Perry Mason 171: TCOT Calendar Girl

Note: Apparently, this 1958 outing is the one Mason case where nobody cares if the murder weapon had fingerprints. It’s also the first time Mason saves his client by practically convicting someone else… and then graciously takes that poor soul as his next client. Talk about job security. And the structure? Unfair. The reader gets zero clues until Mason drops them like plot grenades, so forget solving the mystery on your own.

The Case of the Calendar Girl – Erle Stanley Gardner

The fifty-seventh Perry Mason novel opens with a character who strains credulity: George Ansley, a contractor described as honest. I ask the court of bitter homeowners to suspend disbelief. While they may scoff, let us proceed on the dubious assumption that such a creature exists.

Ansley, this paragon of virtue, finds himself entangled in a sordid affair involving Meredith Borden - a man whose business dealings reek of extortion and influence peddling. Borden, it seems, has the uncanny ability to call off building inspectors who, in their zealousness to enforce code, are making life miserable for Ansley’s construction crews. To keep his projects afloat, Ansley pays Borden off. A regrettable lapse, and Ansley hates having to be a payer, but not as bad as the intimidation of Borden’s extortion.

Then fate intervenes. Distracted and demoralized, Ansley crashes his car. The other driver? A woman of striking beauty and suspiciously persuasive charm. Despite her apparent injuries, she convinces Ansley to drive her home. There, she proceeds to disarm him with feminine fragility, flirtation, and a kiss - a trifecta of manipulation that would make any distracted dude forget his best interests.

Later that evening, Ansley recovers his sense. He seeks legal counsel from Perry Mason, cornering him and his ever-present secretary, Della Street, in a restaurant. Mason, ever the sleuth, insists on inspecting the accident scene. They arrive at Borden’s estate, only to be repelled by barbed wire and vicious dogs.

Coincidentally - or perhaps not - Borden is murdered that very night. The police, diligent as ever, begin their search for suspects. Mason, in his usual obnoxious fashion, embarks on a parallel investigation, tracking down “calendar girls” - models who straddle the line between commercial photography and so-called “art.”

Now, I must object to the narrative liberties taken. Gardner’s storytelling, while brisk, sacrifices fair play. Evidence is withheld, clues obscured, and the resolution hinges on exposition rather than deduction. The reader, like the jury, is denied the opportunity to weigh the facts. In this case, Gardner’s usual flair falters, and the verdict on the novel’s merits must be: mildly disappointing.

Perry Mason 170: Five Perry Mason Starters

Note: New to Perry Mason? Start with five cases that showcase Gardner at his most cunning - plots that snap, dialogue that crackles, and courtroom fireworks that pop. From parrots with secrets to mink coats with murder stitched in, these novels prove why Mason still hits the legal-thriller notes for many hardcore readers.

Five Perry Mason Starters: Murder, Mink, and Mason’s Magic in Court

The Case of the Perjured Parrot (1939)
A Perry Mason gem with a gimmick that works: a murder witnessed by a parrot. Gardner spins it fast and tight - no padding, just plot. Della teases Mason over paperwork until Charles Sabin hires him to block a greedy widow and solve Fremont Sabin’s killing. Fremont, a publicity-shy rugged type, ends up dead in his mountain cabin while Casanova squawks, “Helen, put down that gun!” Which Helen? Wife or librarian? Depression-era despair gives bookish Helen Monteith depth, and Gardner salts the mix with will-law tangles and Sgt. Holcomb’s bullying bluster. The coroner’s inquest finale delivers a twist that’s pure Gardner - audacious and satisfying.

The Case of the Vagabond Virgin (1948)
Gardner serves up a cocktail of sex, money, and murder with a twist that stings. Addison, a retail tycoon, plays Good Samaritan to a platinum-haired waif - and lands in a tabloid trap. Enter Mason, cool as gin, to untangle blackmail and scandal. Then a partner turns up dead, and the courtroom becomes a chessboard. DA Burger blusters, Holcomb huffs, and Mason slices through the bluster with surgical precision. Gardner skips psychology for pure propulsion: greed, lust, and panic drive the plot. The ending? A jolt - rushed but daring. Call it Gardner at his gaudiest: fast, flashy, and fun.

The Case of the Moth-Eaten Mink (1952)
Gardner hits high gear with a mink that’s more trouble than glamour. A waitress vanishes, a shabby coat turns up, and Mason dives into a whirl of pawn tickets, lipstick scrawls, and mob whispers. The trail leaps from L.A. to Seattle, dragging in a cop’s murder, a boyfriend on the hook, and a rising body count. Gardner keeps it lean - dialogue fresh, tempo racing - while Mason juggles roles as counsel and witness. Lt. Tragg shows grit, Holcomb rages, and the finale delivers Gardner’s trademark surprise. No frills, no fat - just a taut, twisty ride that earns its perfect 10.

The Case of the Hesitant Hostess (1953)
Gardner trades plush parlors for neon glare - nightclubs humming, gambling joints grinding, hostesses as bait for bruised egos and busted wallets. It’s noir with a sociological snap: middle-class dreamers lured into a racket greased by cops and graft. Yes, the client’s late to the party and motives wobble, but Gardner compensates with velocity - two courtroom clashes, Mason pounding pavements and pulp-style punches. The mystery’s no brain-bender, yet the dialogue rocks, the pace sizzles, and the energy leaps like a live wire. When the gavel drops, you’re grinning like a canine smelling bacon.

The Case of the Queenly Contestant (1967)
Gardner swaps neon noir for satin and scandal. Ellen Adair - department-store duchess with a beauty-queen past - hires Mason to muzzle a hometown newspaper exposé of her single motherhood. Behind the gloss: a vanished lover, a secret child, and blackmail that sours into murder. Gardner threads the Sixties shift in attitudes toward single mothers through a brisk plot of bent cops, fixer-lawyers, and courtroom pyrotechnics. Yes, gender assumptions creak like Victorian floorboards, but the pace is taut, the rogues vivid, and Mason - cool, relentless -steals the show. Verdict withheld, but Gardner proves he can still lace a whodunit with social sting.

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.