Les bagnards de Botany Bay

A good premise: a gaggle of British convicts, male and female, are shipped to the new penal colony in Australia, circa 1780s. But while this story calls for great seascapes, Paramount gives us ship-in-a-soundstage scenes which are cramped and unconvincing. Even the later sequences in Australia have a "backlot" quality to them. Note the dark, sexually-ambiguous undertones in the performance of ship's captain, James Mason. Alan Ladd, who, like Burt Lancaster and Mel Gibson, liked to suffer in his movies, here gets to be flogged and later keelhauled. His flogging in "Two Years Before the Mast" is much more vivid but his keelhauling in "Botany Bay" marks the only time a Hollywood leading man has suffered this particular kind of punishment. Curiously, despite his penchant for "beefcake" scenes, Ladd remains fully clothed for this sequence. Perhaps the fear was that audiences would understandably expect a shirtless Ladd to suffer many cuts and abrasions on his bare torso while being scraped under the ship's keel, and Paramount didn't want to see its handsome leading man forced to look, even temporarily, disfigured or damaged.

In Sheridan Morley's biography "James Mason: Odd Man Out", the author claimed "Botany Bay" dashed any hopes James had that he would receive more elevated acting roles after appearing as Brutus in Joseph Mankiewicz's "Julius Caesar". This smacked of theatrical snobbery, however Mason also seemed disdainful saying, "At it's worst, my Hollywood life was a matter of facile assembly work like Botany Bay".

However, Mason injected that disdain into his role as Captain Gilbert creating a witty, arrogant villain with the evil charm of his Phillip Vandamm from "North by Northwest" crossed with the martinet brutality of Captain Bligh. Alan Ladd movies worked best when he had an animated adversary or sidekick to counterpoint his quiet, unruffable demeanour, Mason gave him one of the best villains in any of his films.

Mason played the captain of the three-masted Charlotte, part of "The First Fleet" transporting the first convicts from England to Botany Bay in New South Wales. In the hold is innocent American doctor, Hugh Tallant (Alan Ladd) and not so innocent Sally (Patricia Medina), an actress fallen in with rough company. There is history in there somewhere but the facts weren't allowed to get in the way of the story.

Following "Two Years Before the Mast" onboard the Pilgrim, this was Alan Ladd's second cruise under a tough captain. Not so much the fictional ship's masters, but the "master" of both films, director John Farrow, an ex-naval commander who had a reputation for being an SOB on set.

Both films were studio bound hell cruises, but "Botany Bay" is more fun. Compare the 20 lashes Alan Ladd's character receives on the orders of the Pilgrim's captain played by Howard da Silva, which lays him up in his bunk recovering for days, while he treats the 50 lashes he receives from Mason's Captain Gilbert as though the cat-o-nine-tails was made of pyjama cords. And what about the female convicts fighting on the deck with Patricia Medina right in the thick of it suffering a torn sleeve, but without a smudge of her lipstick?

Historical liberties were taken including composer Franz Waxman incorporating "Advance Australia Fair" into his score although it wasn't composed until 1878. A didgeridoo would have been more authentic for 1788. Nevertheless, try to catch a good print of this film; although just about all the scenes were shot in the studio it has a rich look.

Farrow and Mason could be difficult men, but in a 1999 documentary, "Alan Ladd: The True Quiet Man", we learn that Alan Ladd was considerate, courteous and liked in an industry where egos often ran riot. Patricia Medina said that he had a quality that made her feel almost maternal about him. However, he had inner demons; he is one of Hollywood's tragic stars.

I think "Botany Bay" is one of John Farrow's better films, and it's the scene stealing from Mason and Medina, despite floggings, keel-hauling and plague, that helps make it so.

Following the death of his parents from the plague, American "Tallant" (Alan Ladd) came back to the mother country only to get embroiled with a crooked inheritance agent and find himself found guilty of stealing his own cash! Transportation was the order of the day, so he is imprisoned in the ship of "Capt. Gilbert" (James Mason) and off they set on the eight month voyage to New South Wales. En route, it soon appears that "Gilbert" might have learned the arts of seamanship from Captain Bligh, so when the decent young "Tallant" falls in with the enigmatic "Sally" (Patricia Medina) he ends up earning the animosity of his host, and after a failed escape attempt is now a marked man. Even though he has a modicum of medical experience and the ship no surgeon, what chance he will make it half way around the world to put his case to the Governor (Sir Cedric Hardwicke)? Mason is on quite decent form as the menacingly jealous officer and Medina does well with a slightly demonic look in her eye but Ladd, he's as wooden as the mizen mast. He has the all-American football player looks, all right, but as an actor he has all the screen presence of a dead chipmunk. It's a predictably episodic adventure but whilst all are at sea it's quite good fun before an ending that is all a bit disappointingly rushed and which I felt rather let it all down. Still, there's plenty going on, even a keel-hauling, and plenty of folks get clunked on the head or shot or drowned, so it is worth a watch.

I recall catching this as a kid on local TV, a screening which, most probably, came about via the personal print of the film-buff sexton who calls over a number of friends, me included, from time to time to his private home theater in order to share in his vast movie collection on 16 and 35mm. Based on a book by the authors behind "Mutiny On The Bounty", this follows a very similar path – with a ship's crew at the mercy of a martinet captain (James Mason basically returning to the kind of role which had made him a star in his homeland); his opposition is led by medical student(!) Alan Ladd (typically dour) who's actually one of the many prisoners bound for exile in far-away Australia, among whom is also leading lady Patricia Medina (predictably, over the course of the film, she also becomes a personal object of contention between the two male stars).

Despite such imposing credentials as scriptwriter Jonathan Latimer and director Farrow, the film perhaps fails to rise consistently above the routine – not even with such unusual plot points as Mason's adoption of a banned form of punishment (keel-hauling); during the latter stages, then – as the company sets ashore, and we also get to meet Governor Sir Cedric Hardwicke – the film tends to lose the initial momentum of the ship-board brutality. Suffice it to say that the film I watched just prior to it, CARTOUCHE (1962; with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Claudia Cardinale) was over 20 minutes longer but seemed to me to have moved at a much quicker pace! Even so, BOTANY BAY remains a good example of the colorful entertainment they used to churn out in the old days, given an extra edge by Mason's compelling portrayal (which, if anything, suggests that he'd have made a marvelous Captain Bligh).

For the record, John Farrow directed Alan Ladd for the fifth and last time here after what looks like a run of mostly unassuming action potboilers: CHINA (1943), the equally seafaring TWO YEARS BEFORE THE MAST (1946), CALCUTTA (1947) and BEYOND GLORY (1948). It must be said here that, locally, Alan Ladd was a very popular film star with my father's generation and, apart from the immortal Western SHANE (1953), it's a pity that he seems to have been undeservedly forgotten with the passage of time.

P.S. Useless bit of trivia: I have just come across an allegedly uncut copy of the controversial WAKE IN FRIGHT aka OUTBACK (1971; with Donald Pleasence) taken from an Australian TV screening and, as the credits rolled, an announcer informs the audience to tune in at the same time tomorrow for a screening of…BOTANY BAY!!

This is a great novel, and the film, alas, does not quite live up to it. All the actors are quite all right, James Mason as a paragon of inhumanity at his most loathsome superiority - you wait for him to get murdered all through the film, and Alan Ladd, reliable as always in his irrepressible heroic obstinacy, Cedric Hardwicke as the pragmatic Australian governor, and Patricia Medina as the indispensible female element of some counterpoise to all the beastly cruelty. Franz Waxman's music helps a lot, and there is nothing really to complain about in this film on a great and interesting story indeed, except that it could have been made so much better, as the novel is well on par with "Mutiny on the Bounty".