Hi Hello & Welcome to this week’s look at the movies and movie people that matter to me.
So this week I’m taking a whirlwind look at one of the greatest Actors of his or any other generation. A man whose mastery of Film and Stage (and let’s not forget the Lecture circuit) was total, complete. I’ll shine a quick light on two of my favourite of his performances and which also offer an insight into his range as well as talent - THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME (1939) and HOBSON’S CHOICE (1954), with a super quick reference to (as I simply can’t leave out one of my favourite movies of all time) - THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER (1955).
He was a genius of course and therefore, like all geniuses (see my recent piece on Peter Sellers) he had a personal life that was chaotic at best, frankly pretty repugnant at worst. He could’ve simultaneously occupied the couches of thirty psychiatrists such were were the nature of his personality issues and problems, and such was his fierce intelligence he’d have led them a merry dance they’d have been clueless was even happening. He was quite simply a most brilliant, a most fucked up and most dichotomous human being - in other words everything you need to be a genius.
His name -
CHARLES LAUGHTON
He was born July 1st, the son of locally notable hotel keepers Robert & Eliza, and not only was he born into a family steeped in the Hotel business he was actually born in the Victoria Hotel, which the Laughton’s ran in the North Sea coastal town of Scarborough.
After a brief spell at a local boys school Laughton’s mother - a devout Roman Catholic - had him quickly moved to Stonyhurst College, a somewhat prestigious Jesuit school which then had a fearsome reputation for discipline but also bizarrely a fair-handed approach to culture and the arts. He was going to get an excellent education, he was going to get the arse end of catholic brutalism, but the arts were not going to be denied him. Not that they were anyway as one of his brothers - Tom - wrote in his autobiography about how he and Charles would delightedly watch the Pierrots and Fol de Rols on their outings around Scarborough setting up makeshift stages and giving shows, or performing on the seafront when the weather was clement. Charles of course was particularly taken with all of this. And performing at school himself. His first performances took place at Stonyhurst in front of the rest of the school and the no doubt stern faced Jesuit masters.
But a horrendously dark cloud was looming for millions of young men born around the end of the 19thC. Part of Stonyhurst’s syllabus included Army Officer Training, so after hostilities officially broke out it was only a matter of time before Laughton would be called up, and he was, serving first with the 2/1st Battalion of the Huntingdonshire Cyclist Battalion then with the 7th Battalion of the Northamptonshire Regiment before being gassed. After that it was time to start getting his hands dirty in the family hotel business.
He got involved in some local am dram but in 1925 and having convinced his parents (somehow) that it was a good idea he set off to London to study at RADA, and after graduating in 1926 it all started to take off for Charlie boy. You can imagine can’t you. He’d have been as precocious as fuck. Of course he was and of course with his natural talents intelligence & confidence - the latter at least outwardly - of course theatre audiences instantly loved him.
He started flying around London and London’s West End, tearing the roof off Shakespeare, Chekhov, Moliere, O’Casey, Gogol - all the big boys. What I’d give to have seen him play Tartuffe, Andrew Aguecheek or Konstantin - sweet mother of avocados they’d have been glorious nights in the Theatre.
But shift our arses we must, Laughton certainly was. He was treading the boards not only in the West End and at the Old Vic but debuting on Broadway and in Paris, the lad was killing it and he was hot to trot. So it wouldn't be very long - and it wasn’t - before Hollywood sniffed him out and they did so almost as soon as he made his Broadway debut. He quickly started popping up in films opposite the considerable likes of Cary Grant, Gary Cooper, Tallulah Bankhead, Boris Karloff and working for legends like DeMille. But it was of course a homegrown film that launched him into the celluloid stratosphere when he teamed up with Alexander Korda to star in The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933). It won him the Best Actor Oscar, and he would never look back.
Thereafter followed a stream of fantastic parts in movies such as Les Misérables (1935), Mutiny On The Bounty (1935), Rembrandt (1936), Jamaica Inn (1939) - for Hitchcock - and then eventually the first of our two main films of focus this week, THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME (1939).
Laughton was now marked out as a top-class serious actor who could play strong, leading, character based roles, and the offers were rolling in. Although perhaps an obvious choice for the super-juicy lead in 'Hunchback’, Laughton was hesitant at first. He’d long done self-loathing over his looks (amongst other things) and genuinely felt the character of Quasimodo was too close to home. He also had problems with the IRS. Indeed he nearly lost out on the movie when Lon Chaney Jr. pushed hard and screen-tested for it when RKO weren’t sure that Laughton was going to sign on. Fortunately for all concerned then and all of us now Laughton got his shit together and dashed pen across paper. He quickly snatched up 18yr old Maureen O’Hara who he’d just finished Jamaica Inn with for Esmeralda (giving her her Hollywood debut) and to the make-up chair it was.
Laughton spent two and half hours every day having Perc Westmore’s stunning make-up design applied and he was - somewhat understandably - less than jovial during the process apparently, but holy fuck did it pay off. Bearing in mind this was 83 years ago it’s truly remarkable how stunningly good and effective Westmore’s work looks today. But of course Laughton works it, works the make-up and the costume like the genius he was. It’s all encompassing. The physical portrayal, the vocal work, the emotional connection with the character and then the extraordinarily courageous and authentic expressive sharing of everything he thought and felt the Hunchback was, with us - the audience. For such a bombastic fucker in everyday life, Laughton captures and communicates the pain, the suffering, the agony, the ridicule, the shame and the guilt of the Hunchback to an extraordinary degree.
Check this scene out for christ’s sake -
I mean that is genius acting and performance right there.
As ever, don’t take my word for anything though and just go watch it and decide for yourself. What’s the worst that can happen? You’ll have escaped the various travails that are hammering the crap out of so many of us right now for a few minutes. ‘Get into denial! Get into film!’ (dunno either, just came to me - but I kinda like it)
Laughton was tipped to win a second Oscar, but didn’t. Ahhh, so what. Cream always rises to the top, gets remembered, presents a long-lasting legacy, whilst all the other - if I may quote Zach Galifianakis - ‘hot idiots’ burn PR-bright and are then lost to the posterity of the mediocre. Fuck a ‘gong’, we have Laughton’s performance, the Film. 1939 is often cited as ‘the greatest year in film history’, and there’s a good argument for that claim frankly, but all I know is that in that year of years ‘Hunchback’ stands tall and proud with the best of them.
The 30’s then had been one helluva decade for the pudgy kid from Scarborough. I mean from 1931 and his Oscar right through to 1939 and ‘Hunchback’, Laughton really had fucking owned the gaff in terms of heavyweight character actors. The 40’s were not going to be the same.
The names of the films don’t matter really - although he was always as a bare minimum “can’t take your eyes off him” in all of them - but suffice to say that although he made plenty of them he also made mucho deniro, so much so he was able to buy a very nice gaff on N Carson Avenue in L.A. and get none other than Frank Lloyd Wright to come give it a spruce. Rather like Edward G. Robinson he also invested wisely and well in Art, so, although the 40’s were in many ways Laughton’s worst professional decade, he had a decent wedge of green in his back pocket by the end of it.
The 1950’s though? Things got better. A lot better.
Saying that the start was inauspicious actually, and projects like O. Henry's Full House (1952) didn’t help. Personally I always enjoy Abbott and Costello Meet Captain Kidd (1952) and I clip it on Twitter as a little curio and example of Laughton in full hammy flow, but no, this wasn’t a terribly good start to a decade that free of world war would give birth to, well, everything we have now in terms cultural and artistic. (Scratch that. Everything we had, fuck only knows what we have now.)
However, in 1954 our lad returned home, rather as he had done with Korda in ‘31, this time to hook up with David Lean. The movie -
HOBSON’S CHOICE
Adapting a Play into a Movie carries great risks and technical difficulties which too often become a burden that can’t be born. But this beauty is a rare and wonderful exception and in David Lean’s genius hands Harold Brighouse’s play sparkles and shines amidst the Salford grime. Of course our boy is a major reason.
As ever, plot, characters, even story you can find out for yourself by watching it - and my goodness you should watch this mid-50’s pearler. The actor playing Henry Hobson needed to be larger than life and did they ever get larger than life than Laughton? He’s mighty & magnificent, strutting across and dominating the screen at every turn. His outstanding comic timing is in full effect, his talents explode all over the screen and in every scene. Despite being known for some of cinema’s most visually epic productions, Lean handles this tiny piece with exquisite dexterity and set about casting it quite beautifully with the wonderful John Mills and Brenda de Banzie just delightful. Malcom Arnold’s score is perfect (very British-film-in-the-50’s) and it’s one of those films that’s like an old friend you meet up with maybe once every year or two and you’re always so pleased you did afterwards. This one also gets richer with every viewing. I adore it, and if you don’t at least like it then there’s something wrong with you.
Finally then I have to mention Laughton’s only go in the director’s chair -
THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER (1955)
I’ve written about this previously in my Substack piece on Robert Mitchum so I shan’t repeat myself except to say a couple of things.
It’s a masterpiece, it’s a genius work, the critics were baffled by it (fucking idiots), the public rejected it, the studio had a much more expensive Mitchum picture (“Not as a Stranger”) it wanted to promote instead, Laughton hated working with the child actors and screenwriter James Agee, Mitchum repeatedly cited Laughton as the director he most admired and loved working with, it’s the nearest thing to poetry that Hollywood’s ever produced, and if you don’t at least give it a try I don’t know why you’re reading this.
I feel like I’m cheating both you & I with this week’s column as I know so much about Laughton I’d dearly loved to have shared with you - not the least of which being his tumultuous long-term relationship with Elsa Lancaster, and the pain and degradation his sexuality caused him. However, may I leave you with this. The late and wonderful Barry Norman did a fantastic series for the BBC in the late 70’s and early 80’s called HOLLYWOOD GREATS and whilst I recommend the entire series of course, this episode on Laughton is really fabulous. Picture quality ain’t all that but it’s hugely worth damaging your retinas for.
That’s it for this week then, thanks for reading, thanks for subscribing, see you on Twitter of course, Good Night And Good Luck and if I may quote the glorious Kathy Burke -
Michael