I few days ago I was re-watching one of my very favourite old movies ‘Hobson’s Choice’ starring Charles Laughton. Laughton originally a Yorshireman born in Scarborough made an impressive career in Hollywood in a number of well regarded movies such as Mutiny on the Bounty and Witness for the Prosecution. He was married to another Hollywood great, Elsa Lanchester who is came to prominence as the Bride of Frankenstein. My watching Hobson’s Choice, promoted YouTube to offer me a selection of pieces by Laughton of which I had previously been unaware and it is these that I wish to share with you.
Laughton’s voice, equally capable of a penetrating, theatre-filling shout and a soft, velvety tone, first appeared on 78-rpm records with the release of five British Regal Zonophone 10-inch discs entitled Voice of the Stars issued annually from 1934 to 1938. These featured short soundtrack snippets from the year’s top films. He is heard on all five records in, respectively, The Private Life of Henry VIII, The Barretts of Wimpole Street, Mutiny on the Bounty, I, Claudius (curiously, since this film was unfinished and thus never released), and Vessel of Wrath. In 1937 he recorded Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address on a 10-inch Columbia 78, having made a strong impression with it in Ruggles of Red Gap.
He made several other spoken-word recordings, one of his most famous being his one-man album of Charles Dickens’ Mr. Pickwick’s Christmas, a twenty-minute version of the Christmas chapter from Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers. It was first released by American Decca in 1944 as a four-record 78-rpm set, but was afterward transferred to LP. It frequently appeared on LP with a companion piece, Decca’s 1941 adaptation of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, starring Ronald Colman as Scrooge. Both stories were released together on a CD for Christmas 2005.
In 1943, Laughton recorded a reading of the Nativity story from St. Luke’s Gospel and this was released in 1995 on CD on a Nimbus Records collection entitled Prima Voce: The Spirit of Christmas Past. A Brunswick/American Decca LP entitled Readings from the Bible featured Laughton reading Garden of Eden, The Fiery Furnace, Noah’s Ark, and David and Goliath. It was released in 1958. Laughton had previously included several Bible readings when he played the title role in the film Rembrandt. Laughton also narrated the story on the soundtrack album of the film that he directed, Night of the Hunter, accompanied by the film’s score. This album has also been released on CD. Also, and derived from the film they made together, a complete radio show in June 1945 of The Canterville Ghost was broadcast which featured Laughton and Margaret O’Brien. It has been issued on a Pelican LP.
A two-LP Capitol Records album was released in 1962, the year of Laughton’s death, entitled The Story Teller: A Session with Charles Laughton. Taken from Laughton’s one-man stage shows, it compiles dramatic readings from several sources. Three of the excerpts are broadcast annually on a Minnesota Public Radio Thanksgiving program entitled Giving Thanks. The Story Teller won a Grammy in 1962 for Best Spoken Word Recording. Although the album has yet to be released on compact disc, it can now be heard in its entirety online.
