SECTION: Pg. 05
LENGTH: 1409 words

BYLINE: By SIMON CALLOW

BODY:
CHARLES Laughton's The Night of the Hunter is at the very top of that curious list of one-off films directed by actors, which also includes Marlon Brando's One-eyed Jacks and Peter Lorre's Der Verlorene (The Lost One). Next week a new print of the film is reissued at cinemas.

It is an extraordinary, haunting and highly personal work which, despite occasional flaws, is clearly the work of a master. It should have been the climax of his life's achievement and the harbinger of many more remarkable films. Yet it slipped almost unnoticed into the stream of 1955 releases, and he never made another.

By 1954, when he was 55, Laughton's remarkable career had become many-stranded. After a late start - he only gave up running the family hotel in Scarborough to go to RADA at the age of 26 - he experienced the most astonishing and varied success on the London stage. By 1930, after only three years in the profession, despite unconventional looks and a lack of glamour, he had established himself as the most original actor in England.

The following year he went to Broadway, causing a sensation there too, went on to Hollywood, where he made a number of striking films, coming home to make The Private Life of Henry VIII, which made him world-famous.

After a rather disappointing season at the Old Vic he went again to Hollywood, and gave a sequence of indelible performances of unique pressure and intensity; a pressure deriving partially from an anguished struggle with his homosexuality. His genius was to use his inner tensions in the service of great art. His work takes the art of acting to extraordinary heights of imagination and poetry, perhaps to a degree only rivalled in this century by Brando.

ART mattered a great deal to Laughton: he was a deeply informed, largely self-educated aesthete, an authority on painting and sculpture, a connoisseur of the broadest possible range of literature. With high hopes for the development of the art of film, he had returned to Britain in 1938 to found a production company headed by Erich Pommer, former boss of the great German company UFA. But despite the intelligence and ambition of all the parties involved, the three films they produced were oddly broken-backed, including Hitchcock's version of Jamaica Inn, a dubious if commercially successful farrago.

Disappointed, Laughton returned to America, where he was soon to adopt citizenship. Although a Yorkshireman to his fingertips, he was in full flight from everything that he found oppressive about England: the omnipresence of class distinctions, the rigidity of sexual morality, the weather.

The first film he shot when he came back to Hollywood was The Hunchback of Notre Dame, in which he gives the climactic performance of his career. Whether he had burnt himself out with the demands that he made of himself to create the image of suffering humanity that he realised in his Quasimodo, or whether his life was changing anyway, he never again invested quite the same degree of imaginative fervour in a part.

Around this time, in the early Forties, he found, for the first time in his life, sexual and emotional fulfilment with a man, and this long-delayed resolution seemed to free him up to more communicative, less self-involved forms of activity. He started hugely successful public readings - of Shakespeare, the Bible, Dickens, Jack Kerouac - primarily directed at young people; he taught in small groups based at his house in Los Angeles; and he began directing plays.

After a number of sucessful productions, it was evident that he was an exceptional theatre director, and his manager, the vigorous, abrasive young agent Paul Gregory, determined that the time was ripe for him to direct on film. Apart from anything else, he was convinced that Laughton was killing himself with the reading tours (which Gregory had set up in the first place), so at the first opportunity, he snapped up what seemed to him a highly promising property, The Night of the Hunter.

A first novel by Davis Grubb, not yet published, it told the story of a murderous preacher and his terrifying pursuit up-river of two small children, until they finally escape into the protective embrace of a good-hearted, gun-toting spinster. His instinct was sound; on publication the book went straight into the bestseller list.

Laughton had fallen in love with the novel the moment he read it. Its tone, hypnotic and incantatory, was deeply attractive to him, as was its essentially American feel; his devotion to his adopted country and its literature was intense. The novel's depiction of a struggle between good and evil, the attractiveness of evil, the healing power of goodness and the ultimate triumph of innocence was something to which he could respond.

Laughton wholly immersed himself in Grubb's work, to such a degree that when the screenwriter, critic and memorialist of the South, James Agee, delivered in his alcoholic befuddlement an unfilmable screenplay, Laughton adapted the novel himself in a week.

His other collaborators proved more amenable; indeed, he created a singularly harmonious creative team, his chief partners being the cinematographer Stanley Cortez and the composer Walter Schumann.

The time pressure exerted by United Artists (who betrayed scant enthusiasm from the beginning: Gregory dubbed them "United against Artists") meant that every day had to be planned in the greatest detail, and Laughton gathered his team around him at the end of each day's shooting for intense and concentrated discussions. These nightly sessions are remembered by the participants as curiously inspiring, Laughton imparting to them with spell-binding eloquence his sense of the charged visual poetry that he sought.

The river journey of the fleeing children is told in a sequence of ravishing nature shots, while the haunting and ominous presence in the distance of the hymn-singing preacher ("Leaning! Leaning on the arm of the Lord!") was achieved by recourse to a pony and a dwarf on the horizon.

LAUGHTON, Cortez and his composer Schumann used every means at their disposal for expressive intensification, but all within a homespun, wholly American idiom, one which owed much to DW Griffith but which paid its borrowing back threefold.

Nor did Laughton's cast let him down. The young Shelley Winters (a graduate of Laughton's acting classes) contributed a potent sexual presence, if no great histrionic subtlety. Lillian Gish, Laughton's idol as a young man, purveyed the love without condition, strength without threat, that the role of the spinster demands. And Robert Mitchum as the preacher, full of dark, silky charm, love and hate written across his face just as surely as they are across his knuckles, gives the performance of his life, as he always acknowledged.

"Mitchum," Laughton had said to him when offering him the part, "the Preacher is a diabolical s."

"Present!" said Mitchum.

Laughton, absolutely sure of what he wanted, and entirely open to his fellow artists in trying to realise it, created a rare focus. "I have to go back as far as DW Griffith," wrote Gish, "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."

Alas, America was not ready for his film. The previews were unfavourably received and United Artists, never convinced of the film's viability, promoted it half-heartedly. The reviews were respectful, and on the whole positive, though no one was quite able to understand its form. Franois Truffaut, reviewing it in Cahiers du Cinema - "it makes one fall in love with an experimental cinema that really experiments and a cinema of discovery that actually discovers" - presciently observed that it would be unlikely if Laughton made another film.

He never did - the failure of The Night of the Hunter had broken his heart. He had found his metier - everything in his career and life so far had been preparing him for film-making - but it came too late for him to withstand the rough indifference of the commercial cinema. In the six further years left to him, he gave a few more performances (including his magisterial Southern senator in Advise and Consent, his last role), and even found real love. But he never found it in himself again to lavish all of his genius on anything so personal and poetic as his lonely masterpiece.
 SOURCE: Lexis®-Nexis® Archive. © 1999, LEXIS®-NEXIS®, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All Rights Reserved.
NOTE: This file is  from a Penn-Only Resource:  For more information on Penn-only arhives see 
http://www.library.upenn.edu/keys/key_restrict.html