The Man Between: the Cinematheque Ontario celebrates 20 years with the films of James Mason

I’m thinking about that scene in Lolita (1962), the one where Clare Quilty meets Humbert Humbert on the veranda of the hotel where a police convention just happens to be underway. “You have a most interesting face,” Quilty tells Humbert in parting. Yet only minutes earlier he’d told him, “You have the most normal face I’ve ever seen.” That’s James Mason.

5 Fingers (1952)

The Cinematheque Ontario, recently—and, it must be said, lamentably—re-dubbed TIFF Cinematheque, turns 20 this year, and it strikes me at least as serendipitous that among the numerous exciting programmes being unveiled in their newly launched anniversary season, which include retrospectives of legendary directors such as Eric Rohmer, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Akira Kurosawa, they’ve made room for a 14-film retrospective of James Mason, the extraordinary actor whose larger body of work I only became exposed to, and only began to fully appreciate, after becoming a Cinematheque member five years ago when I first moved to Toronto.

Julius Caesar (53)

Laura and I arrived in June of 2005, right in the middle of a heat wave and right in the middle of the Cinematheque’s Ingmar Bergman retrospective. We’d just traveled across the country with our aging Mexican poodle, had been through car trouble and illnesses along the way, and had nearly exhausted our finances completely. Nonetheless, a Cinematheque double membership was the first thing we bought with our last bit of cash. It was one of the best investments we ever made. If you’re going to be broke for a summer in Toronto, you might as well spend it watching elegantly projected masterpieces with an enthusiastic and attentive crowd.

Bigger Than Life (56)

It was at the Cinematheque that I first saw Max Ophüls’ The Reckless Moment (49) and Caught (49). In the former Mason plays a blackmailer, in the latter a kindly pediatrician. It was at the Cinematheque where I first saw Sam Peckinpah’s Cross of Iron (77), in which Mason plays a Nazi. And it was at the Cinematheque where I finally saw Bigger Than Life (56), Nicholas Ray’s melodrama about a middle-American schoolteacher and patriarch who’s saved from a death sentence by a wonder drug only to have it drive him off the rails. The material is fascinating and provocative, the mise en scène exacting and so tense as to make you grit your teeth, but its Mason who makes the film so enduringly troubling. With his mid-Atlantic accent, his slightly overwrought cheerfulness and contained superiority, Mason’s Ed Avery is that much more reflective a mirror of postwar American values by so obviously being an outsider, one quietly desperate to fit in, and when he’s gradually transformed from an amiable, humble, hard-working family man into a potentially murderous, ultra-conservative megalomaniac, you never quite buy that it was just the drugs that did it. It was something already there, inside the character and permeating his environment. I believe this sort of transformation, this rigorous persistence of ambiguity, even while working within the confines of the Hollywood studio system, is evidence of Mason’s genius.

North by Northwest (58)

The Cinematheque will be screening all of the above pictures minus the Peckinpah, as well as some well-known favourites such as North by Northwest (58), where we get to see Mason survey Cary Grant’s well-tailored wrong man like he’s sniffing leftovers and stroke Eva Marie Saint’s neck like he’s fitting it for a noose. And of course we get Lolita, which took Mason even farther out on a limb than Bigger Than Life. Mason’s Humbert is rather different from that of Vladimir Nabokov’s source novel, as are so many things, but Nabokov’s own adaptation, realized by Stanley Kubrick, manages to offer a slightly more palatable, if still inky-blackly comic variation on the novel’s pedophile’s confession. (As I get older and begin to re-asses Kubrick, Lolita is starting to look more or more like his best work.)

Lolita (62)

I cannot imagine another actor in this role, not even Jeremy Irons, who played Humbert in the later Adrian Lyne version (97), which corrected certain things while completely screwing up others. It’s the odd sincerity in Mason’s expression and vulnerability in his voice when he urges Quilty to understand he’s about to be killed. It’s his deliciously ridiculous attempt to cha cha cha with the very horny Charlotte Haze. It’s the hoity-toity way he enunciates words like “issue” and “toenails.” Mason’s Humbert, though afflicted with a perverse, crippling nostalgia, is indeed, as Mason’s characters usually are, urbane. He’s also bumbling. He’s nefariously manipulative, yet he’s also somehow innocent, even in the depths of his moral bankruptcy.

Odd Man Out (47)

Mason was born in 1909 in Yorkshire. He studied architecture. He co-authored a book about cats. He led several lives, it seems, before his death in 1984. He was self-effacing, yet his career, which thrived both in the UK and the US, was clearly driven by a tremendous ambition and belief in his particular talent. The Cinematheque’s programme gives a superb assessment of his singular career, and is not to be missed.

Crisis of conformity: Bigger Than Life on DVD

Ed Avery must have come from somewhere other than the anonymous suburb where he now lives with his wife and young son and teaches grade school. He has that mid-Atlantic accent, untraceable yet distinctive. He once played football, but now wears bowties. He seems patient with his students and friendly with his colleagues, but might there be a subtle tone of condescension in his voice? There’s a curious tension between his emblematic middle-class Americaness and these hints at Otherness.

Ed moonlights as a taxi dispatcher, something he hasn’t yet told his family about. He’s overworked, and maybe that’s why the shooting pains he’s been suffering get worse until Ed finally collapses, is taken to hospital, and following a series of uncomfortable tests is told he has a rare inflammation of the arteries which kills those afflicted within a year. His only recourse is to take cortisone, a new ostensible wonderdrug still to be satisfactorily tested. The drug indeed makes Ed feel wonderful, charged, optimistic, ready to re-apply himself to his vocation and familial role. But this new life rapidly descends into nightmare. Ed becomes moody, flamboyantly arrogant and short-tempered, cruel to his wife and unreasonably demanding with his boy. The Avery home becomes a house under siege by its increasingly deranged patriarch. But here’s the thing about Bigger Than Life (1956): I never really believe that Ed’s behaviour is the fault of the cortisone. Helpless as he is to the threat of pain and death—that force that ultimately proves to be bigger than life—Ed’s peculiar rampage feels like the release of some long repressed attitude toward the rest of the world. Ed the eager-to-assimilate outsider, perhaps more than his indigenous peers, has bought fully into the American Dream, and it may have simply been a matter of time before it made him crazy.

Bigger Than Life, now available from the Criterion Collection, is among the finest achievements of director Nicholas Ray’s career. Coming quickly after Rebel Without a Cause (55), it represents the zenith of Ray’s explorations in the realms of both Technicolor and Cinemascope, resulting in expressionistic flourishes of red and orange against a generally muted palate and framing that gradually forces the walls of the Avery home to seemingly close in on its inhabitants. Based on a New Yorker article by Berton Roueché, to which the script, written by Cyril Hume and Richard Maibaum, with uncredited contributions by Clifford Odets, is surprisingly faithful, Bigger Than Life also represents the height of Ray’s profound interest in social problems, especially those that refused to be facilely dismissed by way of class or race. The critique of postwar consumerism threaded through this vivid and continuously unnerving film is fairly overt without being chastising: when Ed ’s workmate mentions she’s having car trouble, Ed immediately suggests she just get a new one; when Ed arrives home from work the first thing his son Richie does is ask if Ed brought him anything; when Ed leaves hospital, despite increasing worry over medical bills, the first thing he does is take his wife Lou out to a fancy dress shop where he bullies her into elaborate gowns they can neither afford nor have any practical use for. Spending money seems the only way for Ed to express his feelings of anguish and exhilaration. That is, until he re-directs his energies toward an oppressively disciplinarian, reactionary vision of pedagogy, which then builds to quasi-religious delusions of grandeur. During the film’s climax Lou tries to remind Ed of God’s fundamental forgiveness. “God was wrong,” Ed tells her.

Part of what makes Bigger Than Life so persuasive are its finely tuned performances. The inspired casting of James Mason, also the film’s producer, provides Ed with layers of neurosis that a more obviously “average joe” sort of actor would never yield. During parent-teacher night Ed holds court, declaring childhood “a congenital disease, and the purpose of education is to cure it.” Such audacious outbursts are delivered with a subtly bizarre mixture of conviction and childish provocation, with Mason looking at once oddly oblivious and surveying the room to gauge reactions, perhaps gleeful over the more outraged faces. At other times Mason’s pain and confusion seems chillingly acute, such as in the scene that finds him staring into a fractured mirror after having driven the previously obedient Lou to the point of exasperation. Barbara Rush provides Lou with a heart-rending, if frustrating, inner-conflict between whether to coddle or berate her husband. She’s often in a state of terror, desperately calculating under attempted placidity as to how to best pacify Ed. There’s also sturdy support from Walter Matthau as the bachelor phys-ed teacher whose relative youth and physical strength seem to threaten Ed. (In one of the disc’s best supplements, author Jonathan Lethem makes a case for Matthau’s character’s hidden homosexuality. Of course Lethem also goes on a very amusing tangent about the pompadour created by James Mason’s shadow.)

The performances help imbue Bigger Than Life with the balance of identification and strangeness, of urgency and ambiguity that Ray seemed to be nurturing on every level. The film is unrelenting in its disquiet, which may account for its being so unloved in its time. It wears the vestiges of a Douglas Sirk-style melodrama, yet it at times feels like pitch-black comedy, and with its noirish shadows and claustrophobic interiors, it comes to resemble a horror movie, complete with a finale in which the monster hasn’t died but rather seems to be sleeping, waiting. The desperation with which Ed clutches his family in those last moments is genuinely touching. I truly believe his need and his fear and even his love. It’s just that his clutching could so easily erupt into a stranglehold.

Two films from two Michael Powells: A Matter of Life and Death, Age of Consent on DVD

I saw my first two Michael Powell films some years ago at Edmonton's Metro Cinema. A Canterbury Tale (1944), made with Powell’s longtime collaborator Emeric Pressburger, concerns strange criminal activities in a fictional Kent village during the Second World War, and it functions as a moving, somewhat mystical appeal to read history in landscape. Peeping Tom (60) is a thriller about a killer who films the death of his female victims. The former is an immensely charming work from the height of Powell and Pressburger’s hugely popular, very British spectacles. The former is an unremittingly grotesque portrait of psychological disease that, far from creating the sensation of the similarly sinister and voyeuristic Psycho (60), released only three months later, it essentially ended Powell’s career in the Britain, driving him to wander the wilderness of international co-production for the last 30 years of his life.

So we have two exemplary Powell films and, as it happens, films that exemplify the two Powells: the celebrated patriot and master craftsman, and the shunned maverick. As retrospectives and home video continue to introduce his legacy to a new generation of filmlovers, it’s interesting that the latest pairing of Powell films to appear on DVD in Sony’s two-disc The Films of Michael Powell also straddle the disparate halves of his career.

A Matter of Life and Death (46), re-titled Stairway to Heaven for its US, opens gazing into the celestial heavens, with a voice-over meditating briefly on stars and gases and the life and death of entire galaxies. It grounds itself in the widest possible context, one of myth, awe and whimsy. It needs to because what follows is so absurdly fantastical. The story shifts between miracle survival and radical brain surgery on earth and a court hearing in heaven overseen by an audience of thousands. The lovers at its centre meet in voice only when British Airman Peter Carter, the last living crewmember aboard a badly damaged bomber en route back to England, makes contact with June, an American radio operator. During what he assumes will be his final moments of life, Peter passionately flirts with June and she’s deeply moved. Peter then leaps from the descending bomber and falls without parachute into the sea—and lives.

Turns out the emissary of death sent to scoop Peter up couldn’t find him in the soupy English fog. Heaven, being an imposingly modern realm run as a well-oiled bureaucracy, sends the emissary back to get Peter. But Peter, having by now awoke on the achingly beautiful shore of Sceptered Isle and met his beloved June, has fallen in love, and demands clemency on grounds of romance and, as it will come to pass, UK-US diplomatic relations. All very silly but also delightful, gorgeous, endlessly imaginative, engrossingly strange and so very unabashedly a movie. And we’re asked to heed the opening voice-over’s implication that this may be best seen as the entirely interior journey of a severely brain-injured man. And it surely spoke to countless soldiers returning from a long war, weary, death-haunted and needing to believe that life really can start all over again.

There’s pleasure to be had in all the dichotomies. Heaven is black and white, while earthly life is conveyed in an astoundingly sumptuous use of Technicolor—like The Red Shoes (48), it was photographed by maestro Jack Cardiff. Peter is played by beloved British star David Niven, a veteran of the war as well as the movies, while June is played by the fresh young American Kim Hunter, basically an unknown, though she’d already played the lead in Val Lewton’s sublimely bleak The Seventh Victim (43). Their ages are visibly much farther apart than the film would have you believe, but what they represent and the strength of their chemistry, like everything else in A Matter of Life and Death, trumps verisimilitude.

From the shores of Sceptered Isle to those of Dunk Isle along the Great Barrier Reef, a Powell hero once again finds renewal begins by the primordial sea. In Age of Consent (69), successful Australian painter Brad Morahan ditches his cosmopolitan existence in New York City to go Gauguin on an Edenic beach back home with a dog named Godfrey, who nearly steals the film. I say nearly because the pooch’s costars are the great James Mason and the 22-year-old Helen Mirren in her first film role. Mirren plays Cora, a deeply uncultured island girl desperate to escape a stifling life shared with her grandma, a screeching old bag that even in a story deliberately forged in archetypes is far too gratingly one-note to suffer gladly.

Cora becomes Brad’s muse, reviving his creative vitality. Their relationship, teetering on woefully antiquated cliché—Powell himself expressed a general distaste for the “Girl Friday” theme—is above all given life by Mirren’s astonishingly immediate performance. Often naked, never able to articulate her sense of confusion, despair or discovery, her Cora is about as pure a presence as can be found in a talkie. Aspects of Age of Consent, like the gags, the music and the occasional excess of enthusiasm with the zoom, can feel corny and dated. Yet the leads, along with Powell’s characteristic sensitivity to nature, light and sound, make very worthwhile what would, sadly, prove to be Powell’s last feature film.