Perry Mason 131: Casting Cool & Lam

Note: In the noir-lite mysteries penned by Erle Stanley Gardner under the pseudonym A.A. Fair, the detective duo of Bertha Cool and Donald Lam is a study in delightful contradiction. Gardner, ever the courtroom trickster, flips the genre’s tropes. Bertha Cool is brash, overweight, and unapologetically vulgar - a bulldozer in dripping in diamonds. Donald Lam, her partner, is the anti-Mike Hammer: diminutive, cerebral, and empathetic. Casting these two from the golden age of Hollywood is no easy feat, but let’s give it the old studio try.

Donald Lam: The Underdog with a Law Degree

Lam is no trench-coated bruiser. He’s the little guy who wins the fight by knowing the law better than the authorities and the crooks. He’s clever, slippery, and always underestimated. So who could play him without turning him into a just a lucky wise-ass?

·         James Cagney: He’s got the size and the speed, and he could talk circles around a DA. But Cagney’s default setting is “ready to punch,” and Lam wins with brains, not fists. Verdict: Too much peppy pugnacity, not enough heft in the brains department.

·         Dick Powell: Post-songbird Powell gave us a credible Marlowe, and he’s got the sardonic deadpan down cold. But Lam’s intellect is scalpel-sharp, and his well-concealed emotions warm. Verdict: Close, but not quite cutting it.

·         William Powell: Too old? Nick Charles had Lam’s charm and smarts, but he also had a cocktail in hand and Nora on his arm. Lam’s world is grittier, less tuxedoed. Verdict: Too debonair, too charming.

·         Dana Andrews: Andrews brings the brooding intensity, but Lam isn’t haunted - he’s harried by clients and cops, bad guys and Bertha. He’s a man dodging punches and talks with the DA, not ghosts. Verdict: Too tragic, not enough hustle.

·         Alan Ladd: Physically perfect, and his performance in This Gun for Hire proves he can play underestimated. But Lam needs to talk fast and think faster. Ladd’s controlled insecurity might come off as self-doubt. Verdict: Right size, wrong temperature.

·         I admit I'm stuck - Gig Young? Jack Lemmon? Martin Milner?

Bertha Cool: The Bulldozer in Diamonds

Bertha Cool is a casting challenge Hollywood often fumbles on the one-yard line. She’s loud and large. She’s not comic relief; she may or may not have a heart buried somewhere under layers of sarcasm and cigarette smoke.

·         Marie Dressler: Dressler had the heft and the humor, but Bertha’s bite is sharper than Dressler’s maternal warmth. Verdict: Too cuddly for Cool.

·         Thelma Ritter: Ritter’s wisecracks are legendary, and she could sell Bertha’s street smarts. But Bertha needs to fill a room physically and vocally. Verdict: Too compact for the role.

·         Marjorie Main: Main could bulldoze with the best of them, and her Ma Kettle had the grit. But Bertha’s urban jungle isn’t Main’s backwoods. Verdict: A maybe.

·         Margaret Rutherford: Rutherford’s Miss Marple had the eccentricity, but Bertha’s not quaint - she’s caustic. Verdict: Too British, too genteel.

·         Lucille Ball: Ball had the brass and the timing, but Bertha’s vulgarity isn’t sitcom-ready. Could Lucy go full-on ferocious? Verdict: Tempting, but risky.

Perry Mason 130: Shame They Got Kilt

Note. On the classic TV series the Mason murder victim is usually a scamp doing crimes like blackmail, so detestable that we figure they needed killing, like they say in Texas. And we hope the killer gets the sentence meted out to cops and judges gone wrong.

Shame They Got Kilt

Killed in Error. Poor Flavia is mistakenly poisoned in place of her husband and his lover in The Case of the Madcap Modiste. One of the few on-screen killings in the show, the poisoning scene is uniquely gruesome, complete with death rattle. In The Case of the Sleepwalker's Niece, too accommodating for his own good, Uncle Phillip trades bedrooms with a dastard. And thinking it’s the dastard, the cold-blooded killer knifes Uncle Phillip in his sleep. That’ll learn would-be perps, as Mickey Rourke said in Body Heat (1981), “Any time you try a decent crime, you got fifty ways you're gonna fuck up. If you think of twenty-five of them, then you’re a genius - and you ain’t no genius.”

Harmless Geezer Buys the Farm. In The Case of the Sun Bather’s Diary, a nice guy who likes a little potation, George Ballard is uncle to the red-headed beauty of the title. He is murdered with a knife to the back for no motive that I can discern unless maybe it was robbery or to keep him silent or both. When his dog Sandy guards and whimpers over Uncle George’s corpse, it’s pitiful. Just as pitiful is the killing of another Uncle George in The Case of the Shoplifter's Shoe. He likes a drink so much that before he goes on a toot he mails his car keys to himself. He was killed to keep him silent and his niece goes all to pieces. Nobody was as adept at sobbing on cue as Margaret O’Brien. She used to ask directors “When I cry, do you want the tears to run all the way or shall I stop halfway down?”

Paragon Meets Unjust Deserts. In The Case of the Sulky Girl, sadly, virtue turns out to be less than its own reward. Not that I’m blaming the victim, mind, but a factor in the motive was Uncle Edward being an uncompromising model of rectitude. Perhaps if Uncle had been less ready to call the cops when he thought a crime was going down, the killer would not have bashed in his skull with a walking stick.

Commendable Motives of a Boss from Hell. A multi-million-dollar space project is six weeks behind schedule in The Case of the Angry Astronaut. James Coburn’s General Addison Brand is brought in to get things on track. Speaking in a hectoring voice, he screws up his belligerent face into a visage of dynamism and purpose.  If fulfilling his duty involves kicking ass and blasting complacencies, that’s the way it is going to be. Ironically, he is not murdered for doing his duty in an obsessed fashion. We feel the federal government will miss such a hard-charging can-do manager.

The Worst Case. In The Case of the Nine Dolls, a tyrannical oil baron repudiates a seven-year-old grand-daughter until he meets her. He then sees with his own eyes that she is the exact duplicate of her mother at that age. Naturally the joyful reunion calls for a change in the millionaire’s will in favor of the newly found member of the family. This amendment is not something certain interested parties will tolerate. They kill the old man out of sheer greed and cowardice. They are quite OK with the old man’s niece going the gas chamber in their place. That the heart-warming reunion provokes such a terrible crime is ironic and tragic, making this episode especially melancholy. But as disturbing is another scene: in Perry’s hotel room a mangled doll is left by a note saying, “This can happen to little girls too.” It’s one hell of an episode, certainly in my Top 3 Favorites.

Clearly, being an uncle is a risk factor in Perry Mason mysteries.

The Nones of William Talman: City that Never Sleeps

Note: Growing up in Detroit’s exclusive Indian Village, William Talman was exposed to the theater and acting when he was only about ten years old in the mid-Twenties in his father’s Players Club. Talman and his brothers attended the elite Cranbrook academy in Bloomfield Hills and joined the drama club. His brother said “Bill had the most brilliant mind in the family. He could read a page once, turn it over, and recite every word by heart.” This ability probably helped him digest all the legal mumbo-jumbo he needed in his role as the district attorney Hamilton Burger on the classic TV series Perry Mason.

City that Never Sleeps
1953 / 1:30
Tagline: “… from the Honky Tonks to the penthouses … the creeps, the hoods, the killers come out to war with the city!”
[internet archive]

Republic Pictures pulls a fast one with this moody little crime drama, opening on Chicago in foggy greys like it’s auditioning for noir status. Don’t be fooled, however, the film flirts with noir but never quite gets there. It’s more about the ache of frustrated ambition than overheated emotion and light through venetian blinds.

Everyone here wants out of their life. Policeman Johnny (Gig Young) dreams of fishing boats on the Pacific, but mostly he’s stuck delivering babies once a month and grinding through the job. His wife Kathy earns more than he does, which gnaws at his pride. Enter Sally (Mala Powers), a nightclub dancer who once aimed for ballet and now hoofs it with poodles. Her despair is so thick she’s considering a comedy act with a mime called The Mechanical Man - performance art as existential shouting into the abyss.

Hovering above is Penrod Biddel (Edward Arnold), a mob lawyer who collects people like stamps. He “rescues” Lydia (Marie Windsor) from a lunch counter and remakes her as a trophy wife. He “reforms” Hayes Stewart (William Talman), a pickpocket turned magician. Both protégés rebel, because living someone else’s script feels like slow death. That’s the film’s pulse: autonomy versus control.

Talman's Hayes slinks through boiler rooms and catwalks like a reptile, all cold audacity and sleight‑of‑hand menace. When the stakes spike, he turns vicious without blinking. His snarl - “I’ve stolen lots of things in my life but never someone’s wife” - lands like a smack. Later, blaming Marie Windsor for his downfall, he lies with chilling conviction.

The supporting cast does its job. Gig Young sells Johnny’s weary decency. Powers, cast against perky type, sometimes strains at hard‑boiled bitterness but nails the bewildered anger. Arnold brings sadistic polish; Windsor channels her inner Maria Ouspenskaya (her acting teacher) with gusto.

Visually, a few close‑ups scream early television, but the nightclub scenes hum with tension. Showgirls wear smiles like masks. The safe‑cracking sequence is tight as a drum, and the climactic chase along commuter tracks is pure Republic adrenaline.

This isn’t just a B‑movie time‑killer. It’s a sharp, stylish riff on identity and ambition, totally unexpected by this viewer at least. Watch it for Talman - he’s the real deal.

As for the connection with the classic TV series Perry Mason, Marie Windsor was great it all four of her appearances: TCOT Daring Decoy (cheated on wife), TCOT Madcap Modiste (victim killed in error), TCOT Tarnished Trademark (noble woman who suffers) and TCOT Wednesday Woman (monstrous perp).

Perry Mason 129: TCOT Grinning Gorilla

Note: Mason and Street’s romance? Always a non-starter - thanks to Della, the ultimate realist. Her logic? ‘If I marry him, I lose all the fun of speeding, committing B and E, and letting the air out of Paul Drake’ So, she’s kept it strictly professional … until now. Cut to Della, blushing like a teenager because her fortune cookie just declared, ‘You’re about to fall for someone in a snazzy suit.’ Cue Mason smirking, cue audience laughter.

The Case of the Grinning Gorilla - Erle Stanley Gardner

In 1952, Perry Mason acquires - mindfully - the diaries of Helen Cadmus. She is either dead or missing, either drowned or vanished, either tragic or up to something. The authorities, as usual, are plodding. Mason is not.

The diaries, bought for five dollars at auction, are immediately contested. A man named Nathan Fallon appears. He is a cousin, allegedly. He is also, unmistakably, a crook. His sponsor is Benjamin Addicks, a millionaire with interests in gorilla neurology. Addicks offers money. Mason declines. It is not about money. He doesn’t like being lied to and taken for a chump.

Paul Drake, who is Mason’s investigator and cultivates the bland facelessness of a politician afraid of his own opinions, discovers that Addicks is the poster boy for the eccentricity of the rich. The mansion is fortified. The gorillas are real. The science is speculative bordering on Boris Karloff in The Ape. Mason and Della Street, who is always present, visit the crazy old house. There is a confrontation. There is a gorilla. There is a murder.

Addicks is found dead. The weapon is sharp.

The accused is Josephine Kempton, a housekeeper with an aptitude for being economical with the truth. She withholds facts. She calls it discretion. Mason calls it usual for a client who is scared and not about to talk of intimate matters and bad choices to strangers.

The case feels pulpy, but not quite. It is noir, but not entirely. It is existential, in the way that only stories involving gorilla brains and mad scientist millionaires can be. Mason is nearly killed - twice. The city vibrates, quaking at the uncharacteristic violence. The truth is elusive and slightly absurd.

This is a weird Perry Mason novel. Unique in the canon.

The Kalends of William Talman: Two Gun Lady

Note: Let's take a break from Perry Goddamn Mason. No less a cultural arbiter than TV Guide acknowledged William Talman in this cheapo western as “the U.S. Marshal who lends a hand …” and remarked that Talman “efficiently takes care of a trio of heavies,” indicating he brought a steady, workmanlike energy to the role. Talman played the DA in the greatest courtroom drama in the history of broadcast television.

Two Gun Lady
1956 / 1:11
Tagline: “A two-timing petticoat built to break a man's heart!”
[internet archive]

This isn’t your standard shoot-’em-up with a square-jawed hero and a schoolmarm waiting in the wings. It’s a Western boiled down to gristle and bone, where men swagger like alpha roosters and then die like flies. The surprise is that it's not about men. It’s about Kate Masters, a woman who walks into this moral wasteland with pistols on her hips and vengeance in her veins. Forget the Annie Oakley tricks - those are just the window dressing. What matters is that Kate is the only one in this dried-up world who understands that she can choose personal vendetta or the law, that justice isn’t just a bullet to the brainpan.

The men are a sorry lot. Jud Ivers, a patriarch with a soul of soot, thinks violence will buy him peace. His son Ben is a walking pathology case - cruel to animals, crueler to women, and dumb enough to think a gun makes him a demi-god. Dan Corwin, the law with a grin, imagines he’s Kate’s savior, but he’s just another deluded pissant in pants. They all drink, brag, and brawl, as if noise could drown out the emptiness in their souls.

What makes this curio worth a look is its bleak honesty. The script may be thin and the sets cheaper than a dime-store cap-gun, but the theme cuts deep: men’s hearts are dark, and their ways are cruel. Into that darkness rides Kate - a woman forged in massacre, carrying her own brand of justice. When the smoke clears, the moral is clear: in a world of endless violence by angry lost men, retribution is more just when pursued legally.

And yes, William Talman shows up, doing the mixed-up guy archetype of James Dean and Monty Clift, but the other surprise is that the film flirts with revisionism. It’s grim, it’s fierce, and it dares to focus on a woman’s wrath in a genre that usually treats women like furniture, in a culture uncomfortable with the anger of women. 

For a Western from the Fifties, the claim that justice is grounded in moral choice, not gender roles, may be one reason it is worth an hour and change on a rainy afternoon in spring.

European Reading Challenge #3

I read this for the European Reading Challenge 2026.

Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State - Götz Aly

In this detailed analysis, historian Götz Aly explains how the Nazi regime established and maintained public support by providing material comfort to German citizens. This comfort was obtained through systematic plunder. The regime financed its social programs by looting occupied territories and confiscating assets, particularly from Jewish communities.

Aly traces the flow of money and goods to show how the Nazi state operated as a vast criminal enterprise. Its leaders orchestrated the plundering, but ordinary Germans benefited, shielded from war’s consequences by policies designed to maintain the approval of the masses. The regime’s redistribution of stolen wealth ensured widespread complicity.

The final section of Aly’s work focuses on “The Plunder of the Jews,” revealing how Jewish wealth was targeted to settle Nazi debts. This wasn’t limited to Germany: governments and individuals in Bulgaria, Greece, France, Romania, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia also profited from the confiscation of Jewish property. Aly cites studies like Holocaust of the Jews of Greece, historian Michael Molho’s account of the riches seized in Thessaloniki, which rivaled fictional treasures in their scale.

Ultimately, Aly argues that the Holocaust was enabled not just by ideology, but by economic incentives. Many across Europe materially benefited from the persecution and murder of Jewish people. It’s disturbing to think that Europeans may have lived with a German-dominated Europe - without any Jewish people - had the Nazis been less rigid, less greedy, less brutal, less thieving.

Perry Mason 128: The DA Calls It Murder

Note: For nine novels, Doug Selby is the DA Gardner threw into Madison County, California to slug it out with the sleaze, the hacks, the lawyers who think ethics means coercion should be used only when necessary. He’s human, yeah, but relentless, like justice on too much coffee from South Sulawesi.

The DA Calls It Murder – Erle Stanley Gardner

Doug Selby’s first outing as Madison County’s new district attorney starts with a bang - literally, a corpse in a hotel room. He and Sheriff Max Brandon, his election-day partner-in-crime-fighting, are still riding the high of victory when the call comes in. Madison City sits a hundred miles north of Hollywood, but the trouble Selby’s about to wade into has Tinseltown fingerprints all over it.

Max is the kind of straight-shooting lawman you’d expect to see in a pulp Western, loyal to the bone. Sylvia Martin, Selby’s girlfriend, is no shrinking violet either - smart, quick, and ready to dive into the mess. She’s the kind of woman who knows when to hold your hand and when to frog-march you toward the truth.

The dead man isn’t the only mystery. There’s an envelope fat with five grand, a lawsuit snarled around an estate, and a movie script so overwrought it’s Gardner doing parody - Lest Ye Be Judged. Toss in a poisoned German Shepherd (don’t worry, the dog pulls through) and a camera that’s cutting-edge for 1937, and you’ve got Gardner’s signature: a plot that twists and cool technology.

Hollywood glamour slinks into the picture in the form of Shirley Arden, a star with more brains than her studio gives her credit for. Like John O'Hara did with his shabby glamorous characters, Gardner lets her speak with a candor that slices through the hype. Heaven knows, Gardner liked his short digression but this monologue on fame and privacy is unique in the canon.

[Fans]'re like telegraph poles whizzing by when you're traveling on a Pullman train, if you know what I mean. They tell me things about themselves and I smile at them sympathetically and work my eyes; but all the time I'm thinking about my last income tax return, how long I'm apt to be working on this present picture, whether the director is going to listen to what I have to say about the way I should say "Farewell" to my lover or whether he's going to insist on doing it according to some standards which don't register with me. I give my fan my autograph and turn loose my best smile on him. I know I'm never going to see him again and he's in sort of a daze anyway which he's conjured up to wrap around me as an aura.

Selby nearly gets hypnotized by her - literally - and their verbal sparring has the smoky tension of an Ida Lupino - Ronald Colman scene.

The novel’s heartbeat, though, comes in a quiet room where Selby and Sylvia break the news to Mrs. Larrabie, the widow of the murdered man. Gardner drops the hard-boiled mask for a moment and shows us something rare: women carrying each other through grief. Sylvia steps up, comforting a stranger until her own composure cracks and in a twist of human grace, the widow consoles her. It’s a scene where Gardner tries to do something out of his lane. It works, I think, but I'm as easy-goingly uncritical a reader as you'll find anywhere.

The D.A. Calls It Murder is a puzzle box of subplots and clues. It is also Gardner doing something different, perhaps to test himself, peeling back the gloss of Hollywood and the grit of small-town realities to show us what ambition and compassion look like when the stakes are high.