By A California Reader
fri, nov 11, 2022 3:59 a.m.
[N.S.: I apologize to ACR for not posting this letter two weeks ago. I just stumbled upon it, in the constant blizzard of email, while looking for a more recent ASG letter.]
James Mason and Another Matter
Dear Mr. Stix,
I was very sorry to hear of the death your mother. Was your wording a veiled reference to Alzheimer's?—a terrible way to lose a parent. My condolences to you.
[N.S.: Thank you for your kind words, ACR. No, it wasn't Alzheimer's. The old lady's 92-year-old heart and lungs just gave out on her.]
Friday, November 25, 2022
James Mason and Another Matter
As for James Mason films, I just watched The Man Between, an excellent 1953 drama directed by Carol Reed, co-starring Claire Bloom and Hildegard Knef, and set in post-war Berlin amid a lot of rubble. Young Bloom is so radiant that she outshines Knef, herself quite a beauty. The film has been compared to Reed's The Third Man (its immediate predecessor, set in Vienna) and Odd Man Out (1947), Mason's greatest performance as far as I'm concerned, about an IRA-type gunman on the run in Belfast.
Two other snippets on Mason:
According to the imdb.com, "Mason admitted to journalists that he had only taken a part in Mandingo (1975) because he was behind with alimony payments, leading critic Roger Ebert to reply, 'Surely jail would have been better.'"
From wikipedia: Mason's will left his entire estate to his second wife, Clarissa Kaye. It was challenged by his two children Portland and Morgan, and the litigation continued from 1984 to 1994 when Clarissa Kaye died from cancer, bequeathing her estate to an Indian guru Sathya Sai Baba (not to be confused with Meher Baba, a different guru). The lawyers for both sides must have gotten plenty—another case of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce?
N.S.: I am a huge James Mason fan. It's 50 years since I saw Odd Man Out on The Early Show on TV after school. My only recollection is of Mason's wounded IRA man on the top level of an open British bus, not so slowly bleeding out.
I was also a huge Carol Reed fan at the time, having seen his masterpiece trilogy (The Fallen Idol and The Third Man).
For 50 or so years, I had also taken for granted that A Star is Born (1954) was Judy's picture. However, a few months ago I saw it thrice in a month's time, and now consider it to be every bit as much Mason's picture. Actually, it is the most even-handed version I've yet seen of Hollywood's company town story.
Early in the picture, George Cukor devoted huge set pieces to Mason, especially the premiere, with thousands of extras, at the very beginning. Then there's the scene at the Oscars, where Mason's drunken Norman Maine humiliates Vicki (Garland), begging his old friends and colleagues for work. And there are other, more low-key scenes, like his last one.
Meanwhile, Judy Garland's performance had serious flaws that Mason's did not suffer from. She had trouble doing dramatic scenes when she wasn't singing and dancing. She gets overwrought, like in that terrible courtroom scene she did in Judgment at Nuremberg. (For which she got an undeserved Oscar nomination, which should have gone instead to Marlene Dietrich from the same picture.) And one musical scene she did that was cut from the post-premiere version (set in the slavery South), while her character told everyone to be happy, was just plain mean-spirited.
Mason may have played a hopeless (if sometimes charming) drunk, but Garland had to lean on him a great deal.
Mason played a character with two very different sides, which comes out beautifully after his death in the argument between studio mogul Oliver Niles (Charles Bickford) and his PR chief (Jack Carson). Niles had seen only the charming, lovable Norman, while the PR chief had seen only Norman's ugly side.
I never heard of the 1953 picture; I'll have to hunt it down. And I loved the Roger Ebert quip!
The man gave so many great performances (e.g., as "the prince of fu--ing darkness" defending an evil, Boston hospital owned by the Catholic archdiocese against scruffy, drunken, plaintiffs lawyer Paul Newman, in Sidney Lumet and David Mamet's The Verdict). He was not just another pretty face.
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