The Man in Grey (1943)

(On Cable TV, October 2022) For a distinctive actor who hit Hollywood stardom in the 1950s and kept going until the late 1970s, it’s sometimes sobering to realize that James Mason’s career began much earlier in Great Britain, with his first film roles dating back to the mid-1930s. The Man in Grey isn’t quite that early in his career, but it shows Mason in a villainous role—one of the distinctive aspects of a career in which his characters could straddle the line between good and evil (or at least a very rough kind of good against a refined form of evil). It’s not, in most aspects, that good of a movie: It’s a period costume melodrama, with piques of salacious material in-between more standard fare. (Also: a lot of blackface. And slurs.) It’s sometimes fun, but its respectability only comes from how old it is. Still, Mason fans will be delighted to see him at work as a terrible cad in a film that revelled the bad actions of its characters.