James Mason — “The Majority of my Films are Crummy” (1975) 🇨🇦

There are a handful of movie actors who are so professional in their performances on screen that it is difficult remembering them ever delivering a poor presentation. In this select group surely belongs James Mason.

The veteran British star would be the first to disagree with this evaluation. “I’m really only pleased with a few of my performances”, admits Mason of a career that has encompassed five decades in such memorable films as Odd Man Out, “The Seventh Veil”, A Star is Born, “The Desert Fox”, “Lolita”, “Five Fingers” and now as Maxwell, the decadent owner of a Southern slave breeding planation in Dino De Laurentiis’ production of “Mandingo”.

“The majority of my films are crummy”, he states of the almost 100 films he has made, noting wryly that native born American actors really have it easier than those in England. “American film actors can always fall back on the Westerns or any similar stereo-type role their audience has grown accustomed to, but Britishers with the tradition for acting on the stage, are forced into taking chances such as doing Shakespeare periodically or challenging character roles.”

Mason has survived in films, indeed flourished, as he has grown older, precisely because he has undertaken character parts, exacting roles other actors would refuse to do because it would be at odds with their comfortable screen image.

The Mandingo role of Maxwell is in the Mason tradition of strong dramatic characters. “Maxwell is a businessman, a professional slave breeder, and in the context of his time he was a rather decent fellow. Maintains reasonably decent standards of living for his slaves and does pursue domestic tranquility. In this sense he is a man of integrity who has a code of living handed down to him by his father. He doesn’t think about the rights or wrongs of it.”

What was so striking to those who worked closely with Mason on Mandingo was his absence of temperament. He never complained. Completely adjusted to life on a movie set, taking things in stride and never getting distracted.

“I guess I’m somewhat more pragmatic than most actors. My ego never seemed to require special treatment because I was a movie star. I went into acting because it seemed at the time to be the best way to make a living.”

Born to a middle class family in Yorkshire, Mason went off to Cambridge in 1931. A very bright student, Mason was somewhat confused over what to study because his father — ‘a very pension-minded man’ — wanted James to seek the security of the civil service in India. Intending to study languages and the classics, the young Mason soon found himself in architecture.

“I would have gladly been an architect,” he recalls, “but I didn’t see that I could make a living in architecture during the Depression and I didn’t want to be a burden to my father.” Acting, which he had indulged in with amateur theatre groups at Cambridge, provided a way out. For as Mason puts it “even in the worst of times the stages flourish because it provides the public with the means of escape and I had great confidence I could make it as an actor.”

During the 30’s and 40’s Mason worked in England, successfully shifting his acting career from the stage to films. In 1947 he heeded the beckoning call from Hollywood and travelled to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, where he appeared in some of their biggest productions of the 1950’s including “Madame Bovary”, “Pandora and the Flying Dutchman”, East Side, West Side, and “Julius Caesar”.

Probably his most commercial triumph in those years was The Desert Fox, in which he played sympathetically the late German General Rommel. Of the performance Mason said, “I don’t think I was especially good as Rommel. Call my work inadequate”. The public disagreed, and Twentieth Century-Fox brought Mason back as Rommel in the sequel “The Desert Rats”.

Mason received his first Academy Award nomination for his role as the drunken, troubled husband of Judy Garland in A Star is Born and his second nomination for his performance as the lecherous pursuer of Lynn Redgrave in “Georgy Girl”.

Now 65 years old, Mason does about two films a year, finding it increasingly more difficult to pull himself away from his home in Switzerland. Still very much the professional, he goes where the work is, even to Hollywood which he does not hold in any great affection. “I’m not very nostalgic for the old days”, Mason concludes with the spirit of one who is not compelled to look back.

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Mason, as Cicero, with Danielle Darrieux in, Five Fingers.

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(top) Judy Garland and Mason are the unhappy couple in, A Star is Born.

(above left) Mason as Maxwell; the slave owner, who unquestionably accepts the system, with his son Hammon, Perry King, in, Mandingo.

(left) Lilli Palmer keeps Mason company in, The Desert Fox.

Collection: Showbill Magazine, September 1975