SCREEN ICONS: JAMES MASON ****

With his distinctively silky voice and authoritative screen presence, James Mason (1909-84) demonstrated his considerable range in well over 100 movies.

Just five are in this boxset, but one of them features Mason's outstanding performance as Johnny McQueen (right), the wounded IRA man on the run between 4pm and midnight in Carol Reed's gripping, impeccably crafted Belfast-set thriller, Odd Man Out (1947). Among its large Irish cast are Cyril Cusack, Kathleen Ryan, FJ McCormick and Dan O'Herlihy. Mason affectionately recalls working with them in one of the extras of the set, a 1972 interview in which he returns to his Huddersfield roots.

Also includes is a later, lesser film for Carol Reed, The Man Between (1953), in which Mason plays a shadowy black marketeer in Berlin during the Cold War.

Mason stars as an amoral spy posing as a valet to the British ambassador to Turkey in Joseph L Mankiewicz's engrossing 1952 thriller, 5 Fingers, which is in the set, along with two 1943 releases starring Mason: The Bells Go Down, a minor wartime picture of firemen with Tommy Trinder and Mervyn Johns, and The Man in Grey, a well-acted period melodrama co-starring Margaret Lockwood, Phyllis Calvert and Stewart Granger. This became a big hit for the Gainsborough Studios and made Mason Britain's No 1 male box-office star.