Stoic Week 2026 #1

Note: This week is Stoic Week 2026, the annual event that invites participants to “live like a Stoic for a week.” It’s online, completely free, and considerably cheaper than years of therapy. Besides, now that I no longer teach (the pandemic provided the excuse to can the program I taught in), what D. H. Lawrence called “the passion of instruction” has to find a host lest I take to sitting on a rock in the middle of campus behind a sign saying “Ask Me Anything.”

This Pre-Code movie echoes Stoicism with its advice to stop managing appearances and start facing reality. Fear, pride, and false beliefs create more misery than circumstances ever do. What director Borzage ultimately dramatizes is a Stoic paradox: true strength is not lofty self-containment a la Mr. Spock or John Wick but the willingness to meet reality honestly, together with others, without fear of appearing vulnerable.

A Stoic Reading of Bad Girl (1931)

Frank Borzage's Bad Girl is often described as a Depression-era romance, but viewed through a modern Stoic lens it becomes a study of how fear, pride, and mistaken judgments can keep people from receiving the very things they most desire.

Dot Haley (Sally Eilers) and Eddie Collins (James Dunn) genuinely love one another. Their suffering arises from a failure of honest communication. Like many people who grew up among unsympathetic types, they mistake vulnerability for weakness. The Stoics would recognize this immediately as a problem of judgment rather than circumstance.

Both characters come from difficult backgrounds and have learned the same lesson: protect yourself by telling nobody nothing. They conceal worries, mute emotions, and avoid direct expressions of need. What appears to be strength is actually a defensive posture toward life. Epictetus warned that many people become prisoners of false beliefs. Dot and Eddie believe that revealing fear, love, or uncertainty will diminish them and lay them open to hurt. As a result, they create unnecessary isolation inside a marriage built on genuine devotion.

Eddie hides behind jokes and slang because humor feels safer than honesty. He dismisses affection as "mushy stuff" and mistakes emotional reserve for masculine strength when it is really fear in disguise.

Dot's pregnancy intensifies these fears. Haunted by her mother's death in childbirth, she suffers as much from imagined futures as present realities. As Marcus Aurelius observed, people often burden themselves more with anticipation than with the thing itself.

Eddie also ties his worth to his ability to provide, treating financial struggle as a personal failure rather than a circumstance to be faced honestly. The Stoics never condemned material success, but they insisted that it had better not become the foundation of self-respect. Eddie's refusal to discuss money openly stems from the belief that financial struggle reflects personal failure.

The film's most revealing irony is that both spouses think they are protecting each other. Dot hides her worries about pregnancy. Eddie conceals his anxieties about money and responsibility. Each assumes silence is an act of love. In reality, silence deprives them of true intimacy. Their suffering grows precisely because they attempt to carry burdens alone.

What makes Bad Girl endure is its understanding that people often fear emotional honesty more than hardship itself. Dot and Eddie's real obstacle is not poverty, pregnancy, or social pressure but the mistaken belief that strength means self-containment. Borzage's profoundly Stoic insight is that tranquility comes not from suppressing emotion but from confronting reality honestly. Nearly a century later, the film remains moving because its lesson is timeless: people suffer less from circumstances than from fear, pride, and false judgments. Happiness arrives when Dot and Eddie stop managing appearances and begin facing life together.

Perry Mason 179: TCOT Reluctant Model

Note: In the 66^th Mason novel from 1962, an anxious world finally learns Della Street’s address - the Crittmore Apartments on West Selig Avenue. The novel is dripping with mid-century cool: Drake records a phone call and casually kills the legal beep, credit cards are the new craze (though Mason’s client is strictly cash-only), and Drake name-drops the dye-transfer color photo process like a hipster snapper. Gardner even unveils a cutting-edge way to peg time of death - blood-cooling rates. The term “Lushbaugh method” is still used today because Gardner coined the name in this novel.

The Case of the Reluctant Model - Erle Stanley Gardner

It begins with something trivial, as these things often do: a question about a painting. Lattimer Rankin, an art expert, comes to Perry Mason with a grievance. Another expert, Collin Durant, has cast doubt on a canvas Rankin sold to Otto Olney. A model, Maxine Lindsay, claims it’s a fake. Rankin wants to sue. Mason advises restraint - better to secure Maxine’s sworn statement and let Olney handle the matter. Sensible, measured. But sense rarely prevails.

Maxine testifies. Olney makes a statement to the press, all bravado and polish. That evening, Durant appears at Mason’s office, demanding to be heard. Mason refuses. Then Maxine calls, her voice taut, saying she’s leaving town. No explanation. Mason sends Paul Drake to follow her. The next day, Durant is found dead - in Maxine’s apartment. She has vanished.

From here, the story coils tighter. Mason informs Tragg, but soon finds himself in another city, speaking to Maxine, only to be caught by Tragg again. Rankin’s lawsuit fades; Mason now defends Maxine, who is drowning in circumstantial evidence. Durant had leverage - knowledge of secrets surrounding Maxine’s sister and her husband - and he used it. He also commissioned fake portraits of Maxine, another grotesque example of punishing a woman for her beauty.

The preliminary hearing is a parade of damning fragments. A woman saw Maxine at a bus station phone booth; her gun was found in a locker there. That gun killed Durant. A neighbor glimpsed her near the apartment at the time of death. Canary has disappeared. The artist produces the disputed portrait. The judge listens, impassive, as witnesses file past. The case seems airtight. Is it? Who placed the gun in the locker? Who pocketed the $2,000 for the forgery? And why does every answer feel like a door opening onto another, darker room?

Gardner’s ending strains credulity. Coincidence piles upon coincidence: an unlocked door, a conveniently found gun, a victim oblivious to an intruder’s presence. The killer discards the weapon where Maxine had been, sealing her fate. It feels hurried, as if Gardner, weary of wandering in his own topiary labyrinth, chose escape with a trimmer shearing through the nearest hedge.

Still, the novel fascinates. It breaks Mason’s usual pattern, revealing his stoic philosophy and Tragg’s authoritarian fairness. And those antique Americanisms - “as dead as a mackerel,” “take a powder” - linger like ghosts of another age. These idioms seep into my vocabulary and make 50-something women at work say softly, wonderingly to me, “You sound like my dad.”

 

Perry Mason 178: Bachelors Get Lonely

Bachelors Get Lonely - A. A. Fair aka Erle Stanley Gardner

This 1961 effort serves up the usual Cool & Lam cocktail: Bertha’s penny-pinching optimism, Donald’s improvisational genius, and a murder that blows their plans sky-high.

Bertha is thrilled to land Montrose Carson, a respectable developer who looks like the kind of client that will help the firm dodge the messes into which clients usually drag them. Carson suspects someone in his office is leaking sensitive information to a rival who keeps beating his bids. Before Donald’s bunk detector even starts to flash yellow, Bertha has cooked up a plan to smoke out the mole and is her usual smug self over her brilliance.

Naturally, the case pops like the culture. A corpse appears, Donald is hip-deep in trouble, and Lt. Frank Sellers is measuring Lam’s neck for the noose. Bertha, buying into Sellers’ accusations, charges betrayal and accuses Donald of tanking the firm. The only suspense, as in past novels in the series, is whether this is the time Donald can’t find his way out.

The title nods to Lam’s bachelorhood and his role as a faux playboy heir in a sting operation to expose business espionage. Espionage leads to murder, murder to secrets, and secrets to rationalizations like: “How many people live the orthodox lives they’re supposed to?” Gardner was a sympathetic guy, ever ready to assure readers they weren’t nearly as weird as most people.

The novel is absurd fun: comic relief, snappy setups, and coincidences that glide rather than jar. Lam oscillates between out of control and cool as a cucumber, while Bertha clutches her purse like Mr. Krab in diamonds. Switchboards buzz, cafeterias hum, and motels come with separate units – Nostalgia City for readers born in the Fifties.

As always, every babe falls for Donald (including a stripper named Daffodil), though he’s mostly a gentleman - except when looking down Elsie Brand’s top and calling her “Sister.” Sellers, meanwhile, tramples constitutional rights, and Gardner slips in practical advice: “I refuse to talk to you… until I consult with an attorney.” Good to know if life plays dirty.

The wrap-up isn’t as baroque as a Perry Mason finale, but the dialogue crackles with antique slang and blessedly few ten-dollar words. Gardner, writing as A.A. Fair, keeps the tone light, the pace brisk, and the ethics flexible.

Bottom line: Bachelors Get Lonely delivers vintage Cool & Lam - industrial intrigue, murder, and morals as flexible as a yoga teacher’s spine - with enough charm to make you forgive the creaky coincidences. Not top-tier, but a solid slice of mid-century pulp entertainment.

 

Perry Mason 177: Great Day in the Morning

Note: Raymond Burr plays – surprise! – a heavy in this western. He brings to his performance as village potentate Jumbo Means his imposing physical presence (he looks close to 300 pounds) and his distinctive intensity. As the owner of palaces of vice and sin, his character has his shady side. He is an influential Northerner in a predominantly Unionist town in Colorado, so he is in the thick of pre-Civil War strains.

Great Day in the Morning
1956 / 1:37
Tagline: “I like walking alone - no ties.”

It’s a strange movie with an unlikely hero. Set just before the Civil War, it features Owen Pentecost, a character who keeps himself emotionally distant from everyone around him. Robert Stack, an actor with a range up there with Fred MacMurray and George Raft, was perfectly cast to play a loner who says “Sure, I'm loyal. I've got an undying loyalty to myself and no one else, nothing else.”

On the eve of the Civil War in 1861 Owen Pentecost of North Carolina arrives in Denver as a stranger. But he quickly achieves the American dream (money and influence) by winning a saloon cum hotel in a card game rigged in his favor by Ruth Roman, mama of the attached brothel. He is thus able to invest in gold digging start-ups, gathering in half their findings in exchange for his financing.

In the over-heated times before the Civil War, everybody has to choose a side. There’s no “let us all reason together” here, the times don’t allow for subtleties like conscience or brotherhood. Pentecost is from North Carolina but the other Southerners don’t like or trust him because they’ve not known him for years. The Union men in town don’t like him because he is a Tar Heel.

Pentecost's interactions with women highlight his strange solitude. Boston Grant (Ruth Roman) ardently pursues him and not just for his money and power. Though she wants to be his helpmeet in business, he evinces zero affection for her. His relationship with Ann Merry Alaine (Virginia Mayo) intermittently sparks up but romance sputters out. This triangle in the movie features good acting by the actresses.

But the triangle adds to a crowded movie. Pre-war stresses, amoral jerk as hero, two plucky women after the same grouchy jerk and more – the subplot of an orphan boy who is hoorawed by the local kids because they’ve not known him for years so they don’t trust him. The gorgeous Technicolor is the reason to watch this movie.

As for the connection with the classic Perry Mason TV series, hate-filled Yankee Leo Gordon appeared in TCOT Dangerous Dowager as an honest casino owner. Bar employee who has a great scene with Stack, Peter Whitney played an ill-tempered farmer in TCOT Pathetic Patient, an irascible gangster in TCOT Stand-In Sister and a venerable sea captain in TCOT Wrongful Writ. Ubiquitous character actor Regis Toomey, a priest in this movie, was in TCOT Loquacious Liar and TCOT 12th Wildcat.

The Ides of Exploitation: Mystic Circle Murder

Note: Everybody’s a critic. I’m informed that I’ve bestowed “almost Dostoevskian moral gravity” upon a cheap exposé picture. Guilty as charged. Give me a 68-minute Poverty Row programmer and before the second reel I’ve discovered alienation, sexual politics, class warfare, psychic trauma, and the collapse of Western civilization. Perhaps occasionally I should just let the guy in the turban be a crook. OTOH, just wait until you see posts for Stoic Week 2026.

Mystic Circle Murder aka Religious Racketeers  aka Madame Houdini Speaks
1938 / 1:08 minutes
Tagline: “Thrilling Chilling Exposé of the Fake Medium Racket!”

In the dim corridors of human grief, where memory clings like burrs to the soul, there are phonies who prey upon the broken. This exploitation film, brief and strange, does not seek entertainment for the masses. It is a warning, a document of moral decay, and a tribute to the lonely struggle of Beatrice Houdini, widow of the great illusionist, who devoted her life to exposing the lies of spiritualist charlatans.

She appears early in the film, not as a character, but as a conscience. Her voice is clear, her purpose unwavering: to protect the grieving from those who would exploit their sorrow.

The story centers on a wealthy steel heiress, Helene LeBerthron, whose guilt over her mother’s death makes her vulnerable. She is young, pale, blue-eyed, and fragile - an image of innocence that invites corruption. Her hope is not strength but weakness, and the audience, helpless, watches her drift toward deception. We movie-goers whisper, “Girl, listen to your skeptical boyfriend.”

The medium, La Gagge, is no mystic. He is a technician of illusion, a manipulator of grief. He explains to his accomplice - who smokes constantly, as if to remind us that death is always near - that belief must be coaxed, not forced. The machinery of deceit is literal: wires, soundboards, Orientalist props. But the machinery of psychological manipulation is more insidious. The medium isolates the mark, surrounds her with unfamiliar sights and sounds, and replaces her beliefs with ritual and mumbo-jumbo. He uses loneliness as a tool, and sexual attraction as bait.

This is not a tale of ghosts. It is a tale of how easily the human mind, weakened by loss guilt and shame, can be bent. The film shows how repetition, isolation, and suggestion can break down reason. It is not unlike the methods used in darker institutions - prisons, institutions, cults - where obedience is extracted not by force, but by erosion of the self.

The actors do what they can. They are not great, but they are honest. The dialogue is sometimes clumsy, serving exposition more than character. Yet the film moves quickly, and dignity is preserved. It is not art, but it is truth.

This film is for those who study belief, who ask why people cling to illusions, and how grief can become a weapon. It is not comforting. It is not popular. But it is necessary. In a world where deception is often rewarded, it reminds us that truth must be defended - even when it is unwelcome, even when it is ignored.

 

 

Perry Mason 176: Donkeys, District Attorneys, and the Price of Respectability

Note: Erle Stanley Gardner’s background gave him two ways of looking at small-town life. Because he grew up in mining towns, he saw how power often came from money, reputation, and social position rather than from official authority. Later, as a lawyer, he saw how these local power structures could affect the courts, especially when an outsider was accused of a crime. These ideas appear in several Perry Mason novels: powerful local groups protect themselves, outsiders are treated with suspicion, and justice often requires someone from outside the community to step in.

Donkeys, District Attorneys, and the Price of Respectability: Crime in the Small-Town Middle Class

In these three non-Mason novels, Gardner explores the connection between law, reputation, and money in small towns and rural communities. Everyone knows everyone else, and people are very aware of what their neighbors think of them. Most characters are neither rich nor poor. They belong to the lower middle or middle class, and their social position can easily be lost. Because of this, justice is affected by gossip, reputation, fear, and the desire to protect one’s place in the community. Gardner is especially interested in people whose small amount of money and social standing makes them determined to appear respectable.

In The Case of the Backward Mule (1946), Gardner sets the story in a farming community where property means more than simply owning something. The mule is somewhat comic, but the argument over it becomes very serious. Ownership represents independence, respectability, and a person’s standing in the community. The farmers and property owners are not wealthy, but they have enough to lose. A dispute that might seem unimportant to an outsider therefore becomes very important because it threatens both their livelihoods and their reputations.

The Doug Selby novels explore the same problem from another angle. In The D.A. Calls It Murder (1937), reputation is almost a form of money. Shopkeepers, clerks, secretaries, and other working people fear scandal because gossip can destroy a person’s standing even before the truth is known. Selby may be the district attorney, but even he has to deal with local pressures. Justice becomes difficult because people who claim to respect the law are also frightened of scandal and worried about protecting themselves.

The D.A. Breaks an Egg (1949) shows how fragile this social order can be. The Lennox family wants to appear decent and law-abiding, but their position is insecure. They are not wealthy enough to feel safe, and they fear falling into poverty or disgrace. This is an important Gardner theme: people sometimes break rules not because they are naturally dishonest, but because they are afraid of losing their family, income, or reputation. Their questionable choices are defensive rather than predatory. They bend the rules because they fear ruin, not because they want power over others.

Taken together, these novels suggest that small-town justice is not as simple or innocent as it may appear. It is shaped by property, money, gossip, reputation, and the fear of losing social status. Gardner is less interested in obvious villains than in the everyday compromises of ordinary people. Respectability protects them, but it also traps them. The truth matters, but so does the price people may have to pay for admitting it.

Perry Mason 175: TCOT Worried Waitress

Note: Although this 1966 entry lacks the fireworks of Mason’s most celebrated cases, it fascinates for its subtext. Gardner probes enduring issues - the ethics of witness coaching and the clash of poverty and pride - while reminding us that justice is not a flawless machine but a fragile human process, vulnerable to error and manipulation.  

The Case of the Worried Waitress - Erle Stanley Gardner

Rules were rules, and in the restaurant business they were ironclad: servers were forbidden to solicit professional advice from customers. But Katherine Ellis - Kit to her friends - was desperate. She had no one else to turn to. So when Perry Mason and Della Street finished lunch, Mason left his card beneath the plate with a message that was pure Perry: “My usual fee is ten dollars. Under the plate there’s a tip of eleven.” It was a gesture that broke the monotony of routine and set in motion a chain of events that would test human frailty and the criminal justice system.

Kit’s story was simple - and complicated. An orphan, penniless, living with an aunt who pinched pennies until they screamed. The woman hoarded cash in hatboxes, skimped on food, and even posed as blind to sell pencils outside a factory. Mason’s instincts flared. “Get out,” he told Kit. “If that money disappears, you’ll take the fall.” But the warning came too late. The aunt was assaulted, robbed, and left for dead. Kit was arrested.

The case should have been straightforward. It wasn’t. There was Mildred Aldie, a blind woman who seemed to impersonate Kit’s aunt for reasons no one could explain. There was Stuart Baxley, a family friend with too much interest in the aunt’s fortune - and a willingness to plant evidence. And there were two subplots colliding like runaway trains: two wives battling over a dead man’s estate and rival factions fighting for control of a corporation.

Gardner wove these threads into a tapestry of greed, deception, and human frailty.

Yet for all the complexity, something was missing: urgency. Even Lieutenant Tragg, who made the arrest, seemed unconvinced of Kit’s guilt. He looked the other way when Mason bent the rules - technically legal maneuvers that skirted the edge of propriety. The trial, usually Gardner’s crescendo, felt muted. Hamilton Burger prosecuted with the resignation of a man who knew he was destined to lose - again.

The real drama lies not only in the verdict but in the social and legal systems, and the human beings – a.k.a. imperfect thinkers - who keep them running. In that sense, the novel offers something rarer than courtroom theatrics: a glimpse into the machinery of law and the secrets that shape its outcomes.