A nephew of the great Shakespearian actress Ellen Terry, this Briton
was really a man of the theatre, but emerged unexpectedly as the director
of several major British pictures in the late 1930s. An actor at 16,
Mason later became an actor-manager and stage-managed many big London
shows in the 1920s. With the coming of sound, he interested himself
in the cinema, busying himself at varying tasks for Gaumont-British
Studios, including production and assistant direction. In 1936, he made
his first film, The
First Offence (1936), a crime thriller with the young John
Mills, and was consequently put in charge of two of the last star
vehicles of doyen British actor George
Arliss, home from his Oscar winning exploits in Hollywood, and soon
to retire.
Mason's revue experience stood him in good stead when he proved the
most efficient director of a Jack
Hulbert, Cicely Courtneidge
musical comedy, Take My Tip (1937), in which one or two of Hulbert's
dance routines are beautifully staged and for precision almost rival
those of Astaire. Perhaps Mason's most interesting film from this period,
however, is A Window
in London (1939), a dark and disturbing circular drama, from a French
original, about a man who thinks he sees a murder while travelling past
a house on a train. The feeling of faint unease that Mason engenders
throughout the film is very skilfully done. His films of the 1940s are
on the whole of a lighter nature, including Back Room Boy (1942),
an amusing Arthur Askey comedy
set in a lighthouse. Later Mason returned to production activities,
notably with John Grierson's Group Three
Productions, but it would have been more interesting to see him pursue
the directorial career he gave up in his mid-fifties.
