Perry Mason 169: The Best of Season 5

Note: In the classic Perry Mason TV series, cultural quirks of 70 years ago abound: nearly everyone seems to keep a firearm tucked in a glove compartment or handbag, a norm that feels startling today. And then there’s the fashion. My Bride points out that Della Street sports what can only be described as “Barbie shoes”—even when traipsing through rugged foothills alongside Perry and Paul in pursuit of clues. Practicality clearly wasn’t part of the costume design brief. Plus, the show is sepia-toned postcard from a California that hadn’t yet been strip-malled into oblivion. Back when palm trees were romantic, not ironic, and the freeways hadn’t metastasized like an experiment in urban planning gone horribly wrong. Even in monochrome, those locations had a kind of accidental enchantment, the kind you can’t fake with CGI. 

The Best of Season 5 (1961-62)

The Case of the Shapely Shadow. Elaine Devry lights up the little black and white tube as the wallflower secretary turned into hachi-machi with the help of a makeover. With Devry, the viewer wonders how in hell she made her red hair and green eyes come across on the monochrome screen. Not to mention any responsible cardiologist would advise us codgers to avoid prolonged exposure to her ultra-feminine voice and manner. The court room scene is excellent with Burger falling into Mason’s cunning trap and having a blustering sputtering meltdown. That’ll learn him for all of those triumphant smirks.

The Case of the Travelling Treasure. Any episode that has Lisa Gaye in swimsuit gets an automatic four stars. But in fact the acting is top notch in this episode. Arch Johnson plays a cranky gangster who ends up croaked in a locked cabin on board a fishing boat. Our pal Vaughn Taylor plays a mild-mannered chemist who’s too absent-minded to be devious. Familiar TV face Jeff York plays Perry’s client, a relatable working man. Most of the action is set on boats so it’s invigorating to be outside for half of this episode. Rare too for the story to turn on a classic puzzle mystery involving a locked room.

The Case of the Absent Artist. Many different personalities engage our attention: loud boy cartoonist Pete Manders (Wynne Pearce), world-weary sculptor Alexander Glovatski (Victor Buono), and a sneaky artist Otto Gavaert (Mark Roberts) that yearns to get away from it all and paint like the louse Charles Strickland in The Moon and Sixpence. Plus, the snoopy landlady Daphne (ZaSu Pitts), sensuous beat girl Fiona Cregan (Arline Sax), and nervous accountant Monty (Richard Erdman). Besides the outstanding cast, unique settings make episode unlike any other: an oily fishing village that’s also an artist’s colony and the craft and business of syndicated comic strips. Finally, in the studio of the sneaky artist, in the background, we spy the purple woman painting from season 2 and a crying cherub painting from Season 3.

The Ides of Crime: Bodyguard

Note: This is a movie that doesn’t ask for your approval - it demands your attention. It’s messy, moody, and weird. And in the pantheon of RKO B-movies, it deserves a place of honor, preferably somewhere between Out of the Past and The Narrow Margin, with a meat hook dangling nearby.

Bodyguard
1948 / 1:15
Tagline: “A Real ‘Who-done-it’ Thriller”
[internet archive]

I hesitate to over-sell old movies like this one, a noir oddity that feels like it was stitched together from the dreams of Raymond Chandler and the nightmares of a union-busting plutocrat. It opens with a scene so absurd it could only be true: a tyrannical dowager, imperious and upholstered like a Victorian fainting couch, berates her nephew for hiring a bodyguard. She’s receiving death threats, but she’s more offended by the bodyguard’s lack of etiquette than the possibility of being murdered. This is the kind of Post-WWII existentialism-lite where the absurdity is the point.

The bodyguard, Mike, is played by Laurence Tierney, a man whose face looks like it’s been carved out of granite. Tierney, usually cast as the heavy, gets a rare turn as the hero here - but don’t worry, he’s still unpredictably violent. Mike is an ex-homicide detective with a chip on his shoulder and fists that do most of the talking. He’s got integrity, though, the kind that inspires loyalty in street kids and a blonde girlfriend named Doris who records case notes on vinyl. Yes, vinyl.

The plot is a tangled mess of class warfare, murder, and meat hooks – ah, good old meat hooks - and it’s all delivered with dialogue that crackles. A young Robert Altman had a hand in the script, and you can hear his chortle in lines like “It’s as cozy here as Grand Central Station” and a butler being called “Dracula” with no irony whatsoever. The film doesn’t wink at you - it stares you down and dares you to snicker.

Visually, it’s a feast. Shot in black and white, the cinematography is rich with texture: cracked glass, fringe, tassels, and shadows that conceal sprites, pixies, goblins, oh my. There’s a scene in an eye doctor’s office that looks like it was directed by hyper-caffeinated Fritz Lang full of coffee from South Sulawesi. And the Southern California setting is a time capsule - Los Angeles with streetcars, arcades, and meatpacking workers in neckties. It’s surreal in the way only the passing time can make something surreal, like visiting a place you’ve not been to since childhood.

The film’s best moments are its strangest: Mike playing catch with a disabled boy inside a trailer, sailors picking a fight in an arcade because he’s nagging a clerk, and Doris using a “Record Your Voice” booth to store evidence. On vinyl. These scenes don’t advance the plot, but they deepen the world. They make it feel lived-in, like a place where people love, work and belch even when the camera isn’t rolling.

Tierney’s Mike is a bulldozer in a trench coat. He impersonates cops, commits burglary, beats up optometrists, and steals a police car - all in the name of justice. The final fight scene, set in a meatpacking plant, is a ballet of brutality featuring swinging meat hooks – ah, good old meat hooks. It’s the kind of climax that makes you want to cheer and wince at the same time.

As for the Perry Mason connection, June Clayworth played a small part as the neglected wife of the deserving victim in the TCOT Fraudulent Foto, one of the most noirish episodes of the series. Steve Brodie, a meatpacking toiler in this one, was a political fixer in a great episode TCOT Witless Witness.

Matinee Musings: Ann Harding Turned Misery

Note: The sad girl trope in movies features a female protagonist who is profoundly melancholic, visibly traumatized, or emotionally fragile, often styled in an aesthetically pleasing or poetic way. Movie-goers have to decide for themselves whether this validates female grief and aggravation and fosters empathy or promotes passive heroines or reduces identity to pain. Me, I like how the sad girl trope rejects the societal expectation that women must always be put-together. It's okay to be a mess. It'll pass.

The Gallant Lady Weeps: How Ann Harding Turned Misery into Luminous Heartbreak

Ann Harding belongs to a brief moment in early sound cinema when a woman could be intelligent, self-aware, and fated to suffer beautifully. Projecting the modern "sad girl" trope backward into the 1930s, Harding emerges as a performer who turns emotional suffering into an aesthetic experience.

In the early talkie era, Hollywood prized actresses who combined beauty with vocal control. Harding's stage training allowed her screen persona to take rapid, unmistakable shape. By the early 1930s she was consistently cast as the "beautiful, virtuous, self-sacrificing woman," a type studios revisited with near ritual insistence. Across these roles, her characters absorb frustration, disappointment, and renunciation with a composure that approaches stylization.

In Paris Bound (1929), Jim and Mary begin their marriage with modern, permissive ideals, yet it is Harding’s Mary who pays the emotional cost when theory collapses. Left with a child and her suspicions, she becomes the film’s still center of suffering, waiting and doubting. Harding renders Mary's anguish with restraint. When she insists that marriage requires "vacations," her faltering voice reveals the strain beneath the pose.

In Her Private Affair (1929), Harding plays Vera, whose life is derailed by guilt, blackmail, and secrecy. Harding makes her suffering palpable through her expressive face and stage-trained voice, conveying anxiety, fear, and moral anguish. The film is static and stage-bound, but her performance gives it emotional weight and helped launch her stardom.

If Paris Bound establishes this pattern, East Lynne (1931) refines it into its purest form. As Lady Isabella, Harding portrays maternal loss and social disgrace not through melodramatic display but through restraint. Her face registers grief in subtle ways, lingering sadness in the eyes, hesitation in a glance, composure maintained at evident cost. The drama lies in watching her struggle to contain emotions that threaten to overwhelm her.

In Westward Passage (1932), Harding plays disillusionment as a state of suspended aftershock. Having left a failed marriage, she moves through her new life with composed restraint, even as the past intrudes. When her first husband returns, the emotional conflict sharpens: whether the past can ever be recovered.

The Animal Kingdom (1932) centers on a love triangle, but its emotional weight comes from Harding's Daisy. After Tom impulsively marries another woman, Daisy discovers too late how deeply she loves him. Harding gives the character a wounded tenderness that makes her heartbreak memorable. Her farewell, "Good-bye... 'til Doomsday," transforms loss into a form of grace.

In Double Harness (1933), Harding plays Joan, whose determination to reform the irresponsible John gradually turns into painful love. After tricking him into marriage, she is consumed by guilt and struggles to earn the affection she fears she does not deserve. Harding balances strength, vulnerability, and restraint, making Joan one of her most affecting heroines.

As film critic Molly Haskell has argued, Hollywood often turned female suffering into emotional spectacle, inviting identification while encouraging resignation. Harding’s films exemplify this tendency. They ask viewers to admire endurance - to value the woman who transforms loss into moral clarity and composure.

What distinguishes Harding is the intelligence she brings to this paradox. Her performances lend psychological credibility to roles that might otherwise seem same-old, yet their repetition across films exposed the limits of the type itself. Her performances are never trivial; they possess a psychological clarity that deepens even conventional roles. Yet that same clarity, repeated across films, lends the suffering a certain predictability. Press resentment - fueled by her reserve offscreen - hardened into sarcasm, dubbing her “Noble Ann Harding.”

With the stricter enforcement of the Production Code in the mid-1930s, Hollywood retreated from the kind of adult emotional material that sustained Harding’s* career. Her achievement endures: she demonstrated how cinema could render wounded feminine energy** as something formally persuasive and aesthetically compelling.

 +++++++++++++

* And the careers of Leila Hyams, Evelyn Brent, Mary Nolan, Genevieve Tobin, Marian Marsh, Madge Evans, Helen Twelvetrees and the wonderful Mae Clarke and Nancy Carroll.

** Look it up! I can’t do everything for you. I give and I give….

Perry Mason 168: Godzilla

Note: Too heavy to be a leading man in the movies, Raymond Burr usually gave terrific performances in supporting roles, most often as villains, in the ten years after WWII. Many movie fans of all ages are still watching his turns with Alfred Hitchcock (Rear Window) and George Stevens (A Place in the Sun). And hardcore fans of noir still watch Raw Deal (Anthony Mann), The Blue Gardenia (Fritz Lang), Horizons West (Budd Boetticher) and Great Day in the Morning (Jacques Tourneur).

 Godzilla, King of the Monsters
1956 / 1:20
Tagline: “Makes KING KONG look like a Midget!”
[internet archive]

The Japanese studio Toho (Treasure of the East) made the original Gojira in 1954. I think it is one of the few monster movies that transcends its genre because it makes me feel the horror and tragedy of the monster's rampage: the thousands killed and the destruction of infrastructure painstakingly rebuilt after the war. The waste of life and property is simply terrible.

Haunting too is that unforgettable roar – that combo of shriek and factory klaxon.

To make the film more accessible to American audiences, new scenes featuring Raymond Burr as reporter Steve Martin were shot and inserted into the Japanese original. Martin serves as a Western point-of-view character, our man in Tokyo, much like Edward Murrow reporting from London during the Blitz while a national catastrophe unfolds around him.

Nowadays it is easy to mock this narrow-mindedness, but I remember being a kid in the Sixties and hearing rude comments about the Japanese. Only twenty years had passed since World War II, about as long ago then as Hurricane Katrina is to us today. So only 11 years after the cessation of hostilities, in 1956 feelings must still have been raw.

Burr’s scenes are rather jarring in places, feeling disconnected from the original footage. He talks to characters in the original film but all we see are the backs of their heads. Scenes are of him listening at meetings, giving a voiceover to describe what’s going on. A Japanese American guy translates for him since Martin says, “My Japanese is a little rusty.” This is lame, since nobody would expect him to speak the Japanese of paleontology. A funnier line might have been: "My conversational Japanese is fine, but this geological and biological mumbo-jumbo is way over my head."

Burr, ever the professional, rises above the sometimes weak material and never gives the impression that he is merely collecting a paycheck. He gives a serious and stoic performance. Burr's best scene comes when he finds himself trapped in a vulnerable office building. Fighting back panic and maintaining his professional composure, he records what he believes may be his final report.

To my mind, there are two unintentionally amusing scenes.  One is a Japanese-American as an Odo Island peasant that speaks what even I know is kitchen Japanese. The other is seeing Burr so heavily bandaged that he looks as though a group of children had practiced first aid on him, calling to mind the funny scene in TCOT Grinning Gorilla.

Burr reportedly joked that he received a generous paycheck for only two days' work on Godzilla, but that claim seems doubtful. In the sequence on Odo Island that suspensefully leads up to the first sighting of the monster, there is a day scene and a night scene that would have taken at least a couple days to set up and film. In fact, Burr and crew worked six days to do his scenes.

The American version, I think, does not cut any of the monster’s depredations. So it feels just as grim as the original. For example, it retains the dreadful scene in which a mother is assuring her two little kids they will soon meet the father they lost in the war while the trio is cowering in a shop’s doorway as the monster is only steps down the street. Given moments like this, it is easy to understand why some countries initially restricted the film to adult audiences.

Matinee Musings: Conquest of Space

Note: To keep this blog's connection with the classic TV series Perry Mason, I'm compelled to point out that Dr. Elsbach is played by Michael Fox who appeared in 25 episodes, usually as a doctor or forensic pathologist. Chinese guy playing a Japanese guy named Imoto, Benson Fong guest starred as the accused in TCOT Caretaker’s Cat. For some odd reason, William Hopper (Paul Drake) is billed higher than Fong though Hopper is in only two brief scenes and Fong is almost always in a scene. 

Conquest of Space
1955 / 1:20
Tagline: “Dramatic Effects Never Before Equaled - Or Even Imagined!”
[internet archive]

The Commander, a figure carved from the granite of military tradition, is a cinematic archetype - stern, rule-bound, and yet quietly aware of the psychological erosion that comes with prolonged duty in space. The Wheel, a rotating space station that doubles as a construction port and a fort, becomes a metaphor for the grinding monotony of interstellar vigilance. The crew, suffering from the tedium of their orbital tour of duty, begins to unravel: irritability, nausea, dizziness, and a creeping sense of existential dread permeate the mise-en-scène.

When the mission is unexpectedly re-routed from the Moon to Mars, the Commander’s reaction is not rebellion but resignation - a classic gesture of the professional soldier, the kind of man who thinks “Mine is not to reason why.” His stoicism is not heroic in the sense Marcus Aurelius would endorse, but tragic: a man burdened by his unbending sense of duty, but also haunted by the dark implications of his own obedience. The stakes are high - Earth’s survival depends on the success of this mission - but the film’s true drama lies in the Commander’s internal conflict, his slow descent into metaphysical unease.

As the narrative unfolds, the film anticipates a familiar trope in science fiction cinema: the psychological breakdown of a crew member, the “madness in space” motif that would later be explored from 2001: A Space Odyssey to Ren & Stimpy. But here, the breakdown is not merely personal - it’s philosophical. The Commander begins to question the very premise of the mission, suggesting that humanity’s reach into the cosmos may be a form of cosmic trespass, a violation of the divine order.

The supporting cast, while not given the depth of characterization one finds in Citizen Kane, nonetheless serves the themes the director explores. The members of the crew are unable to articulate the moral dimensions of space exploration to their CO and thus unable to dispute his religious and philosophical misgivings about the mission. Their inability to form and express an argument becomes a critique of technocratic culture - a reminder that scientific progress is a hollow, if not hazardous, enterprise without reflection about values and the ability to formulate and argue your point of view to unknowing or unsteady authority.

Visually, the film is a mixed bag. The Technicolor palette is both a strength and a liability: the close-ups, a staple of television aesthetics, sometimes betray the limitations of the medium, but the spacewalk sequences are genuinely striking. The Angry Red Planet, rendered in vivid hues, is a painterly abstraction - a hostile, beautiful terrain that reflects the inner turmoil of the characters.

Not wanting to oversell this picture, I grant that this is a film that lacks the polish of later sci-fi epics. But in the final analysis, it compensates with a sincerity of purpose and a thematic ambition that elevates it above its pulp origins with a meditation on duty, doubt, and the limits of human ambition.

Perry Mason 167: Pass the Gravy

Note: I like the Cool & Lam series and this 1959 outing is one of Gardner’s sturdier contraptions, the kind that looks at first like two unrelated annoyances and then reveals itself to be one of those infernal little boxes where every side folds into the next. 

Pass the Gravy – Erle Stanley Gardner writing as A. A. Fair

Pass the Gravy (and you can already hear Bertha Cool snort at the title) is Gardner nudging a mess of details until they cry uncle and confess.

We begin, as usual, with PI Donald Lam being handed two problems that he is explicitly directed by partner Bertha not to combine. First: a fifteen‑year‑old girl with more anxiety than cash wants her Uncle Amos retrieved from his latest alcoholic orbit - except this time the orbit has widened past what the family can endure. Second: a far more remunerative proposition, courtesy of a sleek wife whose missing salesman husband has vanished into exactly the sort of fog Gardner enjoys. Bertha Cool, patron saint of billable hours, votes decisively for glamour over pathos. Lam, professionally a risk-taker all the way, declines to choose.

The miracle (or the trick, depending on your tolerance) is a pair of postcards from the same nowhere gas station, which Lam seizes on like a man on a mission. Off he goes, ricocheting through Sierras, Reno, and a parade of low‑rent America - hitchhikers, ex-cons, predators - each one offering a clue that mostly serves to make the previous clue look stupid. Gardner keeps the tone breezy, but the method is almost scientific: accumulate detail, distrust it, repeat.

Meanwhile Bertha looms - half partner, half thrower of Lam under busses - coiled like that famous spool of barbed wire, measuring morality in invoices. Lam, no one’s idea of a saint, nevertheless insists on helping the broke kid, as if he’s dimly aware that a detective who ignores the poor stops being a detective and turns into furniture. Secretary Elsie Brand thinks dark thoughts, looking askance at Lam's desire to assist a teenage girl - it was an age when literally millions of sixteen-year-old girls got married every year.

It is here that Lam can be read in light of Seneca’s observation that “the wise man is fortified against all inroads.” Lam is no Stoic adept - he is too ironic, too improvisational, too entangled in contingency - but he approximates Stoic flexibility and resilience in practice. He does not retreat before uncertainty, financial pressure, or physical danger; nor does he allow Bertha’s mercenary calculus to wholly dictate his course. Poverty (his own professional precarity), sorrow (the girl’s desperation), disgrace (his disbarred past), and pain, disability, and disfigurement (the ever-present threat of bodily harm to his small frame) all press upon him. Yet Lam persists, not with serene detachment, but with a dogged alertness and dedication that mirror Seneca’s ideal in a compromised, modern form.

In the end, the puzzle snaps shut neatly, Gardner having tidied the room with efficiency. But the aftertaste is better than that: beneath the wisecracks and coincidences, a faint, unfashionable idea - that decency may be impractical, but is nonetheless binding. Lam doesn’t win because he’s invulnerable. He wins because he refuses to take the sensible exit and he does not like seeing vulnerable people abused.

The Nones of Crime: Mystery House

Note: As for the connection with the classic TV series Perry Mason, Sheila Bromley was both a goody and a baddy in five episodes. Her most outstanding performance was in TCOT Nervous Neighbor in which she had amnesia, one of the very few credible instances I’ve seen of that “convenient for the script” condition. 

Mystery House
1938 / 56 minutes
Tagline: “A piece of wire...a toupee...a rifled safe..3 CLUES! 3 MURDERS! 3 TIMES The Thrills of Any Other Mystery Hit!”
[internet archive]

This Warner Brothers B-movie begins at an autopsy hearing where Gwen (Anne Nagel) insists her father was murdered - after all, he’d accused his business partners of shady dealings. But the evidence points to suicide: a locked room, a gun, and no sign of foul play. 

Gwen, unconvinced, vows to hire a private detective. Enter Sara (Ann Sheridan), nurse to Gwen’s cranky Aunt Lucy (Elspeth Dudgeon), who recommends her boyfriend, PI Lance O’Leary (Dick Purcell).

Gwen’s own beau is played by William Hopper - yes, Paul Drake from Perry Mason. Here he’s a society fop with an insipid smile and enough makeup to suggest he wandered in from a silent film. His main talent? Looking game for gin rummy even after a supposed suicide.

At Lance’s urging, Gwen gathers suspects for a weekend hunt at her country estate.

Tension simmers; secrets hover. One guest hints at explosive knowledge - then turns up dead, another “suicide.” The police? Never summoned. Lance inspects the body, pockets evidence, and deduces strangulation by a wire from the now-broken radio.

Purcell brings expected vigor to the role, his athletic ease lending the PI some presence. Sheridan, known as “The Oomph Girl,” does what she can with thin dialogue - though one longs for Technicolor to revel in her red hair. Ben Welden, in a toupee, plays against his usual lug type as a respectable if pushy exec.

Based on a mystery by Mignon Eberhart - once dubbed the “American Agatha Christie” - the film offers locked-room intrigue, country-house tension, and a dash of pulp charm. Forgotten today, it’s still a curious relic for fans of B-movie sleuthing.

As for clothes, the mystery is set in winter so the fur-trimmed coats are pretty nice. The cars are swanky; that might be a cool 1938 Ford Deluxe Tudor Sedan.  At only an hour, this works for a Saturday evening in winter.