Perry Mason 181: Ride the High Iron

Note: Raymond Burr loved to act, appearing in dozens of feature films between 1946 and 1957, of which many built him up as an icon of film noir. He typecast as the villain because his stoutness gave him a commanding menacing presence. Film historian Alain Silver concluded that Burr's most significant work in the genre is in ten films: Desperate (1947), Sleep, My Love (1948), Raw Deal (1948), Pitfall (1948), Abandoned (1949), Red Light (1949), M (1951), His Kind of Woman (1951), and The Blue Gardenia (1953).

Ride the High Iron
1956 / 1:09
Tagline: “Sure I'll Keep Your Name Out of the Papers, Baby...For a Price..”
[internet archive]

Raymond Burr dominates this low-budget melodrama with a performance that underscores controlled menace. His character’s worldview - dog-eat-dog, shaped by immigrant roots and a sense of perpetual scarcity - gives the film its sharpest edge. Burr embodies a man who believes success is fragile and must be seized with both fists, and that conviction radiates through every scene.

The movie’s real fascination lies in its blunt commentary on class and identity. It probes the uneasy tension between aspiration and authenticity, showing how the hunger to escape one’s origins can hollow out a sense of self. The contrast between Burr’s aggressive self-fashioning and the quiet dignity of working-class values becomes a cultural critique as much as a character study.

Though made for television, the film ambitiously tackles themes of social mobility, pride, and the corrosive effects of shame. Sally Forrest evokes Ida Lupino’s emotional intensity, and while Don Taylor never quite matches Burr’s ferocity, the trio’s dynamic underscores the film’s central question: what does it cost to reinvent yourself - and is the price ever worth paying?

The Nones of The Thirties: Hitch Hike Lady

Note: In City Limits (1934) two homeless guys teach a tycoon to enjoy life. In Among the Missing (1934) a little old lady turns a front into a home. In The Fall Guy (1930) a sorely-tried woman supports both her teenager of a husband and her impossible brother with a loyalty that borders on sainthood. Midnight Mary (1933) is a fast, economical crime melodrama with a tough shell but a tender center – the heroine’s longing for a better life and real connection gives the film its emotional weight. This is another little movie of the time, with a big soul.

Hitch Hike Lady
1935 / 1:16
Tagline: “Highway hilarity that will tie up titter traffic!”
[internet archive]

This modest Depression-era comedy-drama offers more than its Poverty Row pedigree might suggest. It’s a tale of unexpected friendship and the quiet dignity of an older woman determined to find her son - and peace of mind - on the other side of the world.

Alison Skipworth, in a performance that is both sturdy and touching, plays Mrs. Amelia Blake, a British mother who believes her son is thriving as an orange farmer in California. In truth, he’s serving time in San Quentin, but the film wisely delays that revelation, allowing us to see Mrs. Blake not as a victim of deception, but as a woman of hope and grit.

The story unfolds with a series of misadventures that feel both comic and poignant. Mrs. Blake’s journey from Kent to California is marked by hardship and humanity. Her bond with Judy (Mae Clarke), a young woman adrift in the economic whirlpools of the 1930s, is the emotional core of the film. Their shared struggles - hunger, exhaustion, and the indignities of hitchhiking - forge a friendship that feels sincere.

James Ellison provides romantic interest as Jimmy, a trailer salesman with a heart, and Arthur Treacher and Warren Hymer add comic relief as con men with more affability than menace. The ensemble is surprisingly effective, and the film’s tone - while occasionally veering into melodrama - remains grounded in character.

Mrs. Blake: My son has an orange ranch in California. I wonder if you've heard of it.
Mortimer: Really? What does your son call his estate?
Mrs. Blake: Rancho San Quentin. I see you have heard of it.
Cluck: Heard of it? Why lady...
Mortimer (poking Cluck to shut up): Of course we've heard of it. It's one of the most arresting places in America. Not only is the fruit of California golden, Cluck my knave, but so is silence.
Mrs. Blake: Oh, let him tell me about it.
Mortimer: No, no. He's not very poetic. I don't think he'd do it justice.
Cluck: Aw, you see, when it comes to talkin', I'm almost a dummy. 

Mortimer (as only an Englishman could say it): Yeah.

In one episode, the trailer unhitches from its coupling and ends up in the camp of large band of harvesters. The itinerant field workers immediately want to help Mrs. Blake and the two rogues by feeding them and making sure they aren’t hurt. The kindness of the salt of the earth was a strong theme in the Thirties; perhaps we Americans wanted to reassure ourselves that WWI, the rowdy Twenties, and the Depression didn’t turn us into complete monsters that had forgotten basic rules like “help others in trouble.”

The episode ends up with Mrs. Blake preventing vigilante justice from tar and feathering the two rascals for which they feel grateful enough to decide they owe her something. It’s weird but the juxtaposition of the frightening reality of mob violence and the cultural values of communal support and reciprocity seems quintessentially American.

Alison Skipworth was often cast as a battleaxe or harridan but here she is a nice old lady with a big soul. Arthur Treacher is an amusing blowhard with a pompous vocabulary and makes a hilarious contrast with inarticulate Warren Hymer who plays the lug-thug-mug in such a way that the movie-goer does not get short of breath (I’m looking at you, Leo Gorcey). James Ellison and Mae Clarke make an attractive couple. Like I always say, Mae Clarke deserves a lot better than to be remembered only for that nasty grapefruit scene. In this she is a spark of life, smart, sassy, delightful, resilient.

Yes, the plot is thin and the pacing uneven, but the film’s feeling is in the right place. It’s a story about finding connection in unlikely places, and about the strength of women who refuse to be defined by their circumstances. For viewers willing to look past its modest production values, this is a warm movie with a surprising amount of soul.

 

The Kalends of The Thirties: The Rich Are Always with Us

Note: I think about names too much so I pondered the origin of the female name Malbro. I thought at first it was a compromise of mom’s Mallory and pop’s Brooke. But neither name was popular in the early 20^th century. Then, I thought it’s the cigarette, marketed to women in the late Twenties as a brand “Mild as May.” But given the character was born in 1910 the cigarette brand didn’t yet exist. Finally, the obvious struck me: Malbro is from Utah. But I had to reject that too because it lacks the final /ee/ sound and is not double-barreled as in Jersey Jo or Pixley Wren. So I’m at a loss.

The Rich Are Always with Us
1932 / 1:11
Tagline: “A daring story of reckless love and bankrupt morals”

I’d seen Ruth Chatterton only in the superb Dodsworth with Walter Huston, so I was curious to revisit her in The Rich Are Always with Us (1932), a glossy soap opera about wealthy New Yorkers who, lacking money worries, invent emotional ones.

Carolyn (Chatterton) is a devoted wife and one of the richest women in the city. After ten childless years of marriage, she still loves her husband Greg (John Miljan), a stockbroker diminished by the crash. His insecurity makes Carolyn mother him through his professional woes. Yet Greg, despite relying on her, imagines he loves Alyson (Adrienne Dore), a younger woman whose immaturity and jealousy suggest she enjoys the idea of hurting Carolyn. Everyone admires Carolyn as “a real lady,” a status Alyson covets but knows she’ll never achieve.

Enter Julian (George Brent), a foreign correspondent and novelist who has long loved Carolyn. She flirts lightly but resists him, fearing passion will topple her better angels: “You know perfectly well I can’t think when I’m in your arms.” Her loyalty to Greg keeps her dithering.

For comic relief, there’s 24-year-old Bette Davis as Malbro, a flighty socialite chasing Julian. Carolyn offers wry advice: “Pursue him to the point where he either proposes to you or shoots you. If he shoots you, your troubles are over. If he proposes, they’re just beginning.”

Malbro is an appealing mix of goofy teenage girl and determined adult woman. Nobody can predict if the next thing she says will be from the girl-savage or from the worldly-wise woman. Julian observes the world will be blessed the day Malbro learns to think before she speaks. As the comic relief, she gets the best lines. Here, she is horning in on the extension when Carolyn calls Julian from Paris:

Malbro: Far from loving Julian, I'm beginning to despise him. He's all flabby from not exercising and drinking too much. He's been running around with strange women.
Julian: She's a liar, darling! I've been to two parties in a month.
Malbro: I think he stays at home, smoking opium.
[laughs]
Malbro: He looks it anyhow!

The film plays like an inkblot test. Malbro may seem a sassy delight or a brat; Alyson, either immature or spiteful; Carolyn, either noble or indecisive. Brent is convincing as a patient, grown-up man, avoiding the heaviness typical of male leads of the era. Chatterton shines as a complex woman torn between duty and desire - dignified yet witty, with flashes of vulnerability.

With regard to the script, sometimes yesterday’s sophistication is today’s  puzzle. Could this be a reference to the modernist response to WWI, the loss of complacent certainty in the old pieties? Given Julian was born in 1900, he may have had dark thoughts in the aftermath of Verdun and the Somme ….

Carolyn: “Haven’t you got any morals at all?”
Julian: “Well, they began to ache when I was 16 so I had them pulled out.”

Visually, the film is a feast. The clothes are beautiful as are the cars (one might be an amazing 1933 Auburn 12-165). As for the sets, some drawing rooms look large enough to stable more than a couple of racehorses. It’s a portrait of privilege, but beneath the gloss lurks a question about shifting values in a world still reeling from war and economic collapse.

Stoic Week 2026 #7

Note: This week is Stoic Week 2026, the annual exercise in discovering whether inner peace can survive contact with social media. Enrollment is free, which immediately distinguishes it from most routes to self-improvement. Having lost my teaching outlet when the pandemic throttled the program, I now possess an excess of pedagogical energy. Stoic Week provides a useful release valve. Otherwise, I’ll end up sitting on a boulder in the middle of campus dispensing life advice like a Greek oracle that has seen too many Charlie Chan movies. “Man who read comments section voluntarily enters mosquito swamp.”

If Bad Girl teaches that strength requires vulnerability, Flaming Gold that wisdom requires questioning first impressions, The Sins ofthe Children that serenity requires focus on what is up to you, Parole Girl that character can be rebuilt through habit, and Undertow that happiness requires self-knowledge, then The Fall Guy teaches that adversity itself is seldom the real danger. The real danger is abandoning honesty and sound judgment in an effort to escape adversity. Face bad news immediately. Problems grow larger when procrastination based on fear delays action. 

The Fall Guy (1930): A Stoic Reading

The Fall Guy belongs to that fascinating group of early talkies made when the Depression had settled in to become a harsh daily reality. Jobs vanish, debts multiply, and small lapses in judgment snowball into major problems. From a Stoic perspective, the film is a reminder that the hardship of economic downturns presents serious risks but the genuine danger lies in how we respond to unemployment and money worries.

Johnny Quinlan (Jack Mulhall), a drugstore clerk, loses his job through carelessness and then makes things worse by concealing the truth from his wife, Bertha (Mae Clarke). Like many husbands under pressure, Johnny fears his wife's disappointment, dismay, anger, and worry so much that he chooses avoidance instead. The Stoics regarded this as a classic mistake. Bad news is manageable; it’s not fair to a spouse that they are not told what’s going on.

Desperate for money, Johnny accepts help from bootlegger Nifty Herman. The loan quickly becomes a leash. Everyone warns Johnny to keep his distance, but he convinces himself that necessity excuses poor judgment. Epictetus would have recognized the pattern immediately: one compromise leads to another until a man finds himself carrying burdens he neither understands nor controls. The title is less about bad luck than about the consequences of surrendering one's judgment 

Living with the Quinlans is Bert's brother Danny, played by the terrific Ned Sparks. Danny is unemployed too, but unlike Johnny he has elevated joblessness into something resembling a profession. He spends his days torturing a saxophone with the same miserable tune, creating an accidental soundtrack for Depression life: the same worries repeated endlessly with no improvement in technique.

Like Jason Compson, Sparks is hilarious as a man whose pessimism has ripened into a lifestyle choice. Danny complains about everything, contributes almost nothing, and seems permanently offended that the universe continues to expect effort from him. One begins to suspect that the family's most effective austerity measure would be leaving him on the nearest curb with his saxophone.

Yet the film remains valuable as social history. Bert supports both her irresponsible husband and her impossible brother with a loyalty that borders on sainthood. Meanwhile, despite financial desperation, almost nobody seriously considers the possibility of her seeking work. Economic collapse may shake society, but gender expectations remain remarkably durable.

The picture also captures a moment when Prohibition had lost much of its moral authority. Nobody seems especially troubled that Nifty sells liquor. The concern is practical rather than ethical. Speakeasies attract trouble, federal agents, and occasionally funerals.

As cinema, The Fall Guy is often stiff and unmistakably early-talkie. But its Stoic lesson remains relevant: unemployment, poverty, and misfortune may be beyond our control, yet honesty, judgment, and self-command are not. Johnny's downfall comes less from losing his job than from refusing to face reality directly.

The movie may be modest entertainment, but it preserves a timeless truth. Hard times test character, and avoiding the truth generally creates more suffering than the truth itself. Even when the film creaks, that lesson still lands.

European Reading Challenge #10

I read this for the European Reading Challenge 2026.

The Railway Children – E. Nesbit

A nice story for hardcore readers like us and children, though hard-boiled American kids may be impatient with English niceness and period corniness The didactic intent is more apparent here than in Nesbit’s other stories such as The Phoenix and the Carpet or its prequel The Five Children and It.

First published in 1906 and set in 1905 in rural England, the novel tells the story of Roberta (Bobbie), Phyllis and Peter, three siblings, who suddenly find themselves forced to move out of a pretty London suburb after the mysterious departure of their father one terrible night.

This change from suburb to country is experienced by the siblings as a real adventure, because arriving at Three Chimneys, they find themselves for the first time very close to the train station. The Railway infrastructure - its bridges, carriages, tunnels and signal sheds  - fascinates the three children. Everything to do with trains comes to life in the minds and reality of the three protagonists, who are brought into contact with a varied collection of people – railway workers, passengers, doctors, porters, schoolboys and all sorts of people in trades.

The move means becoming poor, which their mother does her best to make neither the kids nor other people notice. They don’t become poor in the sense that they are precariously on the edge of the abyss: they always have enough to eat, even if they have to be very careful about “either butter or jam, never both butter and jam.” Like E. Nesbit herself, the brave noble mother of Bobbie, Peter and Phyllis has to write stories for weekly magazines and annuals to get food on the table and pay the cook and maid.

Edith Nesbit must have had a wonderful mind to write the way she wrote. Her style is vivid, spontaneous, fresh and extremely fluent. I especially appreciated the metaphors that enrich the descriptions.

    They all climbed on to the top of the fence, and then suddenly there was a rumbling sound that made them look along the line to the right, where the dark mouth of a tunnel opened itself in the face of a rocky cliff; next moment a train had rushed out of the tunnel with a shriek and a snort, and had slid noisily past them. They felt the rush of its passing, and the pebbles on the line jumped and rattled under it as it went by.

    “Oh!” said Roberta, drawing a long breath; “it was like a great dragon tearing by. Did you feel it fan us with its hot wings?”

    “I suppose a dragon’s lair might look very like that tunnel from the outside,” said Phyllis.

As in the other books, the author will digress to confide in the reader. She’ll bust through that fourth wall, asking us unsociable and end-gaining post-moderns to see where our heroes Roberta, Phillys and Peter are coming from, as they worry so deeply about not hurting those who are close, about doing everyone a loving-kindness, without keeping score and without becoming prigs about it.

The happy ending will make most readers misty but just as touching is the Edwardian optimism that the world really is getting better, richer, healthier. Kind of melancholy too, our knowing that born in 1895 Peter is just the age in 1915/16 to be one of thousands of officers and squaddies whose life expectancy was about a year and a half in the trenches.

Happy Halloween

Dead on Arrival: A Field Guide to Teenage Death Songs

Teen tragedy records were essentially ancient folk ballads dressed in the clothing of postwar youth culture. Where earlier ballads told of drowned maidens, dead soldiers, and ill-fated lovers, the records of the early 1960s substituted hot rods, railroad crossings, motorcycles, and high-school romance. They transformed traditional narratives of youthful death into a commercial pop genre aimed directly at teenagers.

Like ghost stories, urban legends, and cautionary tales, teenage death songs allowed young listeners to rehearse fears about love, separation, sex, and mortality within the safe confines of a three-minute pop record. Their melodrama often seems excessive today, but it reflected genuine anxieties surrounding a generation experiencing unprecedented freedom, mobility, and risk of automobile fatalities.

Here are the classics:

Black Denim Trousers and Motorcycle Boots – The Cheers (1955)

Lieber and Stoller play the genre for laughs before it was even a genre by telling the story of a motorcycle rebel who dies in a high-speed crash, to the dismay of his ignored GF inevitably named Mary Lou.

Endless Sleep – Jody Reynolds (1958)

This rockabilly song is about a girl who walks into the ocean after a lovers' quarrel. A deep Southern darkness hangs over it, drawn from the same abyss that Dock Boggs had the courage to gaze into and name.

Teen Angel – Mark Dinning (1960)

Goosebumps for sure as a love-struck girl runs back onto railroad tracks to retrieve a ring and learns, in the most dramatic way possible, that jewelry is replaceable. Once, I saw police photographs of a man struck by a train. It is an image that has haunted me ever since, one I would give much to unsee.

Tell Laura I Love Her – Ray Peterson (1960)

It doesn’t get more sentimental than this tale of a boy who enters a stock-car race to win money for an engagement ring and dies in a fiery crash. I seem to recall dimly this song was popular when The Twist was a hit, which was the song that got me interested in listening to the radio all the time, to my parents’ consternation.

Laurie (Strange Things Happen) – Dickey Lee (1965)
Patches – Dickey Lee (1962)

Lee took multiple stabs in the genre. In Laurie, the somewhat awkward lyrics get across a story in which a boy dates a girl who turns out to have died a year earlier. Patches is much more effective lyrically; I still get torn up by the lines “pretty Patches there watchin' the door” and “floating face down in that dirty old river.” This song should not be confused with the sad inspiring song Patches with the immortal lines “Then one day a strong rain came | And washed all the crops away.”

Ebony Eyes – The Everly Brothers (1961)

Count on the Irish to be restrained but devastating in their treatment of a plane crash that separates lovers. That this great song is much less remembered than the inferior Wake Up Little Suzy makes me despise popular taste. In case you've not noticed, I’ve eaten for breakfast disdain for popularity - my own or anybody else's - since I was about ten.

Leader of the Pack – The Shangri-Las (1964)

I was eight when one of the era's greatest records was released. My friends and I thought the motorcycle crash that followed the lovers' rebellion against her parents was a hoot. We laughed at the doomed devotion of "Look out! Look out! Look out!" as children often do, with the effortless cruelty of the innocent. Only later did I recognize the shadow moving beneath the story: youth rushing headlong toward fate, love colliding with death on a dark stretch of road. Lawsy, what little monsters we were.

Johnny Remember Me – John Leyton (1961)

A dead girl's ghost calls to her lover but the realistic singer - an phlegmatic Englishman probably - figures “Well some day I guess I'll find myself another little girl To take the place of my true love.” Corny and eerie at the same time, which doesn’t happen very often.

Last Kiss - J. Frank Wilson & the Cavaliers 1964

The record's plainspoken sincerity is exactly why it works. No ghosts, no stock-car races, no doomed motorcycle rebels. Just young love, bad luck, and one of pop music's most efficient emotional sucker punches. Even listeners who spend most of the song rolling their eyes may find themselves surprisingly misty-eyed by “… she smiled and said Hold me darling for a little while.”

These form My Best Of List of teen tragedy records. They're melodramatic, earnest, and often unintentionally funny in our 2026, but they're also strangely moving. It seems such a long time ago, heartless kids snickering at ridiculous teenagers sniffling over 45-rpm records about train wrecks, car crashes, and doomed romances.

Stoic Week 2026 #6

Note: This week is Stoic Week 2026, a free online program devoted to the radical proposition that not every irritation requires a passionate reaction. Since my teaching career was collateral damage in the pandemic era, D. H. Lawrence’s “passion of instruction” remains sadly unemployed. If left unchecked, it may force me into the quad where I’ll offer unsolicited lectures under a cardboard sign reading, “Ask me about the Royal Order of Adjectives.”

A life that suits someone else may not suit you. Know your nature before making choices that shape your future. If Bad Girl teaches that strength requires vulnerability, Flaming Gold that wisdom requires questioning first impressions, The Sins of the Children that tranquility requires letting go what is not up to you, and Parole Girl that character can be rebuilt through habit, then Undertow teaches that happiness depends on honest self-knowledge. Many short-lived marriages begin when people fall in love with an idealized version of themselves or the SO rather than the person they actually are.

Undertow (1930): A Stoic Reading

"Know thyself" is the lesson at the heart of Undertow , a Pre-Code melodrama that understands how badly a life can go wrong when people mistake fantasy for self-knowledge.

The film opens with lifeguard Paul (Johnny Mack Brown) rescuing a child and winning the admiration of Sally (Mary Nolan), a city woman who claims she longs for the simplicity of life in a remote lighthouse. Paul, raised on the Georgia coast, believes her. Sally believes herself. Both are mistaken.

Three years later, they are married with a daughter and living in isolation. Paul is content because the lighthouse suits his nature. Sally is miserable. The endless waves, wind, and solitude that once seemed romantic now feel like imprisonment. She craves stimulation, company, and city life. What she imagined she wanted and what she actually needed turn out to be very different things.

From a Stoic perspective, Sally's mistake is not marrying Paul but failing to understand herself beforehand. Epictetus repeatedly warned against pursuing an imagined good without examining whether it truly fits one's nature. Sally falls in love with an idea: the noble lighthouse keeper, the lonely coast, the escape from crowds. She never asks whether she is actually suited for such a life.

Paul has his own blind spot. Because solitude comforts him, he cannot understand why it torments his wife. His failure is not cruelty but a lack of perception. He assumes that what brings him peace should bring peace to everyone. Like many Stoic cautionary examples, both husband and wife suffer from false judgments about reality.

The film becomes a study of what happens when people resist reality rather than seeing it clearly. Sally grows resentful and restless. Paul remains bewildered. Meanwhile, her rejected former fiancé Jim Payne quietly nurtures a grudge and uses his influence to prolong their unhappiness. Everyone becomes trapped by emotions they seem unable to examine head on.

The melodrama eventually escalates into blindness, revenge, and romantic conflict, with the neglected three-year-old child forgotten by both the characters and the screenplay. Yet beneath the overheated plot lies an interesting psychological insight. Sally is not wicked. She is self-deceived.

Mary Nolan gives the film's strongest performance, portraying a woman slowly realizing that she has built her life around a profound misunderstanding of her own temperament. The lighthouse itself becomes a symbol of that error: what once looked like freedom becomes a prison because it was chosen without self-knowledge.

The Stoic lesson is simple but enduring. Happiness depends not on romantic dreams or dramatic escapes but on understanding one's nature and living in accordance with it. Had Sally known herself, she would never have chosen a life she was fundamentally incapable of enjoying.

The tragedy of Undertow is not that Sally married the wrong man. It's that she never truly knew herself before making one of the most important decisions of her life.