Anyone ever seen Richard Fleischer's 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA???

It is a bit of a classic.

Interestingly, James Mason was almost cast as Drax in Moonraker.

Yes I had heard about James Mason as Drax. I love Mason (one of my absolute favorite British actors) but Michel Lonsdale was just spot-on as Drax!

Speaking of Mason, has the guy ever given a bad performance? He's just maaarveous (doing my best Mason here) in everything he does. Whether it's escapism like NORTH BY NORTHWEST or realism like THE VERDICT (for which he was Oscar nominated) he just excels in everything he does. I especially love his performances in the 2 great whodunnits THE LAST OF SHEILA and EVIL UNDER THE SUN. And I recently saw him play Watson to Christopher Plummer's Holmes in MURDER BY DECREE. He's got that great old school British class and the way he delivers his lines with that honeyed voice of his.

Connery, Moore, and Brosnan! Accept NO substitutes!

He was a superb actor.

All the performances you listed,where excellent.

One of my favourites of his was the Vampire's henchman, Straker in Salems Lot.

Verily I say unto thee...sorry to say this but Mason did give an hilariously bad performance as a Chinese character named Kam Ling in Henry Levin's GENGHIS KHAN (1965).
The simperingly camp speech pattern he gave this character would be vilified if an actor dared emulate in the these PC obsessed days but it is something to cherish if you really want to see a bad (and I mean BAD) performance by an otherwise respected actor.

And Mason spent years apologising for it, agreeing with all the terrible reviews and pleading in his defence that he only made it because his expensive divorce and acrimonious custody battle had left him completely broke.



"Security - release the badgers."

Wait, is that the one where John Wayne plays Genghis Khan? If so then I can forgive Mason and anyone else involved in that debacle. Something like that is bound to be doomed from the get-go. When someone casts the Duke as a Mongol or a Roman centurion (as in THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD) then clearly someone has no clue what they're doing and have no business being in the movie business.

Connery, Moore, and Brosnan! Accept NO substitutes!

No, ring, that was THE CONQUEROR, twelve years or so earlier, directed by Dick Powell...and apparently, the greatest mistake they made was not (as might be expected) to cast the Duke as Genghis Khan, but to film it near a Nevada nuclear test site, probably resulting in 40 per cent of the cast and crew developing some form of cancer. A mediocre Mason performance pales in comparison.

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Ceterum censeo OCTOPUSSY esse delendam.

Verily I say unto thee...always good to hear that someone in film history has apologised for truly dire work. Marc Forster, are you reading this?