World Film and Television Progress (1938)

John Grierson reviews Laughton's latest film~~ 'VESSEL OF WRATH* Vessel of Wrath is the first offspring of the new Mayflower Company, the strongest and most promising of Britain's young production units. It has the financial backing of John Maxwell and the great Palaces of the A. B.C. circuit are yawning to receive it. Its cost of £80,000 is a challenge to the £150,000 spent so unhappily on British epics of the past. In personnel it represents an important new combination. The producer is Erich Pommer, veteran maestro of the classical German school of cinema and the most competent working producer in Britain to-day. Star and partner in the company's affairs is Charles Laughton, anxious to keep his talent under the British flag, and throwing himself with fury into the building of this new machine. "Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week and no thanks for it, for two or three years," he wrote to me a few weeks ago. For these, among other reasons, it is important that Vessel of Wrath should succeed. With British films in the doldrums a cloud no bigger than a man's hand is all wc need to renew our spirit. As every one must know now Vessel of Wrath is the Somerset Maugham story of the beachcomber in the South Seas who in drunkenness and debauch defies the reforming zeal of a couple of English missionaries and finishes off by marrying the female member of the godly pair and keeping a pub in Sussex. Laughton makes it a study of comic misbehaviour. There is great skill in his insolence and a nicely calculated vulgarity which is very near that gusto we have been missing so much in British films. Viewed as a comment not on missionaries, but on those wretched Women's Leagues of America who have been taking the corpuscles out of American films, Laughton's performance has a certain importance. A little more of this sort of thing and the British cinema will be able to challenge the American on the simple ground of sophistication. No one will be more sensitive to the challenge than the Hollywood producer. Like any first film from a new production unit, Vessel of Wrath is a problem child, and just because it is important one has to say so. Henry VIII, the epic of Royal bedsheets, produced no heirs male. This one may if its errors are realised and the Mayflower Unit's arrangements tightened up accordingly. For one thing the film does not drive through to its ending. The last third is no resolution of the first two and the film fails in narrative power. I think I know why. Somewhere else in this issue Hunt Stromberg points to the fundamental necessity of having someone decide the mould of a film and see to it that all the participants fit their contribution into the mould. Here the mould has not dictated the part of the actors. They have spilled their business on and over and round about, with great generosity but a minimum of discipline. In the first place for reasons of economy Pommer has acted as both producer and director — a silly thing to do as Pommer should know, better than anyone. Where the cold-blooded eye of the producer was wanted the warm appraising eye of the director has taken command. Director and actor have produced a similar undisciplined situation. Because presumably Laughton was partner in this new venture he has been given more than his due, and I know of no more fearful spectacle under the sun than an actor footloose. I do not blame Laughton but Pommer. After all it is in the nature of a good actor to be the worst of critics. Especially when he is good, no one will ever convince him that a medium which like the film can do so much of his acting for him, is not stealing his personal thunder. I like Laughton very much, for he is a brilliant fellow, but I like the future of British films even more. He will not mind, therefore, if I suggest an elementary lesson in the categories. The trouble with Laughton is that lie is good at several very different things. He has skill in tragedy and has an ambition to play King Lear. He speaks rhetoric with a flair almost unique among modern actors, and though there may be mannerism in the way he slides across a full stop no one will forget his reading of the Bible in Rembrandt. He is, moreover, a dangerously good and upsetting showman in his capacity for lagging on a cue and exaggerating an acting trifle behind the back of his director. No scrum half ever played the blind side of a referee more knowingly. Add to these talents the equally various ones of being good at comedy and quite brilliant in slapstick and you have a deadly mixture of virtues. In any single film you can't possibly have the lot. Lear cannot possibly at the same time act the Fool, and Macbeth take his place among the porters. That precisely is what Laughton is forever doing. He does not understand economy, and by the mere process of being everything by starts and nothing long, is the greatest saboteur a film could have. It may all come from his anxious desire to add everything of himself to the value of the film. But the damage is certain. Laughton one at a time would be the wonder of the day. Five at a time he is a producer's headache. I have quarrelled a great deal with people over Vessel of Wrath. But I soon found we were quarrelling over very different things. I viewed it as principally slapstick and was prepared to forgive the odd departures into drama and sentiment. My arguers had viewed it as drama and were bewildered by the fact that it was mostly slapstick. See the film as. nearly, in the category of Laurel and Hardy, and you will see Vessel of (I 'rath at its best. But this does not absolve Pommer and Laughton from making up their minds more decisively next time. Knowing Laughton a little, I think he should come through. A strategic retreat from his own talents is what is called for. 32