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Comedian Skelton plays with fine restraint; his horid face wears a look of such battered averageness that it is hard to see in it the TV clown. As the typical suburban wife, Jean Hagen is as tersely true as the quotient of a questionnaire brought to life. Best of all, the picture is about something, and (thanks to Director Don Weis) never drops its sincere regard for its subject just to pick up a quick laugh. In mass-conscious Hollywood, it took courage to maintain the point that comedy is not always well served by funny lines.
Botany Bay (Paramount) takes the slow boat (94 minutes) to Australia. The ship's log of the trip to the first white settlement in Australia (established in 1788) graphically records a couple of cat-lashings, three deaths, a stabbing, a few larcenous interludes, and even a twin-bill keelhauling. All the same, there are too many becalmed stretches when hardly anything happens. Based on a novel by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall, the script is a sort of reefed-in version of Mutiny on the Bounty. Instead of Clark Gable there is Alan Ladd, an actor who, even in the squalor of a windjammer's brig, carries himself as if he were wearing a dinner jacket under his rags. Instead of Charles Laughton there is James Mason, who makes (whenever he raises his voice above its customary elegant whisper) a fetching younger version of Captain Bligh. The wishbone of contention between Ladd and Mason is provided by a chicken named Patricia Medina, who offers, to say the least, some pretty pickings. She is rather peremptorily picked, in the end, by Actor Ladd, when both have safely reached Australia—a continent which, to judge from the views of it in this film, has not yet been towed off the Paramount lot.