Charles Laughton (33 page)

Brecht was always perfectly happy to share his authorial activities with others; his confidence, again, spared him any anxiety about his creative potency. Any useful input was accepted and absorbed. The relationship with Laughton was evidently entirely congenial to him, all the more for its unusual form. Because Laughton spoke no German, it was necessary for Brecht to offer a rudimentary translation of each line, which Laughton would then convert into idiomatic English. Brecht would then re-work that to further precision, and Laughton would make final adjustments. ‘This system of performance-and-repetition had one immense advantage in that psychological discussions were entirely avoided’ – anathema to both. Laughton was, however, deeply concerned with the shaping of the scenes, the making of points, the overall impact of the play; and many of his suggestions were incorporated into the text. Together they conducted what would now be called a workshop: Laughton would bring in scenes from other plays so as to learn from them – especially Elizabethan ones (‘Although L.’s theatrical experience had been in a London which had become thoroughly indifferent to the theatre, the old Elizabethan London still lived in him, a London where theatre was such a passion it could swallow immortal works of art greedily and barefaced as so many texts’). They shared a passion for the mechanics of playwriting: how is this effect achieved, what is the best way to handle such and such a relationship? Both were learning, both were teaching. They’d rush off to the museums and the art galleries for clues. Laughton amassed a collection of sometimes no more than tangentially relevant material – ‘I could see L. would only make marginal use of it’ – in order to discover the world of the play and its embodiment: ‘he obstinately sought for the external: not for physics but for the physicists’ behaviour.’ ‘For quite a while, our work embraced everything we could lay our hands on.’

As Brecht paints it, it was something of an idyll for both of them. ‘We used to work in L.’s small library, in the mornings. But often L. would come and meet me in the garden, running barefoot in shirt and trousers over the damp grass, and would show me some changes in his
flower
beds, for the garden always occupied him, providing many problems and subleties. The gaiety and proportion of this world of flowers overlapped in the most pleasant way into our work.’ It
was
a kind of love affair, for Brecht an extension of other similar collaborations, for Laughton the discovery of a new and wonderful world. At last he knew what he had been preparing himself for, all these years of reading and studying and looking and learning. Somehow it had needed association with another mind, one he deeply respected, to give him courage to create something. ‘I have many times tried to write very simple stories, but they all looked and sounded terrible the next morning,’ he wrote, years later; and Elsa Lanchester wrote that ‘Charles was never a creative playwright, but he was a master cutter. He would have liked to have been a writer, because in fact he really knew how to build a dramatic house. And Brecht spotted that. Beyond acting, Charles’ chief talent, I think, was construction. You might call it editing.’

For Brecht it was simply a treat to have the total engagement of this huge and complicated spirit whose commitment to the play, and to Brecht himself, was unqualified. No doubt with the constant overview of wanting to get the thing on, this touchiest of men was astonishingly compliant; moreover there was a sense in which, despite Laughton’s political ‘indifference’, his suggestions, both for cuts and additions, sharpened the play’s political impact ‘on the simple grounds that passages in question seemed ‘somehow weak’ to him, by which he meant that they do not do justice to things as they are.’ Willett and Manheim in their critical edition examine in detail the changes made from the 1938 original text. The most significant with which Laughton was involved were, to take two examples, quite specifically political: it was he who urged Brecht to make Lodovico, Virginia’s fiancé, into a nobleman; and it was his idea to have a dummy of the Pope thrown in the air by the crowd in the carnival scene. Laughton had obviously entered into the mind of author: ‘driven by his theatrical instincts, L. is fervently expounding the political aspects.’ His greatest influence, of course, was in the area of the character of Galileo. Interestingly, his suggestions to Brecht were all to do with rendering the character more culpable: ‘L. is for throwing the character to the wolves … he insists on a complete portrayal of depravity, stemming from the crime that brought out Galileo’s negative side. Only Galileo’s brilliant mind survives, functioning in a void, found redundant by its owner, who now desires mediocrity.’

Laughton’s identification with not merely the outward characteristics of Galileo – his sensuality, his passion for learning, his cunning – but also with his moral situation gave his work on the play particular intensity. His nameless, undefined guilt immediately homed in on the matter of Galileo’s treachery, his betrayal of science, of the people. Brecht reports: ‘he reveals this idea most clearly when he is called a ‘scab’ for crossing a picket line in front of the studio; this hurt him deeply, no applause here.’

The film being picketed was
Because of Him
, one of the five films he made during the period of his collaboration with Brecht. Though mostly forgotten now, each of the films contains a rather refreshing performance from Laughton. It may not be fanciful to suggest that the work with Brecht, in restoring Laughton’s self-respect and stimulating every part of his creative faculties, did in fact somewhat restore his enthusiasm for acting itself. It was, of course, necessary for Laughton to keep breaking off from the work in order to make money. In an eloquent phrase Brecht compared Laughton’s lifestyle with that of his friend Peter Lorre: ‘like Laughton, he lives in shameful poverty with four houses and his own Japanese gardeners in a $50,000 villa.’ Laughton did indeed maintain a substantial establishment – though his principal expenditure was on the vast consolation of great art. He was beginning his collection of modern masters, and it wasn’t cheap. It is a measure of his new-found sense that life was, in Rimbaud’s famous phrase, ‘elsewhere.’ He was acting in order to surround himself with great art; to surround himself with it, rather than to create it. But now he could use the indifferent films he was offered to underwrite the Great Project:
Galileo
. So perhaps that too affected his general demeanour in the making of them.

Captain Kidd
, the first of the five films, is generally regarded as a woeful demonstration of the depths to which Laughton had sunk. Certainly in point of production values, the picture, in common with so many at this period of his career, bears no comparison whatever with the films of his great period, the MGM and RKO films. There was neither time nor money to aim for the kind of finish and detail and intelligent shaping of script that had characterised those films. The producer on
Captain Kidd
, Benedict Bogeaus (better Bogeaus than Dull, no doubt), seems on the evidence of the drab costumes, fake interiors and palpably plastic ocean, to have confined himself to cutting corners. The director, Rowland V. Lee, veteran of costume action dramas, shoots without inspiration; while the script is a
preposterous
travesty of history and verisimilitude alike. There are a number of attractive performances, however. John Carradine is forceful, Gilbert Roland poses the dago threat to Barbara Britton’s Lady Anne with some flair and Randolph Scott does his usual poor man’s Gary Cooper routine with panache. Henry Daniell, Laughton’s mocking neighbour from
The Suspect
, without either lines or character, fails to make that elusive monarch William III live; but Reginald Owen, with whom Laughton had agreeably sparred in
The Canterville Ghost
, makes a brilliant foil to him here. Their scenes, valet and master, are the best thing in the film. It is tempting to believe that Laughton had a hand in the writing of them, because they so stand out from everything else. They are, for one thing,
about
something: class. Laughton’s Kidd aspires to social improvement and hires the valet to instil the appropriate behaviour into him. There is much dry correcting of vowels and adjusting of syntax and murmured sartorial advice, with Laughton torn between the desire to learn and the impulse to kill his mentor. ‘Pity about the hair,’ says Owen, surveying Kidd’s matted locks, ‘I suppose you’ve tried everything?’ Their first scene together has an almost Brechtian quality to it, a demonstration of attitudes and behaviour with distant parallels in several of the plays, in which a character is re-made:
Arturo Ui, Man Equals Man
, and, indeed,
Galileo
(the Pope dressing scene).

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.