[Marxism] Guardian honors centenary of great actor James Mason

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I am using the fact that Marxism basically includes the category
"everything" to submit this fine commemoration of the wonderful James Mason,
one of my favorite performers from early childhood.

This is the centenary of his birth. 

I am particularly glad of the acknowledgement of the importance and
perfection of his performance in North by Northwest, that extraordinary
Hitchcock movie. I think it was the patient but tired-of-pretense way he  --
in that beautiful voice -- would call Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) "Mr.
Kaplan" that led me to adopt the party name George Kaplan (the nonexistent
CIA agent whom Mason thinks is Thornhill) when I joined the  US Socialist
Workers Party's Young Socialist Alliance in 1964. I continued to use the
pseudonym on occasional articles in much later years, when I had too much in
a given issue of the Militant or Intercontinental Press.

I am glad this wonderful performance is getting the recognition it deserves.
To me it was pure magic. (Cary Grant was in top form, too.) And this movie
and On the Waterfront have guaranteed the immortality of the late (and
always interesting if not quite always convincing) Eva Marie Saint.

One factual correction. Mason is not egging his top aide, Martin Landau, on
to get rid of the Eva Marie Saint character, as another author says in the
summary of great Mason performances that follows the Thomson article.

The Landau character, who has never trusted the Saint character (like the
actress, she is always interesting but not quite convincing) is instead
fighting to get Mason to understand the need to get rid of her. I have seen
over-interpretations that make this an expression of homosexual jealousy on
the part of the Landau character. My impression is that this is a deeply
loyal top subordinate who after all is dead right about the Saint character,
who is working for the other side -- whatever that really is.
Fred Feldman

Every word a poison dart
James Mason - career villain, smooth talker, creative powerhouse - would
have been 100 today. David Thomson looks back on an unforgettable actor who
never settled for the easy option
 
David Thomson The Guardian, Friday 15 May 2009
Guardian.co.uk

James Mason had good friends, and sometimes that is the measure of a man,
especially in the picture business, where it's all too easy to lose contact
as golden opportunities fade away. Consider his situation in the late 1940s.
After giving his youth and his early beauty to British pictures and theatre,
he decided to go to Hollywood. There must have been people who told him he
was too patrician, too intelligent, as well as too old to break through in
America. But he made wonderful contacts. There was a chance of doing the
Svengali-Trilby story (with Jane Wyman), and Mason longed to have Jean
Renoir as its director because he could see that the Frenchman loved actors.
Alas, that project fell through, but then Renoir offered Mason the role of
the wounded veteran in his Indian picture, The River. I can't do it, sighed
Mason; I'm set to play the male lead in La Duchesse de Langeais - which was
to be the comeback picture for Greta Garbo. 

North By Northwest 
Release: 1959 
Countries: UK, USA 
Cert (UK): PG 
Runtime: 136 mins 
Directors: Alfred Hitchcock 
Cast: Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, Eva Marie Saint, James Mason, Martin
Landau 
More on this film 
Historians still argue as to why that picture collapsed. Advancing into his
40s, Mason had reason to think of bad luck as he played Erwin Rommel in a
couple of movies, Rupert of Hentzau in a remake of The Prisoner of Zenda and
"Hendrik van der Zee" in the dotty but deliriously beautiful romance,
Pandora and the Flying Dutchman. In Britain, there were already superior
figures in acting who marvelled over what was happening to "poor Jimmy
Mason". But as we come to celebrate today what would have been his 100th
birthday, there are those who only wish there was more of Pandora, more
Rommel and an entire picture about Rupert of Hentzau, the only interesting
person in that whole Zenda nonsense.

In every decade, from the 1930s to the 80s, James Mason did some poor work
in disappointing pictures, just as he missed out on mouth-watering
opportunities. So, yes, it's lamentable that he was to have been Prospero
for Michael Powell, only for that Tempest to blow out. But don't forget that
their long friendship did lead somewhere: to Australia, for the quirky but
vivid Age of Consent, where Mason was the film's co-producer and he and
Powell managed to discover the 18-year-old Helen Mirren to be the muse for
the beachcomber painter Mason plays.

Yes, I know you can see Mason in these parts, but it's just as evident that
you hear him and, before we go any further, it's vital to consider the
unique and languid but impassioned voice of this man. Is it enough to say
that he was a lad born in Huddersfield (the son of a wool merchant) who was
sent to Cambridge to speak properly? Should we consider also his years on
the Dublin stage as a prelude to his tragic figure in Carol Reed's Odd Man
Out - the film above all that promoted him from British pictures to a
Hollywood player? Or is there not still something in Mason's voice -
aristocratic, but full of connoisseurship, too - that allowed the actor to
become his true self just once, as the voice of Humbert Humbert in the film
of Lolita? Humbert is not American. He is a scholar of comparative
literature, as well as a judge of nymphets. He is a very bad man (if you
like, or if you don't like), but he may be the purest-spoken scoundrel in
all the movies. For he has to deliver Nabokovian prose as if to say it was
the most normal and sensible way of speaking the English language yet
invented.

So Mason could be lord and nobleman, a very upper-class fellow - he did that
from his Flaubert in the silly MGM production of Madame Bovary to Brutus in
the same studio's Julius Caesar, from Mr Jordan in Heaven Can Wait to the
"prince of darkness" lawyer, Ed Concannon, in The Verdict. He could say
something to another person so that one word seemed like a lash or a curare
dart delivered in slow motion. This Mason was Mr Elocution, if you like, the
personification of affectation and lingering insult or innuendo. But the
same voice could burn with conviction - it does in Lolita, when he talks to
his Lo, just as much as it did in A Star Is Born, with Judy Garland, in
North By Northwest, with Eva Marie Saint, or in The Reckless Moment, with
Joan Bennett, where he has the fine judgment to know that he is falling in
love with the woman he is supposed to blackmail.

Pause over North By Northwest a moment. Why is it that, over the years, that
crazed film calmly urges itself forward as maybe Hitch's most entertaining
picture? Well, of course, it's the demented plot by Ernest Lehman, with the
cornfields of Iowa leading to Mount Rushmore. And it's also Cary Grant. But
run the picture in your head a moment and isn't it Mason's voice you hear as
Vandamm, the villain? Look at it again, if you doubt me - he's the heart and
head of the picture, and he is delighted to realise that North By Northwest
is a frolic, a dance in mid-air, a fabulous absurdity. Of course, we love
Grant and Saint and everyone else in it, but just look at Grant's face and
see the pleasure he feels at being placed beside so sublime a screen being
as James Mason. (Time for a joke: in the year for which North By Northwest
was eligible, 1959, Charlton Heston and Hugh Griffith won the acting Oscars
for Ben-Hur.) 

Mason never won an Oscar, though he was nominated three times - for A Star
Is Born, The Verdict and Georgy Girl (the latter one of those pictures where
he let his Yorkshire accent run riot and where, apparently, he took a deep
shine to his co-star, Lynn Redgrave).

You might have thought that in a thousand words (so far), I'd have been able
to mention all the worthwhile Mason films. But I haven't even touched the
Gainsborough period yet. In the war years (when Mason was a conscientious
objector), he defined a new type in British pictures - the handsome, cruel
mastermind who is irresistible to women. That is the Mason of The Man in
Grey, a costume romance, where he dismantles Margaret Lockwood and Phyllis
Calvert; The Wicked Lady, where he and Lockwood are highway robbers; and the
cult classic, The Seventh Veil, where he is Ann Todd's unkind guardian.

The same years include two other remarkable films: A Place of One's Own,
where he is the elderly husband, and The Upturned Glass - a film that Mason
helped write - about a doctor fascinated with the psychology of murder. To
say the least, that side of Mason - the mind that had ideas for films - was
what made him most endearing to directors. 

Once in America, he forged bonds with two of the least likely artists.
First, he fell for Max Ophuls, effectively in exile, and did two films for
him: Caught and The Reckless Moment. In the first, he is the doctor with a
busy urban practice who takes in Barbara Bel Geddes as a secretary when she
flees from her marriage to the tyrannical Robert Ryan. In The Reckless
Moment, he plays a weak-willed villain, a man whose blackmail plans are
thwarted by his own sentiments. 

In both cases, Mason's struggle to be decent and ordinary provides a
foundation for the film. Equally, in every situation, Mason was the defender
of Ophuls, a high-strung, stylistic perfectionist who was having a hard time
in Hollywood.

A few years later, Mason became friends with another movie director, and an
even more self-destructive man, Nicholas Ray. They wanted to do a story they
had seen in the New Yorker about an idealistic teacher who is warped by his
addiction to cortisone. The result, Bigger Than Life, is one of the great
American films of the 50s, in which Ray's dynamic use of colour and form is
steadily attached to Mason's tragic performance. In the slow reappraisal of
American film by American critics, it's worth saying that Caught, The
Reckless Moment and Bigger Than Life (none of which was a hit) have now
become standards by which other films are judged. In all these cases, the
completion of the picture, as well as its initiation, owed a lot to the
creative vision of an actor who was serving as an extra producer.

Is that all? By no means. To the end of his time (he died in 1984), Mason
was doing intriguing small films such as Dr Fischer of Geneva and The
Shooting Party. He was the star of works as different as The Deadly Affair,
Mandingo, Cross of Iron and The Seagull (where he played Trigorin). He made
Cry Terror! and The Decks Ran Red for that master of suspense, Andrew L
Stone. 

He was Sir Edward Carson to Peter Finch's lead in The Trials of Oscar Wilde.
He was toxic in The Pumpkin Eater and cool syrup in The Fall of the Roman
Empire. He made every trashy costume seem as natural as a good suit and, for
all his life, he seemed carried forward by the odd mixture of yearning and
fatalism that prompted Humbert Humbert. 

Graham Greene called it the marriage of sadness and pride. It is still
there, to be treasured in something like 40 special films.

. North By Northwest is rereleased in cinemas on 19 June

Bad to the bone: Great Mason moments
Odd Man Out (1947)

After making his name as the dashing, cruel-eyed star of wartime period
costume pics, Mason did a 180-degree turn to play an made gunman staggering
wounded through Belfast. Director Carol Reed assembles an arsenal of
expressionist techniques to make this an early, and effective, British noir.
tinyurl.com/masonnoddman

North By Northwest (1959)

Arguably Hitchcock's finest, and maybe Mason's, too - even though he didn't
have the lead role. Here he plays super-smooth microfilm smuggler Vandamm,
egging on henchman Martin Landau to dispose of pesky Cary Grant and Eva
Marie Saint.
tinyurl.com/masonnorth

Lolita (1962)

Nabokov's professorial paedophile terrified the life out of Hollywood's star
names, but Mason stepped up to play Humbert Humbert for Stanley
Kubrick.(Both Laurence Olivier and David Niven turned it down.) Mason's
stuffed-shirt reticence, allied to his lasciviously clipped vowels, made him
ideal for the role. 
tinyurl.com/masonlolita

Andrew Pulver



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