James Mason – The Magnificent 60s

Mayerling (1969) ****

Sumptuous historical romantic drama set in a fading European empire awash with political intrigue and incipient revolution. Archduke Rudolf (Omar Sharif), married heir to the throne and constantly at odds with rigid father Emperor Franz-Josef (James Mason), sympathizes so strongly with Hungarian dissidents that he threatens to tear apart the Austro-Hungarian Empire. However, when he falls in love with Maria (Catherine Deneuve) and wants to marry her instead that, too, threatens to throw the empire into disarray.

Although dissolute, a mistress (or two) on the side, and addicted to morphine, that is not the way Rudolf is introduced to the audience. Instead, he is one of a string of bloodied men arrested after a demonstration giving his name to an officer in a police station who, once he is recognized, orders all other prisoners be released. He is the poster boy for good royalty. The Hungarians, agitating for independence, want him to become their king.

Beautifully mounted with lavish sets and enough in the way of balls, ballet, processions, horse riding and sleighs to keep up a steady parade of visually interesting distractions, the films steadily builds up an undercurrent of tension, both between father and son and between rebels and ruler. The emperor is a political genius, not just spying on his son, but full of devious devices to hold together whatever threatens to break up the empire.

The romance develops slowly and with true historical perspective, the first kiss they share is not on the lips, Rudolf kisses both her cheeks, she kisses his palm. Yet, there is a real sense that, no matter his power, they can still both be trapped in roles they despise, separated at the whim of parents. Rudolf, as he understands true love for the first time, finds the self-belief to challenge political certainties.

The regal aspects are well done, arguments about the rule of monarchy come over as heated conversation rather than boring debate, the political realities unavoidable. Rudolf is desperate to avoid a future where someone has to die before he has a reason to live. Escape is not an option.

There is a wonderful bitchy atmosphere in the court, where ladies-in-waiting disparage each other behind their backs, one dress described as “wallpaper,” and are forever seeking advancement. Countess Larish (Genevieve Page) is a self-appointed procurer-in-chief for Rudolf, not caring what chaos she causes.

I should add, if you are as ignorant of your European history as myself, that Mayerling is a place not a person. I tell you this so that you don’t make my mistake of waiting for a Mayerling character to appear. The film pointedly avoids a history lesson but it could have spared a minute to explain that the events depicted take place just 20 years after the establishment of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the second largest land-mass in Europe, and among the top two or three nations. That would have helped clarify why Franz-Josef was in such a constant state, worried about forces that could break up the empire, and as concerned that his son, living such a debauched life, lacked the personal skills to hold it together after his father’s death.

It is ironic that Rudolf does prove his worth as a result of being briefly separated from Maria, taking the army to task for its incompetent officers and poor maintenance of everything from weaponry to horses.

To his credit director Terence Young (Dr No, 1962) does not rely on Omar Sharif’s soulful brown eyes and instead allows action to convey character and looks and touch the meaning of his love. This is probably Omar Sharif’s best role, one where he clearly made all the acting decisions rather than being over-directed by David Lean as in Doctor Zhivago (1965). Catherine Deneuve is equally impressive as a far-from-docile innocent, especially given the wide range of more sexually aware characters she has created for Repulsion (1965) and Belle de Jour (1967).

James Mason (Age of Consent, 1969) is superb as the conniving emperor, so rigid he will not approve a change of buttons for the army, so cunning that an apparent rapprochement with his son has unseen strings attached. Ava Gardner (55 Days at Peking, 1963) sweeps in briefly as an empress protective of her son and making the best of life in a gilded cage. Also impressive are Genevieve Page (Grand Prix, 1966) and James Robertson Justice (Doctor in Distress, 1963) as the high-living British heir nonetheless under the thumb of his mother Queen Victoria.

Terence Young also wrote the literate, often amusing. script, although Denis Cannan (A High Wind in Jamaica, 1965) and Joseph Kessel (Night of the Generals, 1967) are credited with additional dialog. While Francis Lai (The Golden Claws of the Cat Girl, 1968) wrote the score he relies heavily on classical music from Aram Khachaturian’s Spartacus.

If you come at this not expecting a David Lean style affair full of striking compositions, but an old-fashioned drama advancing at leisurely pace, you will not be disappointed.

North by Northwest (1959) ***** – Seen at the Cinema in 70mm – Bradford Widescreen Weekend

Only thing better than seeing this on the big screen is seeing it on biggest screen possible, Some clever clog has blown it up to 70mm by scanning the “original 6-perf 35mm Vistavision camera negative in 13k with all restoration work completed in 6.5k. The 70mm film print was created by filming out a new 65mm negative.” I don’t know what it means either – except that extra 5mm is the soundtrack and perfs refers to height – but I’m delighted with the result.

Not only does the crop spraying scene bask in greater glory but the pivotal scrambling on Mount Rushmore where Hitchcock used the wide screen at its widest takes on a vivid clarity that’s just impossible watching a DVD when characters are literally hanging off the furthest edges of the screen.

But setting aside the widest widescreen-ness what seeing it on the big screen more than anything restores is the audience experience and that allows the sly humor to reach its full potential. I hadn’t realized just how funny this darned picture is, not just the eye-rolling mother treating her grown-up son as a michievous scamp, and the zingers of lines but the interplay between the various characters.

And putting to one side Hitchcock’s wizardry it is a tour de force for screenwriter Ernest Lehman. I must have counted at least 20 narrative beats, not just thriller or action twists and turns but changes in our appreciation of the characters, plus the devilishly clever sexual banter. And while hero Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) is a hero by accident, heroine Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint) is heroine by design, and thanks to her exceptionally callous boss, The Professor (Leo G. Carroll), likely to pay a heavy price for wanting to do something worthwhile in a life that from her looks seems as if aerated, gliding along with nary a care in the world, her beauty ensuring she would always garner easy attention.

There are some exceptionally clever moments that emanate from Lehman rather than Hitch. The elusive villain hiding behind a variety of identities is finally unmasked as Vandamm (James Mason) at an auction when the auctioneer calls out his name as he buys an artefact that contains stolen microfilm. And so a scene that appeared there for a different purpose – the emotional one of Van Dam realizing he has been cuckolded and Kendall realizing she is going to lose the only man she ever truly loved – turns out to play a vital role in the narrative, critical to the ending.

Given Hitch suffered from accusations of misogyny it’s astonishing how often he serves up exceptionally self-confident women who can string men along, in this case two men, Eve using Roger for mere sexual gratification while seducing Van Dam for the more serious business of snaring a traitor and giving her life meaning. And can there have been a more convincing femme fatale? That is, not the obvious kind as in film noir where a male dupe is easy pickings for a clever female and her seduction techniques over-obvious.

Here, the seduction is not only very gentle, and to some extent baffling, and achieving through language and screen dexterity a marvellous intimacy, but her femme fatale-ness only revealed when she secretly sends a note to Van Dam asking what does she do with her victim in the morning.

There are lot of elements more obviously coming to your attention on the big screen. The irony of a cab firm being called “Kind Taxis” especially in New York where their drivers err on the side of the irate. The train porter whose clothes we think Roger has stolen only for a quick cutaway to reveal him counting his bribe. The cleverness of that disguise. How many red-capped porters will you find in a train station?

A lot of the time Cary Grant (Walk, Don’t Walk, 1966) doesn’t have a great deal to do except react sometimes to very little at all. When he’s waiting to be collected at the crop field he makes his feelings known through shifting his gaze and jiggling with his trouser pockets.

There’s even a scene that might have given Sergio Leone the idea for his famous shootout in Once Upon a Time in the West (1969) where, on first meeting, Roger and Van Dam circle each other with the camera taking each’s POV.

This is just overloaded with delights – the drunken Roger telling the cops to call the cops, using his only phone call in jail to call mother, escaping from thugs in an elevator by the “women first” device, the amazing innocence when he encounters locked doors, clearly expecting them still to be left open to facilitate his escape.

Hitchcock – and to a greater degree in The Birds (1963) – ushered in the random action explosion (gas tankers always seem to be convenient) that would become de rigeur in the genre and used with less finesse here when the crop plane crashes into the tanker and car passengers stop to gawk allowing our hero the chance to steal one and escape.

It generally passes unnoticed how Hitch sets up his main character. At the start of films, especially these day when viewers are in on the gimmick, most audience eyes are on spotting the directing putting in his trademark appearance, rather than assessing Roger as a workaholic advertising executive, dragging his secretary out of the office when she should be on her way home so he can dictate a few more lines to her in a taxi, and inadvertently setting himself up as the kind of man who tells lies for living who for once must stick to the truth.

Grant’s acting ability was rarely fully recognized. Here the more urgent question seems to be how many suits he got through in filming (16) rather than the way he holds the picture together. And only Hitch would keep the audience waiting 30 minutes before introducing the female lead and make it hard for the maternally-dominated Thornhill to exude any sexual attraction after being under the thumb of mother for the first section.

This was the British premiere of the 70mm version so look out for it turning up at your local arthouse. Perhaps someone will go the whole hog and accord Hitch the contemporary honor of re-tuning his pictures in Imax.

I am assuming that I saw the 70mm version of the new 4k that’s just being released.

Not to be missed on big screen or small.

Hero’s Island (1962) ***

There’s a good reason you’ve never even heard of this famous lost film. A fabnulous cast – cult character actors (and occasionally stars) Warren Oates, Harry Dean Stanton, Rip Torn plus a top-billed James Mason – can’t prevent this relatively short film coming over as long drawn out. Proof, too, that cult television producers – in this case Leslie Stevens of The Outer Limits (1963-1965) and Stoney Burke (1962-1963) – shouldn’t always risk stepping into the director’s chair.

But let’s stick for the time being to the good bits. It’s a historical Lord of the Flies, an almost primitive battle over territory, a small apparently uninhabited island off the coast of the Carolinas in the United States. There’s recognition of the British version of slavery, when, driven off their lands, or to escape dire poverty, people in the eighteenth century went willingly into indentured service in North America. After seven years, you could gain freedom – a contract torn up and rejoined at the indent the legal definition – and wives could equally be bought and if they were very lucky the husband might even agree to marry them in a church. You could buy children in similar fashion. There were other legal niceties, ownership could be challenged, since only a “full working family” could take command of land.

Freed from indenture, Thomas Mainwaring (Brendan Dillon), wife Devon (Kate Manx), two young sons and servant Wayte (Warren Oates) arrive on Bull Island, intending to live off the land, growing crops, fishing, building a house, and honoring God. But brothers – fishermen – Nicolas (Rip Torn), Dixey (Harry Dean Stanton) and Enoch (Robert Sampson) resent the intrusion, murder the husband and attempt to drive the others away, first invoking the law and then threatening violence.

The situation becomes more balanced when Jacob (James Mason) washes up on the shore, tied hands and legs to a raft, though claiming to be the subject of a shipwreck. Gradually, he sides with the widow although he doesn’t take kindly to her giving orders, refusing to bear arms, and believing that faith in God will see them through. He’s so disenchanted that when pirates descend on the island, he stands back, refusing to help when the widow and then her children are kidnapped.

But eventually, thank goodness, he springs into action, revealing hmself handy with a cutlass, and a pirate, having sailed with Blackbeard, though his captaincy did not go so well, mutiny the true reason for ending up on a raft. Still, he wades into the pirates, retrieves the situation and the fisherman accept the widow’s rights to the island.

So, some interesting historical information, and a touch of swashbuckling. But that hardly makes up for the acres of time when nothing much occurs and the characters jaw about God, the law and life in general. A tinderbox of a set-up barely crawls along, scarcely catching fire.

And that’s despite the all-round good acting, Rip Torn (Sol Madrid, 1968), Harry Dean Stanton (Paris, Texas, 1984) and Warren Oates (The Wild Bunch, 1969) all at the beginning of their careers, their trademark acting styles not yet developed, so talent revealed as fresh, while James Mason (The Deadly Affair, 1967) acts very much against type. In her sophomore screen role, Kate Manx (Private Property, 1960), Leslie Stevens’ second wife (of five), only holds sway until Mason appears to blow her off the screen.

Writer-director Leslie Stevens (Private Property) has way too much to say but not the directorial skill to properly dramatize the material, which is crying out for greater tension, fiercer argument and more action.

Now that I’ve brought this movie to your attention you may be wondering why, with this knock-out cast, you’ve never heard of it. And the reason is, as I’ve explained, it just doesn’t take off. More like a filmed play than a movie, the camera hardly ever moving. I’m not sure either why James Mason was tempted into becoming joint producer. He had just come off Tiara Tahiti (1962) and Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita (1962) so I would be guessing his career was in decent shape. Though sometimes it’s marquee power that pushes actors into the producing field. Whatever the plan, it backfired, the movie was a financial disaster and he wasn’t top-billed again for four years.

Worth a look for the cast but mostly just to see how even with the best cast a movie can miss the spot.

Cold Sweat (1970) ***

One great scene doesn’t make a great movie, but I’ll tell you about it anyway and we can all wonder what went wrong with the rest of the picture. Through a swinging louvre door we catch glimpses of Joe (Charles Bronson) putting a headlock on a thug. The motion of the door slows down as the villain is slowly choked to death. As the door closes we cut to Joe’s terrified wife Fabienne (Liv Ullman) and watch her reaction as she hears the neck snap.

Pretty good, eh? If only the rest of the movie were in that class. Except for a rollicking good car chase, it’s hampered by an over-complicated plot, kidnappings in retaliation for kidnappings, a dippie hippie (Jill Ireland) and one of the worst accents you will ever hear – quite why director Terence Young (Mayerling, 1969) wasn’t able to tell James Mason that his American South impersonation didn’t cut it is anybody’s guess.

*Made before Bronson was a major global star, there’s a fair chance*
*the kung fu picture was a stronger attration.*

Joe charters out a yacht in the south of France, but prefers gambling and drinking to spending evenings with his wife. But then his past catches up with him. Cue complicated backstory – he was a soldier who got mixed up in a robbery but ran away from the theft when the going got tough and was the only one who escaped a jail term. Now his old buddies want revenge but will accept instead Joe doing another job for them.

Joe doesn’t agree so Captain Ross (James Mason) kidnaps his wife and child. So Joe kidnaps the captain’s girlfriend Moira (Jill Ireland), stashing her away in a remote cabin filled with creepy-crawlies where she has “nothing to eat but money.” So they do a trade, except Ross reneges, and then gets shot, potentially leaving wife and child at the mercy of his creepy sidekick.

There’s a fair bit of action, and when Joe is beating people up or driving like crazy over inhospitable terrain, it makes like a thriller but when he’s left to try and lift a flare gun up with his foot it’s on shakier territory. The two elements of the story split too quickly and while wife and daughter make the most of being scared out of their wits, terrified women aren’t what people come to see a Bronson picture for.

So it’s too much of a mixed bag. To compensate for the dire Mason (A Touch of Larceny, 1960), Liv Ullman offers a fresh perspective on the female lead in a Bronson picture, an actress who can actually act, her extremely expressive features meaning she doesn’t need to over-act. In her first mainstream picture, Ullman junks the Ingmar Bergman angst and comes across as a normal wife and mother thrown into a desperate situation. Her presence lightens up Bronson, though at this stage in his career, as evidenced by Someone Behind the Door (1970), Violent City / Family (1970) and Red Sun (1971), he presents quite a different screen persona to the grimacing/growling that was his post-Death Wish (1974) trademark.

Young seems caught between the action of his James Bond trilogy and the emotion-led drama of Mayerling and falls between two stools and hadn’t quite worked out how to get the best out of Bronson, a problem he rectified in Red Sun. Based, theoretically, on a novel by Richard Matheson (The Devil Rides Out, 1968), the screenplay has gone through too many hands, four at the last count, which probably accounts for the dodgy plot.

Not Bronson at his best, probably not a highlight of Ullman’s career either, and definitely a low point for Mason.

For Bronson completists only.

NOTE: There’s a vicious rumor going round, spread on Imdb, that this movie ended up on television only three days after cinematic release. Total nonsense of course. It was released in Britain in July 1973, gaining a two-week London West End run at the ABC-2 (“West End Soars, Variety, July 25, 1973, p19) and going out on a circuit release. It failed to find a U.S. distributor until 1974 in the wake of the success of Death Wish whne it was given a PG certificate by the Motion Picture Code and Rating Program and subsequently distributed by independents like Marcus Film and Emerson. It premiered in Denver – seen as a testing ground for difficult pictures, the city viewed “as a good barometer” of how movies will perform nationwide – in May 1974 (“Denver Used As Testing Ground For New Movies,” Box Office, May 20, 1974, pW4). Total rentals were estimated at around $250,000 (“Variety Chart Summary,” Variety, May 7, 1975, p134) and it placed 247^th in the chart. It made its U.S. television debut on ABC in February 1975. (“Only ABC Enters Second Season With Quantity of First-Run films,” Variety, January 29, 1975, p43) but didn’t score highly with viewers finishing in 119^th place for the year (“Theatrical Movie Rankings 1974-1975,” Variety, September 17, 1975, p40).

North Sea Hijack / ffolkes (1980) ****

Shouldn’t work at all not with star Roger Moore gussied up like a maiden aunt, fussing over needlepoint and cats, dolled up in tweeds and sporting an unkempt beard and a ginger wig. Our only clue in the early stages that he’s anything approaching a tough guy is that he knocks back whisky like soda pop.

And bear in mind this was a couple of years before the Brits could blithely call in the SAS (Who Dares Wins, 1982) for a ticklish rescue op and more than a decade before it became the norm to rely on a handily-available one-man band of the Die Hard persuasion and even longer before you had to worry about upsetting the pet or elderly neighbor of your local retired assassin.

*When the movie flopped in the U.K. it was re-branded as some kind of James Bond number with scantily-clad women*.

That it does work is very much down to Moore as the opposite of the standard Hollywood hero, avoiding rather than provoking trouble for strategic reasons, and realizing that, even with the deadliest of deadlines, time could be on his side and be used to un-nerve his opponent. After the film flopped spectacularly, Moore claimed he was miscast, but, in fact, despite the box office failure, the opposite is true. Without him brilliantly treading a very fine line this would have easily teetered into spoof.

A bunch of gangsters – not terrorists, plain cash the motive not some obscure cause – led by Kramer (Anthony Perkins) take over an oil platform supply ship, force Capt Olafson (Jack Watson) and crew, including, unusually for the time a female chef Sanna (Lea Brodie), to park under the oil platform while a couple of the gang plant explosives – to be set off as a warning – under the smaller drilling rig located some distance away, threatening to blow the whole operation sky-high if the British government doesn’t meet a ransom demand of $25 million.

As it happens the mysterious section of government that sometimes even Prime Ministers don’t know exists (as with beekeeping within the C.I.A.) has already recognized such a potential issue and hired ffolkes (Roger Moore) and his self-styled team of “fusiliers” to come up with a solution. Once the female Prime Minister (Faith Brook) – Margaret Thatcher was already in power at this point – is apprised of the cost in loss of revenue and human lives, she gives the go-ahead.

Ffolkes is despatched by helicopter with Admiral Brinsden (James Mason) and a high-ranking lackey. The supply ship crew, meantime, led by Sanna, have attempted to poison the invaders but that’s thwarted by the ruthless Kramer who by now has been chucking any dissenters over the side.

Kramer’s a clever guy. His ploy is smart. Theoretically, the drilling rig is financially worth a lot more than the platform, but that loss would account for a fraction of the lives of those on board the platform, and measured in public relations terms by any government deemed the smaller catastrophe. The platform will only be destroyed if the government is foolish enough not to meet his second deadline – if they fail to hit the first it’s just the rig that ends up in Davy Jones’ Locker.

But ffolkes is as cunning and plans a fake destruction of the rig to remove that ace in Kramer’s pack. The resulting explosion is so convincing, especially since it takes place at night, that the stakes are raised in ffolkes favor. But that’s only until Kramer smells a rat and refuses to allow ffolkes on the supply boat, ensuring the cat-lover has to resort to the more dangerous and potentially deadline-breaching Plan B. Nor, despite early action pointing to ffolkes’ efficiency, is he invulnerable in the tough-guy department, needing rescued twice, once by Sanna, hiding in a lifeboat after her failed poisoning mission.

And it does rely on the occasionally dense Admiral learning a simple trick with a cigarette packet.

This probably flopped because audiences expected some version of James Bond (it appeared within Moore’s stint as 007 in the two-year gap between Moonraker and For Your Eyes Only) or at least the cigar-chomping mercenary in The Wild Geese (1978). If Moore had carried out the required action in tweeds or naval uniform it might have been more easily accepted than dressed in a bright red frogman’s outfit (choice of that color a flaw in an op intended as subterfuge).

The irrepressible sexist character he represented might be more of a challenge to a contemporary audience but it’s delivered without malice and, theoretically at least, his aversion to women (and no overt hint of homosexuality I might add, though you could make your own mind up on that score) is explained. And Sarah (Jennifer (Hilary) , the oil platform skipper’s secretary, is his match, though that’s mostly with dry asides and rolling eyes.

There’s a bit of a sexist joke – although somewhat of a cliché – when our man discovers one of the crew is a woman and not a man. But that’s far better than the out-and-out misogyny of one of the gangsters whose reaction to cornering Sanna is attempted rape.

So, not the all-action yarn you – and audiences back in the day – might have expected, but, still pretty good fun. Director Andrew v. McLaglen melds elements of his The Wild Geese, and Shenandoah (1965), Moore’s performance reminiscent of the slow-burn of the James Stewart character. Screenplay by Jack Davies (Gambit, 1966) based on his bestseller.

Scarcely a lifted eyebrow in sight. Great fun – you couldn’t get more retro – and certainly had me chuckling – and free on YouTube.

A Touch of Larceny (1960) ****

Magically fits into the “lost” film category that I’ve been banging on about recently, films, for a variety of reasons, denied cinematic release. Or at least that’s according to Rotten Tomatoes which declares “there are no featured reviews…because the movie has not (been) released yet” despite the fact that it was a big hit in cinemas over six decades ago.

Happening upon this nugget of information in a casual trawl of RT I thought I’d see if this “lost” movie was as good as The Appointment (1969) perhaps or Fade In (1969) or whether it should never be seen.

Imagine my surprise to find a highly entertaining picture best described as a one-man caper that takes aim at the Establishment and the Media, wrapped in a very witty rom-com, and helped along by the kind of Whitehall characters making a meal out of doing nothing as lampooned in BBC TV series Yes, Minister.

The central conceit sounds so lame from the outset that you think this confection is going to collapse the minute it is put into practice, but, in fact, a good few twists inflate the idea until it floats along quite merrily towards a happy conclusion. And if you only remember James Mason from dour turns in The Deadly Affair (1967) or as the smarmy villain in North by Northwest (1959), you’re in for a treat.

For this is the actor at his most winning, so charming he almost edges into the adorable class, and this while playing a rake, the seducer’s seducer, but with the quickest of quick wits to get him out of any scrape. We begin and end with a demonstration of such speedy thinking.

Surprised by the return of his latest conquest’s husband, Commander Max “Rammer” (the nickname nothing to do with sexual prowess) Easton simply dons his naval uniform, whisks up the woman’s dog, his presence explained as delivering a poor creature lost in the street. As easy as pie.

His life is one of ease. When he says he works at the Admiralty, “working” might be a stretch, although “lolling about” would hardly be in the job description, the sole purpose of his desk somewhere to lay his feet, and has an airy dismissal at hand for any Whitehall buffoon inclined to pepper their language with Civil Service gobbledegook.

Bumping into an old war chum Sir Charles Holland (George Sanders), now an ambassador, they were submarine commanders in World War Two, allows him brief acquaintance with American widow Virgina (Vera Miles). Naturally, he snaffles one of her gloves so as to have an excuse to return it. Realizing his game, she bats him back with effortless repartee, saving for the last the fact that she is engaged to be married to Sir Charles.

Given he is so practised at this game, he manages to inveigle his way into her life – Sir Charles away on urgent business – determines that her fiance’s main attraction is his dosh, and comes up with a barmy scheme to put himself in the wealthy category. His notion is to pretend to be a spy, drop a top secret document down behind a filing cabinet, vanish to a remote Scottish island, wait for his colleagues to raise the alarm, someone discover the document is missing, and the newspapers to brand him a traitor, at which point he will pop back up and sue the media for libel, and become rich enough to suit Virginia.

Yep, it seems a crazy notion, especially as Virginia, though clearly enjoying his company, has kept him at a decided arm’s length. Unfortunately, once the hue-and-cry is raised, Virginia makes the mistake of telling her husband it’s all a big con. But that puts Sir Charles in a bind, because to fess up might put his fiancé, and by extension himself, in a difficult position.

So they do nothing. Meanwhile, on his deserted tiny island off the coast of Scotland, Easton is living it up, dining off his ample supplies, occasionally catching a fish or a lobster, certainly enough booze to keep up his spirits, tuning into the radio to keep up with the news, waving half-heartedly at any passing ship, rehearsing his lines for when he is rescued. He’s even brought along a canister of petrol so he will have no trouble lighting damp driftwood and seaweed to make the bonfire he will require to attract attention.

So far, so barmy. But now the first twist. He chucks into the sea all evidence of his high living. He slips on a rock, falls into the water and the precious fuel sinks to the bottom. Now, he is a genuine castaway, soaked, starving, freezing. Second twist, the passengers on the boat that turns up to rescue him greet him by name.

So now we’re in for a devilish third act, the cops tipped the nod without getting the full story, Virginia the obvious culprit, Easton, back to the wall, requiring some fiendish ingenuity to get himself out of the mess. After a bundle of twists coming quick and fast, the romantic entanglement is disentangled, Easton still set to be rich by selling his tale (“the real true story” i.e. fictional hogwash) to the media who no doubt toss in a sweetener in gratitude for not being sued.

Not only is it delivered in effortless style by director Guy Hamilton (The Battle of Britain, 1969), and Mason at the top of his game, matched by Vera Miles (Psycho, 1960), but it is very short, clocking in at just over 90 minutes. Roger MacDougall (The Man in the White Suit, 1951), Ivan Foxwell (Tiara Tahiti, 1962) and the director concocted the screenplay from the novel by Paul Somers.

Great fun, the repartee and the final third an absolute treat while poking gentle fun at the Establishment.

Rather than belonging to the “lost” category, it sits comfortably in the “they don’t make ‘em like that anymore” section.

Age of Consent (1969) ***

Reputations were made and broken on this tale of a jaded artist returning to his homeland to rediscover his mojo. Director Michael Powell had, in tandem with partner Emeric Pressburger, created some of the most acclaimed films of the 1940s – A Matter of Life and Death (1946), Black Narcissus (1947) and The Red Shoes (1948) – but the partnership had ended the next decade. Powell’s solo effort Peeping Tom (1960) was greeted with a revulsion from which his career never recovered. Age of Consent was his penultimate picture but the extensive nudity and the age gap between the principals left critics shaking their heads.

For Helen Mirren, on the other hand, it was a triumphant start to a career that has now spanned over half a century, one Oscar and three nominations. She was a burgeoning theatrical talent at the Royal Shakespeare Company when she made her movie debut as Mason’s muse. It should also be pointed out that when it came to scene-stealing she had a rival in the pooch Godfrey.

You would rightly be concerned that there was some grooming going on. Although 24 at the time of the film’s release, Cora (Helen Mirren), an under-age nymph, spends a great deal of time innocently cavorting naked in the sea off the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. But there are a couple of provisos. In the first place, Cora was not swimming for pleasure, she was diving for seafood to augment her impoverished lifestyle. In the second place, she was so poor she would hardly have afforded a bikini and was the kind of free spirit anyway who might have shucked one off.

Thirdly, and more importantly, artist Bradley Morahan (James Mason) wasn’t interested. He wasn’t the kind of painter who needed to perve on young girls. An early scene showed him in bed with a girlfriend and it was clear that he was an object of lust elsewhere. Morahan, fit and tanned, obsessed like any other artist about his talent, and was in this remote stretch not to hunt for young naked girls but to find inspiration. As well as eventually painting Cora, he also transforms the shack he rents into something of beauty.

Morahan is vital to Cora’s self-development. The money he pays her for modelling goes towards her escape fund. Her mother being a useless thieving alcoholic, she has little in the way of role model. And the world of seafood supply is competitive. She is lost in paradise and the scene of her buying a tacky handbag demonstrates the extent of her initial ambition. Although her physical attributes attract male attention, it is only on forming a relationship with the painter that Cora begins to believe in herself. There’s not much more to the central story than the artist rediscovering his creative spark and helping Cora’s personal development along the way.

Morahan is a believable character. He is not an impoverished artist. Far from being self-deluded, he is a questing individual, turning his back on easy money and the temptations of big city life in order to reinvent himself. He isn’t going to starve and he has no problems with women. And he is perfectly capable of looking after himself. A more rounded artist would be hard to find. Precisely because there is no sexual relationship with Cora, the movie, as a film about character development, is ideally balanced.

The movie is gorgeously filmed, with many aerial shots of the reef and underwater photography by Ron and Valerie Taylor.

What does let the show down is a proliferation of cliched characters who over-act. Nat Kelly (Jack McGowran), sponging friend, ruthless seducer and thief, leads that list closely followed by Cora’s grandmother (Neva Carr-Glynn) who looks like a reject from a Dickens novel. There’s also a dumb and dumber cop and a neighbor so bent on sex that she falls for Kelly. It’s not the first time that comedy has got in the way of art, but it’s a shame it had to interrupt so often what is otherwise a touching film.

At its heart is a portrait of the artist as an older man and his sensitive relationship with a young girl. In later years, Powell married film editor Thelma Schoonmaker and after his death she oversaw the restoration of Age of Consent, with eight minutes added and the Stanley Myers score replaced by the original by Peter Sculthorpe.

Unusually sensitive screenplay from Peter Yeldham who, as my readers will know, is more usually associated with Harry Alan Towers productions like Bang! Bang! You’re Dead / Our Man in Marrakesh (1966), based on the novel by Norman Lindsay.

Intriguing, occasionally moving, superb debut from Mirren plus it works.

Stranger in the House / Cop-Out (1967) ***

Standout performance by James Mason (Age of Consent, 1969) holds together this curiosity. Based on a novel by Georges Simenon from 1951, it is updated to the Swinging Sixties and transposed from France to the English provincial town of Winchester (possibly chosen thanks to the hit single the previous year). While featuring an investigation, but minus Maigret, it’s essentially a character study.

Given John Sawyer (James Mason) is a depressed, divorced, retired lawyer, it could easily have sunk under the weight of cliché. Realistic portrayals of depression, except amongst those confined to institutions, were rare in this era. The bulk of the audience would probably view him just as a grumpy old man.

Sawyer is not only estranged from everyone, distancing himself from daughter Angela (Geraldine Chaplin), but sliding into oblivion and even when offered potential redemption can scarcely lift his head above a parapet of boredom, almost catatonic in his attitude, overwhelmed by the loss of wife and, presumably, the esteem that came with his career. A member of the upper middle-class, he shows surprising sensitivity to the underprivileged, outsiders, especially migrants, usually dismissed with a racist epithet, and sex workers whom he treats as victims rather than a corrupting influence.

When the corpse of young American ship’s steward Barney (Bobby Darin) is found in his disused attic, suspicion falls on his daughter’s unemployed Greek boyfriend Jo (Paul Bertoya). Turns out Barney is a nasty piece of work, blackmailing Angels and her friends for trespassing on his ship.

As well as being put up initially in an empty warehouse by Desmond (Ian Ogilvy) whose father, a department store magnate who owns the building, a former cinema, and later in Sawyer’s attic, Barney extracts cash and sexually humiliates his victims. Attempted rape of Angela comes with his conviction that she’ll “thank me for it.”

Eventually, Sawyer is convinced to take on the case and is up against his daughter’s pompous employer and his wife’s lover Hawkins (Bryan Stanion). Maigret would have solved this in a trice but the joy of this is Sawyer’s indifference to the police procedural. He spends most of the time during the trial attempting to make a necklace out of paper clips, asks virtually no questions of witnesses, and makes no pretence of interest in the proceedings.

Among his unusual techniques are summoning up references to Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Unusually, the pay-off doesn’t come in a courtroom but at the twenty-first birthday celebration of the entitled Desmond when to attract attention Sawyer whips off a tablecloth, sending glasses and crockery crashing, and introduces a woman in red.

Estrangement from his daughter could easily be his fault, too wrapped up in a high-flying career to pay the child much heed, but that indifference might as easily be ascribed to the possibility, as his wife taunts him, that the girl is not his.

There’s much to admire in the observations of ordinariness, loneliness, a class system filled with puffed-up mediocrities revelling in the slightest sliver of power, female advancement often requiring dispensing sexual favors to predatory employers or some form of begging.

There’s a brief appearance by Eric Burdon and the Animals, a modelling assignment using the cathedral as backdrop, and drugs. Difficult to imagine though that the pistol holstered by a carnival booth operator could be the real thing.

James Mason’s employment of a limp (result of a war wound) probably went against any genuine assessment of the subtlety of his performance. Geraldine Chaplin (The Hawaiians, 1970) builds up her character with action rather than dialog, showing tenderness where you might expect anger. Bobby Darin (Pressure Point, 1962) essays another creepy thug.

Paul Bertoya (Che!, 1969) is underused. Ian Ogilvy (The Sorcerers, 1967) is so smug you want to thump him. Look out for Pippa Steel (The Vampire Lovers, 1970), Moira Lister (The Double Man, 1967) and Yootha Joyce (Our Mother’s House, 1967).

In his sole directorial assignment Frenchman Pierre Louve, who wrote the screenplay, has better luck dissecting English mores than finding the essence of Simenon, whose non-Maigret novels generally concentrated on a man under pressure. While Mason delivers a fine performance, and his depression is obvious, there’s no sense of him teetering on the edge, more a general decline. In fact it’s the opposite, returning to the legal fray provides him with redemption.

Tiara Tahiti (1962) ****

There’s an odd tone to this comedy about that British obsession: class. The narrative arc is basically about come-uppance. But you would expect in any movie dealing with the upper-class that it is the poor man who comes out on top. But that’s not the case here and it’s not the case because, basically, the movie makers have decided that the confident charming guy buoyed up by a wealthy background should hold sway over the insecure chap undermined by his lack of breeding.

I doubt if they expected audiences to feel sorry for the jumped-up martinet Lt.Col Southey (John Mills) whose cushy number in post-war Germany is disrupted by the arrival of suave Capt Ainslie (James Mason). The former is reminded by the latter that he was once a lowly clerk in the stockbroking firm of which the captain, by dint of birth, held a managerial position. Soon Ainslie wins over the officers and humiliates Southey at every turn. To gain revenge, Southey informs on the junior officer who is arrested with illicit goods at the customs.

Several years later, Ainslie lives the life of Riley in Tahiti, beautiful girl Belle Annie (Rosenda Monteros) in tow catering to his every whim and under the false impression that he will soon take her back with him to London. He makes a living playing poker, and when luck runs against him can rely on the easily corrupted local police officer to keep his creditors at bay. Into this ostensible paradise arrives Southey, now chairman of an international hotel company, so important he can swan around the world answering to no one.

I had expected that having made it to the top of his profession by dint of hard work rather than accident of birth or having made the right connections, that Southey would have rid himself of his inferiority complex and that, somehow, he would get revenge on Ainslie for the humiliation in Germany. But that proves not to be the case and, in fact, any mention that Southey was once Ainslie’s mere clerk brings the high-flying businessman down to earth and he reverts to his previous jumped-up bumptious persona.

Only momentarily does Southey gain the upper hand, when the broke Ainslie seeks employment, but that lasts only until Southey reveals the part he played in Ainslie being cashiered from the Army. All along there’s been a sub-plot of a jealous Chinese storekeeper Chong (Herbert Lom, would you believe) trying to ease Ainslie out of the way so that Belle Annie will return to him. Chong arranges for a thug to bump off Ainslie. But when Ainslie survives the assault he blames Southey so that he can have the pleasure of ruining Southey’s career when he is kicked off the island.

*A significant change to the way films were distirbuted in Britain. Normally, it was London which got first bite of the cherry. Opening a film outside London was a bold move*

I can’t have been the only viewer to sympathise with Southey, the man who got to high-ranking positions in the Army and business through his own hard graft while charmers like Ainslie used their class to ease their passage. I had imagined that it would be Southey who got his revenge, employing Ainslie in a lowly position rather than the other way round. And it may just be me but I didn’t believe the suggestion in the final scene that any enmity Ainslie felt towards Southey was all in Southey’s head.

Be that as it may, the acting carries this one. John Mills adds a comic element to his stiff-upper-lip officer last seen in the more dramatic Tunes of Glory (1960) while James Mason (Age of Consent, 1969) is the essential cad who can get away with anything thanks to bucketloads of charm.

Several scenes stand out. You wonder if the famed Robert De Niro “you talkin’ to me” in Taxi Driver (1976) had its origins in the scene where Mills talks to himself in a mirror to build up his confidence before confronting Mason. The scenes where Mason dupes the police officer into believing the cop’s novel is a work of genius are very funny. Mason also takes the mickey out of a middle-aged Englishwomen by pretending to be a native Hawaiian.

And that’s not forgetting the exuberance of Rosenda Monteros – mistakenly given the “and introducing” credit when she had previously appeared as the love interest in The Magnificent Seven (1960) – not quite as dumb as she sometimes appears, able to con Chong out of new dresses and ready at a moment’s notice to run away with an athletic young sailor. Not to mention, too, that her bare derriere makes an appearance in a bathing scene rather risqué for the period.

Debut of Canadian director Ted Kotcheff (Life at the Top, 1965, also dealing primarily with class) who has the sense to leave the actors to it. Written by Ivan Foxwell (A Touch of Larceny, 1960), it sticks too closely to the source novel by Geoffrey Cotterell, lumbering the movie with one sub-plot and a couple of characters too many, but excellent when concentrating on the warring protagonists.

Setting the class elements apart, this is all good fun, and the jousting between two of the greatest British actors of all time makes it more than well worth a viewing. It was a big hit in Britain at the time, not quite in the category of Dr No – oddly termed “a bizarre comedy drama” by trade magazine Kine Weekly and – second to Cliff Richard musical The Young Ones in the annual box office chart – but easily in the Top 25.

Setting aside my reservations about the tone and the perspective, I found this far more enjoyable than I expected as result of witnessing two class acts at the top of their game.

Genghis Khan (1965) ****

Hollywood was never reined in by the strictures of history, much preferring fiction to fact for dramatic effect, and that’s largely the case here, although the titular hero’s real life remains shrouded in myth.

If you do catch this surprisingly good feature, make sure it’s not one of the many pan-and-scan atrocities on the market. I watched this in the proper Panavision ratio which meant it occupied only one-third of my television screen, but in that format it’s terrific. It’s a bit of an anomaly for a decade that churned out high-class historical epics like El Cid (1961) because this clocks in about a hour short of other films in the genre and there’s no star actor or director to speak of and no Yakima Canutt to handle the second unit action scenes.

Omar Sharif’s marquee value at this point was so low that if you check out any of the original posters you’ll note that his name hardly rates a mention and he also comes at the very end of the opening screen credits. Although this is post-Lawrence of Arabia (1962), it’s pre-Doctor Zhivago (1965), suggesting nobody had a clue how to market his talents.

Director Henry Levin was a journeyman, fifty films under his belt, best known for not a great deal except for, following this, the second and third in the Matt Helm spy series. Given this film was critically ignored on release and since, and a flop to boot, it definitely falls into the “Worth a Look” category. Although there are few stand-out scenes of the artistic variety such as pepper Lawrence of Arabia or El Cid, this is still well put together and Levin shows an aptness for the widescreen.

The narrative breaks down into three parts – the first section describing enslavement of Genghis Khan (Omar Sharif) by nemesis Jamuga (Stephen Boyd – the picture’s star according to poster and screen credits) – before banding together rival tribes in revolt; the second part a long trek to China; and the third encompassing a final battle and hand-to-hand combat with Jamuga. For a two-hour picture it has tremendous sweep, not just the scenery and the battle scenes, but political intrigue, romance, a rape scene and even clever comedy. Genghis Khan believes his glory is predestined, but he has very modern ideas about the role of women.

The best section, oddly enough, is set in China where Genghis engages in a duel of wits with the distinctively contradictory Emperor (Robert Morley), but that’s not to detract from the film’s other qualities, the action brilliantly handled, especially the chaos of battle, the romance touching, and the dialog intelligent and often epigrammatic.

Unlike James Mason (Age of Consent, 1969) who makes a calamitous attempt at a Chinese accent, Robert Morley (Some Girls Do, 1969), costume apart and looking as if he has just walked out of an English country house, but his plummy tones belie a very believable character. Stephen Boyd (Assignment K, 1968) shines as the villain of the piece. Telly Savalas (Battle of the Bulge, 1965) and Woody Strode (The Professionals, 1966) have decent parts as Khan’s s sidekicks, the former unexpectedly bearing the brunt of the film’s comedy. French actress Francoise Dorleac (Billion Dollar Brain, 1967) is effective as Sharif’s wife.

Hitchcock stole one of his most famous ideas from Genghis Khan. About the only scene in Torn Curtain (1966) to receive universal praise was a killing carried out to a soundtrack of nothing more than the grunts of assailant and victim. But, here, where the score by Yugoslavian composer Dusan Radic was extensively employed, the rape scene is silent and just as stunning. If the only prints widely available are of the pan-and-scan variety I’m not surprised the film has been for so long overlooked, but if you can get hold of one in the preferred format you will be in for a surprise.