"Five Fingers" and "Botany Bay"

This past weekend I got to see two James Mason films, "Five Fingers" and "Botany Bay." They were both excellent. In "Five Fingers" Mason played a spy, an Englishman who so resented being a valet that he betrayed his country to the Nazis by selling them photos of top secret documents. He almost got away with it but got his just desserts at the end. However the tension and suspense became so strong that I found myself hoping he would not get caught, even though he was playing a miserable excuse for a human being and deserved to be caught and shot.

Botany Bay was filmed in color and James Mason was again the bad guy, playing a sea captain transporting British prisoners to the Australian penal colony at Botany Bay. His compassion and basic humanity in that role were about the same as Captain Bligh's in "Mutiny on the Bounty."

He was a thoroughly rotten character, mistreating the prisoners, locking up a little boy until he died of the cold during a storm, using punishments like keelhauling that hadn't been used in many years. He was also ruthless with women, attempting to seduce a young actress on the ship as his "payment" for treating her well. Finally he does get his comeuppance but it was too bad that it came from an aborigine and not from one of the people he treated like dirt.

James Mason was gorgeous in both roles, gorgeous and a rat. He was, truly, the "man people loved to hate." It takes a certain talent to play a good villain, and in many of his roles, Mason played that villain.