Sorry, this movie sucks

Great visuals, story delivers no surprises

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

You'd think a movie about the founding of Botany Bay would be really interesting, but this 1952 "swashbuckling adventure" was incredibly tedious. A bunch of convicts, with Alan Ladd, Patricia Medina, Murray Matheson, and Anita Sharp-Bolster as the featured leads, are sent to sail from England to New South Wales in the 1700s. Of course, since Alan Ladd can't put on a British accent, his character is written to be an American; and of course, even though she's one of very few women on board, already has a bad reputation, and walks around with her dress perpetually falling off her shoulders, no one takes advantage of Patricia Medina. Besides the unrealistic aspects of the story-no one would survive the punishments Alan Ladd endured-it still isn't very good. James Mason is the tough-as-nails sea captain, thinly veiled as another Captain Bligh. This movie is so closely a remake of Mutiny on the Bounty, it's as if James Mason got upset that no one wanted to redo the story in the 1950s so Hollywood appeased him with this. While I'm on the subject, I don't know why he wasn't cast in the 1962 remake; he could easily played any number of villains, like Captain Bligh, Inspector Javert, and Messala. And yes, James looks handsome in his captain's uniform, but unless you want to see him ordering fifty lashes and keel-hauling as if he's merely asking someone to refill his martini, feel free to skip this one. He looks handsome in almost every other movie he made, so you can sit through one of those.

Ship Captain James Mason smartly makes beautiful prisoner Patricia Medina his lady while the rest of the cargo of convicts shivers in damp cells.Alan Ladd is a doctor who supposedly has a pardon from this wretched existence, but Mason will have none of that as he gets his vessel under-way while concomitantly questioning the verisimilitude of the various scumbags on board who claim to be "innocent". Fun escapist film with the fine acting of James Mason and pretty Patricia Medina keeping this viewer from dozing off on the couch... at least during the first time I saw it. Now, I use the movie as a sleep aid, though it's still one of my favorite adventure films. I'd be just like Captain Mason.... Captain Capitano (me) would let gorgeous Patricia move into my cabin.... including my sleeping quarters. Excellent actor Skelton Knaggs makes an uncredited appearance during the first few minutes of the film as a convict reading a posting that lists the names of fellow convicts scheduled to be shipped to Botany Bay.

As of this date, the only other IMDb comment on this title is one with which I can agree. I saw it during its neighborhood run in the year of its release and recall that it did, indeed, look like the budget must have been rather minuscule. But James Mason's performance is one that I can still remember as entirely disturbing for a young moviegoer not yet in his teens. What an actor! He made this film, which Paramount obviously treated as just a programmer, quite an experience. If remade today, I suppose we'd have Mel Gibson in the Alan Ladd role and, perhaps, Geoffrey Rush trying to imitate Mason's indelible portrait, plus some authentic Australian locations. But once was enough, for it was quite a grim experience, and the brutality that would probably be gruesomely depicted today would be more than I'd pay to see!

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.