Perry Mason 136: Tribute to John Dall

Note: John Dall should have been a star. His Oscar-nominated turn opposite Bette Davis in The Corn Is Green (1945) promised a glittering career. Hitchcock saw something in him - perhaps that blend of vulnerability and sly ambiguity - and cast him in Rope and Strangers on a Train. Yet Dall never became a fixture of film or early Sixties television. Maybe he lacked the cocktail-party charm that oils Hollywood’s machinery. Or maybe, in a culture obsessed with labels, his difference was a liability.

Tribute to John Dall

On the classic Perry Mason, Dall left a quartet of indelible impressions - each role a study in coded queerness, whether intentional or not.

Julian Kirk in The Case of the Lonely Eloper (1962)
Julian is the poor relation, living on the margins of a trust-fund estate - a “confirmed bachelor,” as the euphemism went. He’s witty, sharp-eyed, and knows survival depends on reading the room. His concern for Merle, the sleepwalking heiress, feels genuine, yet there’s a brittle edge: Julian understands that wealth corrupts, and blood ties won’t save him if the family turns on him. When Merle frames him for murder, it’s a bitter reminder - trust the rich as far as you can throw their private jet.

Edward Franklin in The Case of the Weary Watchdog (1962)
Here, Dall slithers through the role of an Asian-art expert and blackmailer with reptilian glee. He toys with victims, savoring their discomfort. His cruelty has a sexual undertone - especially toward Trixie, the gentle shop girl he harasses. Franklin’s death by bludgeoning with a Chinese dog statue feels justly poetic. Paul Drake calls the weapon “a tired little mutt,” but the audience cheers: this odious victim needed killing.

Colin Durant in The Case of the Reluctant Model (1963)
Durant is all polish and poison - a connoisseur who weaponizes charm. He manipulates a beatnik painter into forging Gauguin copies for a divorcing couple, then blackmails both sides. When the artist learns Durant pocketed thousands while tossing him a pittance, rage erupts. The killing is accidental, but who mourns? Durant is the kind of elegant predator that nobody is going to miss. Watching him glide through scenes, one senses a man who’s always calculating - and always alone.

Roan Daniel in The Case of the Laughing Lady (1965)
Dall’s final Mason role is pure camp: an interior decorator who invents dynasties (“Sulu period,” “Shalimar era”) with a straight face. He berates movers for imagined dings, preens before clients, and drops bons mots like poisoned petals. He survives the episode - no small feat for a fussbudget diva - but ends up testifying, his hauteur punctured by stern circumstances presided over by unamused authority.

These performances shimmer with subtext. Julian’s outsider status, Franklin’s sadism, Durant’s cultivated amorality, Roan’s flamboyant fraudulence - each hints at coded lives in a straightjacketed era ridden by stereotypes and prejudice. Dall understood these men because he lived in that world: one where discretion was armor, and desire had to masquerade as bemused wit.

Why didn’t Dall’s promise blossom? Hollywood in the Fifties and Sixties was a fortress of compulsory masculinity. Some, like Raymond Burr, managed long-term relationships behind walls and told whoppers that make us post-moderns groan. Others - less adept at camouflage or unwilling to play the game - paid the price. Dall, by most accounts, drank heavily in his last decade. He died in 1972, just 51 years old, felled by a heart attack. A tragic coda to a career that began with brilliance and ended in silence.

Watching these Mason episodes today, one feels a pang. Beneath the camp and cunning lies a gifted actor navigating a hostile culture. His characters - schemers, aesthetes, lonely men - mirror the compromises queer lives demanded in mid- 20^th century America.