Barbara Hale Week 4/4

Note: The last entry in our Barbara Hale Film Festival. She starred as Della Street, the office manager and confidential secretary of Perry Mason from 1957 to 1966. She had a solid career in full-length movies, just as flourishing as William Talman and probably moreso than Burr and Hopper. She could both 'girl next door' and 'femme fatale.'

The Houston Story
1956 / 1:19
Tagline: “Terror Over Texas!”
[internet archive]

This B-movie is a crime story produced in the waning days of the genre known as film noir. It’s an uneven movie with a shallow script. For fans of Perry Mason, however, the main attractions are two fine actresses. Barbara Hale was a regular on the show as Mason’s faithful sidekick Della Street. And Jeanne Cooper appeared five times as a guest star, usually playing a difficult complex woman.

Hale goes platinum blond in this picture. Lest I go completely ‘male gazey,’ I’ll just opine “In-frickin-credible” and let it go at that. Against her girl-next-door type in TheFirst Time and Clay Pigeon, she plays the ambitious ex-wife of Gene Barry's now dead foreman in the oil fields. Bored with a stable homelife and money problems, she deserted her happy home and took a new name, only to end up as a chanteuse and the mistress of a tool employed by the mobbed-up crime czar of Houston.

Jeanne Cooper plays Gene Barry's current girlfriend. Madge is a waitress, all wholesome loyalty, loving compassion and warm dependability. She’s even adaptable when, in the tradition of nice GF’s in film noir movies, she says they can live on the run from the gangsters out to snuff him. Her mistake is that she thinks that Gene Barry loves her and is not a crook. But in the end after she realizes his true wolfish nature, she returns to her core values of honesty and courage. The movie-goer can see her inner turmoil before she adds the proviso “unless somebody is in danger” to our cultural rule “don’t snitch” and moves the story to its inevitable conclusion.

The story gets rolling when Gene Barry pressures Hale into introducing him to the local crime lord Edward Arnold and his minion Paul Richards. Barry presents to the wise guys his plan to rustle oil directly from the fields and sell it on the grey market to unethical distributors and countries like Cuba under embargo. The wise guys agree to the plan, but Barry is a victim of his own smarts and ambition. Barry wants to rise in the syndicate, and Arnold and Richards plan to knock him off as soon as they learn what he knows about oil rustling.

Barry is clever and magnetic but he’s ignorant in various ways. He’s disloyal: he uses his childhood  friend as a patsy, the fall-guy whose signature is on all the contracts. He’s fickle: he cheats on honest Cooper with temptress Hale. He’s ruthless: he sends Cooper to his apartment though it is probably being watched by the hit men. He’s decadent: The montage shows him smiling as he orchestrates grand theft and bribery, looking nasty but charming (Barry was always charming) as he ruins businesses and livelihoods with crime. He’s dumb: he can’t imagine any rivals would really do him in, doesn’t see that he is just as vulnerable to a couple of rounds to the brain pan as the next guy. He actually says, “I’m the big boy now and nobody’s gonna get me out.”

The script comes close to a criticism of the “corporate man,” a story of rivalry among street-fighters in suits but doesn’t quite get there. The script is also blurry as a morality tale. It is not clear why Barry and Hale fall for each other so hard, nor why Barry is so callous about using a childhood friend like a tool. I suppose we movie-goers are supposed assume that Barry and Hale are both birds of a hedonistic feather, merely greedy for good times.

The pace of the movie, however, is brisk though director William Castle (yes, the William Castle) does give us breathers. One is on top of an observation tower at night (yeah, we get a plunge unto death – cool!). And another follows two hitmen through Houston International Airport, which is attractive to us movie-goers who like mid-20^th century infrastructure.

As for the connection with the classic Perry Mason TV series, Frank Jenks, who played the patsy best friend, drove a cab in this movie just as he did in TCOT Deadly Double. Jenks played a barman that had seen it all in TCOT Violent Vest. Jenks had a craggy face that made him look like an archetypal white working class American man. Paul Richards also appeared twice on the show, in TCOT Startled Stallion and TCOT Melancholy Marksman. Both characters were troubled souls.