New York Times
. He was set.

Paramount’s next project for him was
The Sign of the Cross
. Cecil B. de Mille had chosen Wilson Barrett’s play to mark his return to the studio on a new footing, and in his autobiography claims that when he saw Laughton in
Payment Deferred
in London, he knew that only he could play Nero. ‘He was a fat man in a heavy moustache dressed in drab business suits for his role as a Dulwich householder, as far removed as may be from the decadent splendours of Imperial Rome; but he was inevitably Nero to my eye, for I saw in Charles Laughton the incredibly wide range of talent which makes every role he plays seem as if it had been tailored just for him.’

These handsome praises are somewhat ironic in view of the fact that Laughton was now confident enough flatly to refuse to play the character the way C. B. wanted him to. One can again only marvel at the certainty of purpose and strength of will that enabled the thirty-three-year-old chubby Englishman (six years out of drama school) to take on the Tsar of All the Rushes, the prototypical Director as Field Marshall, complete with uniform, maker of some of the biggest – in every sense – films of all time. In fact, de Mille was not a bully, simply an organiser; and he was fighting a battle against the front office throughout shooting, so he acquiesced in Charles’ conception of the Emperor as feckless, theatrical, effeminate – as, to put it bluntly, an outrageous queen, even to the extent of furnishing him, as requested, with a totally naked young athlete to sit by his side during every scene. (Laughton had suggested Elsa to play the catamite, but de Mille, getting into the swing of things, proposed the young man.)

As ever, Charles had done his research, read his Sinkiewicz, too; but his conception of Nero had probably less to do with history or Polish literature than with a desire to avoid another heavy villain – which was de Mille’s notion of the character – a longing to be funny (which he always claimed to enjoy more than anything else) and finally a yearning to step out of the sexual closet, however briefly and however fictionally. Elsa Lanchester shrewdly observes that playing Nero probably did him more good than a year’s psychiatry.