The Ides of Perry Mason 96

Note: Before the Perry Mason TV series, in almost all his movies Raymond Burr played an outlaw. With his heavyset stature, deep commanding voice and expressive eyes, he was the brightest light in forgotten film noir outings such as Walk a Crooked Mile (1948), FBI Girl (1951), They Were So Young (1954), and A Cry in the Night (1956). This movie too - worth it but forgotten. 

The Whip Hand
1951 / 1:29
Tagline: “Foreign Scientist Spies in Vast Germ-Murder Plot!”
[internet archive]

The film opens with a blunt ideological hammer stroke: Kremlin apparatchiks, speaking in grating, caricatured Russian, plot the downfall of America. It’s a Cold War nightmare, rendered with the kind of paranoia that turns Winnoga, Wisconsin - a town whose very name evokes a simpler pastoral Land of the Free - into a focus of realpolitik dread. The choice of setting is no accident; it’s a deliberate inversion of the heartland mythos, a place where the soil is poisoned not by foreign agents but by the complicity of its own citizens.

Enter Elliott Reid, a journalist on a fishing vacation, whose arrival in Winnoga fulfills Tolstoy’s dictum that all stories are either about a journey or a stranger’s arrival. Reid is the latter, and his presence is met with the kind of guarded hostility that suggests not just small-town insularity but something more sinister. The lake, once teeming with trout, is now dead - an ecological mystery that doubles as a metaphor for the moral rot beneath the town’s surface.

Reid’s investigation leads him to Mr. Peterson, a landowner whose opportunism - buying up property after the fish die-off marks him as a man not in simpatico with the rhythms of big nature and cozy community. The townspeople’s evasions, their forced laughter, and their long, appraising stares evoke a kind of Midwestern noir, where the menace is not in shadowy alleyways but in the bright daylight of Main Street.

Raymond Burr plays a hotelier whose joviality is so forced it curdles into menace. His laugh is a performance within a performance, a signal to the audience that the town’s surface charm is a mask for something darker. His henchmen - Peter Brocco’s rodent-like presence and Michael Steele’s Aryan brutality - are less characters than archetypes, personifications of a violence that is both personal and political.

The cinematography captures the piney woods and sandy soil with a documentary-like authenticity, but the close-ups - tight, accusatory - render familiar American faces as foreign, uncanny. It’s a visual strategy that suggests to the movie-goer that the threat is not external but, like contaminants in soil, filth in drinking water, already existing in the nation itself.

The film’s thematic core - biomedical experimentation on unwilling subjects - echoes the darkest chapters of 20th-century science, such as the Tuskegee syphilis study, CIA mind-control programs like MKUltra, and human radiation experiments conducted by government agencies. It’s a narrative that brushes against the ethical abyss, evoking the unease of Oliver Sacks’s Awakenings and the moral inquiries of Deborah Blum’s Ghost Hunters. The horror here is not supernatural but systemic, a reminder that the machinery of progress often runs on the bodies of the powerless.

Critics may dismiss the film as melodramatic, but its sincerity - its willingness to confront the moral compromises of Cold War America - renders it a document of its time. It’s a film that doesn’t just entertain; it indicts, implicates, and ultimately unsettles.

As for the connection with the Perry Mason TV series, Carla Belenda went back to her birth name Sally Bliss by the time she was cast in TCOT Playboy Pugilist. Lurene Tuttle, Burr’s distant and cold mother, was the defendant no fewer than six times in TCOT Substitute Face, TCOT Artful Dodger, TCOT Loquacious Liar, TCOT Shoplifter's Shoe (with Margaret O’Brien and Len Nimoy), TCOT Grinning Gorilla and TCOT Avenging Angel.

Pre-Mason Raymond Burr
Please Murder Me (1956) [internet archive] [my review]
I Love Trouble (1948) [internet archive] [my review]
Sleep My Love (1948) [internet archive] [my review]
Ruthless (1948) [internet archive] [my review]
Pitfall (1948) [internet archive] [my review]
Walk a Crooked Mile (1948) [internet archive] [my review]
Raw Deal (1948) [internet archive] [my review]
Station West (1948) [my review]
Red Light (1949) [internet archive] [my review]
Abandoned (1949) [internet archive] [my review]
Borderline (1950) [internet archive] [my review]
Unmasked (1950) [internet archive] [my review]
The Whip Hand (1951) [internet archive] [my review]