The Ides of Perry Mason 55

Note: On the 15^th of every month we take a trip to Perryverse. Reviewed below per a theme are episodes of the greatest legal drama TV series in the history of Creation. While in hospital in 2020, I was watching an episode on MeTV in the morning and in response to Burr's eyes boring into a hapless culprit on the edge of spilling all on the stand, a young nurse said, “I love Perry Mason.” I said, “Dramatic stories, good acting, nice clothes and cool cars.”

No Courtroom Scene 

The Case of the Silent Partner (1957) 

All the B-movie tropes crowd out the courtroom scene in the sixth of 270 shows. Too good for this sinful vale of tears, the hard-pressed owner of a flower shop not only deals with an alcoholic husband with a gambling jones but is also pressured by a gangster who wants her shop. Noir standbys also include poisoned chocolates, an arson fire, and a hard-boiled female with a heart of gold. A decent if dumb person is naïve enough to think a bad guy can be reasoned with and so makes a date to see him, as usual in the evening. In this case our innocent heroine finds the criminal as dead as a mackerel, shot in the chest with her husband's gun. Or course, she breaks the Prime Directive: When you find a corpus, don’t pick up the gun. It has the oft-heard line so familiar that it makes us sigh with content, “He was dead when I got there. You gotta believe me, Mr. Mason.” The noir look of this one is compelling, because the director, Christian Nyby, edited To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep.

The Case of the Baited Hook (1957)

Three unique scenes push aside the courtroom climax. A man, who doesn’t identify himself, arrives at Mason’s apartment with a veiled woman in tow. As a retainer, he gives Perry a $10,000 bill, torn in half. In a somber scene in the office, Abigail Leeds, excellently portrayed by Geraldine Wall, wants Perry to protect her ward Carol from the crook who mismanages her trust fund, Albert Tydings. In her middle age, Geraldine Wall often played a no-nonsense female, frank to the point of hard-boiled; she would have been a good Bertha Cool in her thirties and forties. Finally, this episode has what I call the “door ajar” scene. Frequently in the evening Paul and Perry visit a residence, find the front door ajar, stroll in and find a corpus. In this episode, they open a closet door and the corpus falls out, in a scene as funny as it is startling. As one fan born in the Fifties points out, it's like seeing Emil Sitka fall out of the closet in a Three Stooges short.

The Case of the Velvet Claws (1963)

The courtroom scene is replaced by an interrogation scene in which Perry breaks down his lying client, the mendacious Eva Belter. When Eva realizes that Perry has lied to her in order to trick the truth out of her, she slaps Mason, then goes down slowly on her knees, a desperate sobbing mess. It’s a scene about three miles beyond the usual breakdown on the stand.

Patricia Barry plays Eva, a femme fatale that Mason's office manager Della Street can’t stand on sight, shrewdly sensing Eva to be a gold digger that has slid by on velvet and claws without working a day in her life. Barbara Hale's Della has few lines in this episode but her cold glares and eye rolls speak volumes while the tale-spinning Eva draws Perry into a plan to pay off a blackmailer, a strategy Perry never approves of.

The Case of the Careless Kitten (1965)

The courtroom sequence isn't missed due to visually interesting scenes taken out of the Hitchcockian sketch book. The first scene is pure suspense as the camera follows a cat doing peak cat, sinuously gliding through knick-knacks high on top of a china cabinet as the viewer grows more tensely certain the cat is going to knock one or two over out of sheer feline devilry. In a disreputable hotel, with his high scratchy voice, Percy Helton plays a seedy desk clerk. Answering an insistently ringing phone with creepy aplomb is Hedley Mattingly, playing what the ubiquitous Allan Melvin calls a “spooky Limey butler.” Other scenes in this busy episode show a body found, the cat poisoned, a human poisoned, and a guy shot and wounded.

The acting is exceptional too. In 1964, impressed by seeing her on TV, Alfred Hitchcock cast Louise Latham as Tippi Hedren’s mother in Marnie. Latham is incredible as dusty flinty Aunt Matilda Shore, whose husband Franklin disappeared with his secretary. Still angry as hell, Aunt Matilda refuses to probate the will, much to the chagrin of her indigent brother-in-law, played as nervous as a cat by Lloyd Corrigan, and her niece, played by talented Julie Sommars, later J.J. in the too-smart-to-last sitcom The Governor and J.J. In a cute if bizarre wardrobe choice, Sommars wears a sailor outfit that will call to mind a Japanese junior high school girl. The Siamese named Monkey is pretty cute though a little fiend.