Charles Laughton

Charles Laughton Read Free Page B

Book: Charles Laughton Read Free
Author: Simon Callow
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great cutting room in the sky. When I had been doing the research for
Charles Laughton: A Difficult Actor
, I was told that after the death of his wife, Janet Gaynor, he had withdrawn to Palm Springs to raise squabs, and was incommunicado. His letter thanked me for the book, for its balance and accuracy, and hoped that we might meet one day.
    The other was from the James Agee estate asking me whether I’d like to read the original screenplay. A couple of months later, I was in Los Angeles, and visited Gregory, but not before I had received and read Agee’s screenplay. I discovered that despite a great deal of elaboration of incidents and characters in the novel characteristic of most first drafts, the original screenplay, with its six-section structure, was quite clearly the basis of the film as it was shot, with certain curtailments and excisions, certain condensations and extrapolations, of a kind that every director makes, either during pre-production on the set, during filming, or afterwards during the editing process. Clearly Laughton was the governing spirit in the making of the film, but the nuts and bolts of the writing of the screenplay were put in place by James Agee. All of this is brilliantly described in Jeff Couchman’s book
Credit Where Credits are Due
, which any
The Night of the Hunter
enthusiast should eagerly seek out. In my long and very frisky meeting with Gregory at Palm Springs, I gently suggested that all this new evidence pointed to a very different story to the one he had told; he brushed the idea aside. Short of bringing him the original screenplay and taking him through it page by page, it is hard to know what would have convinced him to change his story. Why it was so important to him to demonise Agee and exalt Laughton, with whom his relationship, always difficult, eventually foundered beyond the point of no return, is a matter for conjecture. It is equally baffling to know why he – and Robert Mitchum – always insisted that Laughton loathed the child actors in the film (particularly Billy Chapin, who so brilliantly plays John in the film) and preferred not to work with them, leaving it to Mitchum to direct them. Grave doubt was cast on this version of events by another remarkable development in
The Night of the Hunter
studies, Robert Gitt’s discovery and restoration of the rushes of the film, including many sequences where the camera had been left running after Laughton had called ‘Cut’ and gone to work with the actors before the next take. Laughton is shown as charming, affectionate, and playful with the children, now and then becoming quite strict with them – just as he is, in fact, with all the actors. A selection of these fascinating and moving examples of his directorial approach can be seen on the newly-issued Criterion edition of
The Night of the Hunter
.
    Apart from these two matters, the writing of the screenplay and Laughton’s approach to the actors, especially the young ones, I am pleased and relieved to find on re-reading the book that it accurately tells the story of what I conceive to be Laughton’s heroic life in acting. It seems to me to be a story worth telling, both in an exemplary sense and because he was an altogether uncommon human being. I was surprised, this time round, at how central Laughton’s homosexuality was to his work. It is a highly debatable question as to whether the torture that he underwent as a gay man, terrified of exposure and filled with loathing for himself, was an essential component of his art, but on a simple human level, it is cheering to see him making peace with himself at last, able finally to share in the (relatively) uncomplicated experience of loving and being loved by another. Great creativity can spring from anywhere, it seems: from profound alienation, but equally from a deep sense of personal equilibrium. Whatever its source, Charles Laughton’s creative imagination was of the order of the greatest painters, poets,

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