The Nones of Perry Mason 74

Note: Buffs of classic Hollywood know that Raymond Burr played the murdering husband identified by apartment-bound James Stewart in Hitchcock’s Rear Window. But only hardcore readers who have somehow found their way to this blog know that before he landed the Perry Mason role in 1956 that was to be his ticket to immortality, Raymond Burr was the Portly Prince of Noir.

I Love Trouble
1948 / black and white / 1:35
Tagline: “Five Lovelies Leave a Trail of Perfume … and Murder!”
[internet archive]

Our buddy Burr has two lines in one scene – with shadow covering half his grim visage. His bulk compels our attention as he sizes up with his spellbinding eyes hero Franchot Tone. Burr seems to be measuring Tone for a beating. Tone has been hired by a well-connected LA realtor-politician to identify the blackmailer of his wife. After Tone pursues leads in Portland, the wife’s natal city, he returns to LA to dead bodies, edgy police and thugs that roughly request the information he gathered.

Franchot Tone saves his dignity by delivering noir one-liners with style and grace. He may be feeling that old “coming down in the world” feeling due to having to appear in a B movie, but he’s a true professional. What’s curious about his ambiguous character is that the viewer can’t guess how he is going to approach an interview, especially with women.

Burr’s disheveled partner in crime is John Ireland. He made a career of looking tough and at least half-way down the road to PsychoVille. Though the formidable one, it is Burr’s role to ensure that Ireland doesn't get carried away and kill anybody in the heat of the moment.

For comic relief, we get two wonderful actors. Glenda Farrell cracks wise as the tough city girl, game, canny, reliable as the PI’s ever faithful secretary. Tone asks her, “Ever have the feeling you're being watched or followed, and she replies sourly, “Not nearly enough.” Sid Tomack plays a wise-cracking bistro owner who comes to an unhappy end because he knows too much and wants to monetize his excess of knowledge. Appearing three times on the classic Perry Mason, Tomack was especially great in a satirical scene in The Case of the Envious Editor.

The main draw, however, is the bevy who possess a similar beauty. This feeds into the noir themes of doubleness, identity, and misdirection. Janis Carter and Lynn Merrick both shanghai a movie-goer’s attention wherever they enter a scene.  Janet Blair, a breathtaking pin-up, is the nice girl we’d take home to ma and warn pa to heed his better angels. Adele Jergens is the Jezebel we’d keep secret from the homefolks.

All this but we movie-goers are treated to location shots of Late Forties L.A., with brutal concrete buildings on Hollywood Boulevard. Venice Beach used to have clam chowder shacks where proprietors would say, “You can have clam chowder and clam chowder,” to which you would reply laconically, “I’ll have clam chowder” like a real noir hero. Oil derricks in Santa Monica, so cool. I like mid-century industrial infrastructure probably I grew up in a house a five-minute walk to the Rouge Plant. 

Though complicated, this diverting movie is redeemed by its Chandleresque writing. Caretaker of the mansion, where the kidnapped PI was kidnapped, drugged, beaten, and interrogated, when asked what the place is called, “733, that’s all. Places like this don’t have a name.” PI: “That’s what you think.”