The Ides of Perry Mason 87

Note: Below are the memorable episodes from the second season of the Perry Mason TV series that ran from 1957 to 1966, in 271 episodes. Granted, the noir theme of "innocents menaced by a hostile universe" was what PM was all about, but in the first three seasons the noir look and tropes were conspicuous.

The Best of Season 2 (1958-59)

The Case of the Lucky Loser (September 27, 1958). This episode overflows with noir elements, starting with the noir byword “Appearances are often deceiving.” A cranky dying father. His feckless son who digs up ruins instead of running the family empire. Son’s cheating wife. A fixer man who specializes in intimidation and corruption. A crooked resort owner who’s bribed to commit perjury.  Douglas Kennedy plays the sinister fixer, cast for his menacing air of willingness to throw his weight around. Plus he gets our goat because we are jealous of his sharp late Fifties Corvette, second in coolness only to an early Seventies Chevelle Malibu. As the cheating wife, Patricia Medina is drop-dead attractive with her dark Spanish eyes and sultry allure.

The Case of the Perjured Parrot (December 20, 1958). The first half-hour showcases two amazing actresses in two memorable scenes. Being interviewed in Perry’s office, Fay Baker is a mother who’s desperately afraid her daughter’s going to jail but feels angry as hell at the kid for ditching school too. Jody Lawrance plays a gentle and lonely librarian who finally finds love only to have her life shattered when she ends up charged with murder. Lawrance and Burr, in a nice change, don’t have their interview in a cell but on a park bench. Burr characteristically goes silent and gives space to Lawrance and she sustains the scene like a true professional. Two familiar faces, Edgar Buchanan and Frank Ferguson, whip up old-timey corn pone as a country coroner and sheriff respectively. Joseph Kearns – Mr. Wilson on Dennis the Menace – plays a self-styled expert nervous that his imposter syndrome will be exposed. Mel Blanc does the parrot’s voice: “Thank you for coming but you needn’t stay.” What more could we ask? This may be my favorite episode ever.

The Case of the Dangerous Dowager (May 9, 1959) has the familiar despotic dowager, her browbeaten son, and an alligator disguised as a gangster. In a comic scene crusty Ellen Corby (who later played Grandma Walton), gives Paul Drake crap at a poker table for not showing his cards when called. Paul looks put-out as Perry gives in to rare chortles. But the dramatic scene in which Perry does jail-cell therapy with compulsive gambler Sylvia shows great things happen when TV writers and actors get a little room to move. Broken and lost Sylvia tells about how she used gambling and alcohol to blot out the pain of being abandoned by her mother and tyrannized by her grandmother. Sylvia was played by London-born Patricia Cutts who studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. And the stage training shows. It’s an incredible scene.

The Case of the Lame Canary (June 27, 1959). I like another bird episode not only for the non-stop action that involves a broken marriage, attempted murder, insurance fraud, arson, grand theft, and of course the killing of the vic that needed killing.  But also it’s a cavalcade of all the usual suspects. The comely female client with poor judgement and her working-man boyfriend who’s loyal anyway. There is a tag team of evil doers: the sex bunny and dishonest insurance broker. Just classic noir. This was Berry Kroeger’s second appearance of seven on the show. His amazing voice – attention-grabbing but relaxing - got him started in radio in the late 1930s and he could act up a storm, from menacing to congenial, from forthcoming to clammed up. For once, DA Hamilton Burger gets the quotable last line, “That's the first time I ever heard of a lame canary turning out to be a stool pigeon.”

Honorable Mention: The Case of the Howling Dog is notable for its understated acting, melancholy atmosphere, and the highest body count in the whole series, I think. In The Case of the Purple Woman, elegant Bethel Leslie one of her three outings as a nice wife unhappily married to a louse who deservingly ended up on a slab in the morgue. Purple Woman also has Robert H. Harris playing his usual sleazy oaf; he was in seven episodes, as the perp in three and the defendant and victim in one each.

He Scratched her Tender Skin...

The Animal Kingdom
1932 / 1:25
Tagline: “He scratched her tender skin and found a savage!”
[internet archive]

In this Pre-Code love drama, Tom is the owner of a small press in Connecticut. He wants to publish art, not tripe. His father fears that idealistic dreamer Tom lacks punctuality, focus and persistence.

Tom had a three-year romantic relationship with Daisy, a magazine illustrator who wants to paint seriously. They had a vague idea that marriage wasn’t in the cards, that love was a bourgeois thing. But Tom met Cecelia while Daisy was away studying the great art and artists of France. After a whirlwind month that featured judgement-clouding “infatuation,” Tom married Cecelia.

Optimistic Tom wants to maintain a friendship with Daisy, because he knows they are good for each other. They like exchanging news. They give each other advice about making genuine art but making a living too. Daisy realizes with dismay that she loves Tom like crazy, bourgeois thing or not. She bails to Nova Scotia to get him out of her system.

At first Cecelia seems okay with Tom hanging with his bohemian buds. However, in the course of time, Ceceila envisions herself to be the project manager with Tom as the project. “See his ability to organize and carry through? That’s all me!” For his own good mainly but so they can live in the city, not the suburbs, and be the charming power couple in a busy social and professional life.

Playwright Philip Barry puts this complicated triangle in a social world. Cecelia allies with Tom’s father to make Tom a success, whether or not success costs Tom what he thinks is his integrity. Tom selfishly uses his ex-pug butler Regan (William Gargan, comic relief) as a good luck charm. Tom and Daisy’s hipster friends are pulling for them, but feel powerless to snap Tom out of his “bewilderment.” Cecelia keeps an ex-lover in thrall because as a lawyer he (Neil Hamilton) might be handy in advancing the scheme to sell Tom’s publishing house to a conglomerate. No triangle is an island.

Leslie Howard played Tom on the stage in this Phillip Barry play so he’s comfortable in the role. Howard has a warm gentleness that movie-goers will recall from The Petrified Forest. His lightness and tenderness disarm our judgement that Tom might be merely passive and immature. Even puritans like me will understand him doing the head over heels thing with somebody as attractive as Cecelia.

On top of easy to look at, Ann Harding as Daisy is likeable, a rare mix of talent, intelligence, and courage to want a baby even if it means being a single mother in 1932. Harding also has this aura of “Hold me when I’m hurting” that is compelling. "Easy on the eye," "likeable," "compelling," hell - who am I kidding? I'd storm Troy with Menelaus to get Ann Harding back. 

Myrna Loy as Cecelia could have played the part as an unapologetic social climber, but does not. Cecelia thinks she is doing the right thing for everybody involved, manipulating and coercing Tom to get on the path to success in the world of publishing, not an industry that coddles the thin-skinned. A puritan like me, however, has qualms about Cecelia’s esteem of ephemera such as popularity, the high life, status, and money.

The Pre-Code movie is worth watching, if the movie-goer has a yen for a rather talky movie about adult situations. I don’t think it is a “comedy of manners” because there are few one-liners and scenes are not played for laughs. The ex-prizefighter is there for comic relief, which implies to me the playwright himself thought the tone was generally serious, on the level, unironic.

The Nones of Perry Mason 86

Note: Raymond Burr was a demon for work, appearing in more than 50 feature films between 1946 and 1957. He was typecast as the villain because his stoutness gave him a commanding menacing presence. Film historian Alain Silver described Raymond Burr's psycho private investigator in Pitfall as "both reprehensible and pathetic," a characterization also cited by film historian Richard Schickel as a prototype of film noir. 

Pitfall
1948 / 1:26
Tagline: “A man can be as strong as steel … but somewhere there's a woman who'll break him!”
[internet archive]

In an incredible performance, Raymond Burr portrays a brutal private investigator that stalks Lizabeth Scott. She was connected with a case of embezzling that the insurance company, represented by Dick Powell, has to make good. Scott and married-with-young son Powell have brief dalliance that does not amount to much. However, Burr the Burly Brute wants Scott body and soul. He schemes to own her by setting up Powell in an ugly trap. Excellent plotting, pace, and climax with realistic characters.

Burr makes the most of an extended part as an ex-cop turned private investigator. He looks close to 300 pounds, making his head look small on a monolith of a body. The secretaries in Powell’s office nicknamed Burr “Gruesome” because he creeps them out. Doubtless ex-cop for cause, he hulks with repressed violence and moves as slow and leisurely as a cat as if to warn people to run away when he moves fast.

Whether he is redolent of threat or yearning for something nice to happen to him (for once), he stares with a faraway look, as if he has retreated to a place where feverish dreams are fulfilled and sociopathic plans hatched. The scene in which he visits the salon where Scott models clothes and forces her to show more bare shoulders by taking her shawl down will give the movie-goer a full-blown case of the heebie-jeebies.

Burr seems eerily oblivious of the repulsion he provokes. In his narcissism, he figures that if the object of his obsession spends a little time with him, she’ll get over his being horrible and not feel the compulsion to take a shower whenever he looks at her. In his stupidity, he never considers the hazards of driving to desperation a woman who keeps a gun in her apartment. It is too much to expect that imagination-free victimizers to ever conceive of themselves as one day becoming the victim.

The performances make this movie well-worth viewing. Powell looks and talks rather deadpan as he plays the bored suburban husband who makes it easy for noir trouble to find him. It’s his damn fault, he brews his own trouble: he doesn’t tell Scott he’s married – the fink – and, deeply wounded yet again by useless immature men, Scott drops him.

Jane Wyatt is convincing as the dependable wife. When Powell, in a rut, asks her, “You were the homecoming queen and I most likely to succeed, what happened,” she answers matter-of-factly, “We got married. I had a baby.” Quite sensibly, she tries to talk him out of his sulky FOMO and get him to appreciating what he’s got, which is only a life millions would trade their eyeteeth for 

Lizabeth Scott has delightful moments sporting about in a motor boat when she is actually smiling. This is a sea change from her usual defeated look caused by bad luck with the wrong kind of men (see The Strange Love of Martha Ivers). But due to Burr’s menace and stalking, it doesn’t take too long before she assumes her bewildered mien. She’s decidedly not a scheming femme fatale. She’s an ordinary woman who has been kicked around by life. She’s unlucky enough to get unwittingly involved with three clucks: a weak-minded boyfriend (Byron Barr), a bored insurance man (Powell), and a psychopathic detective (Burr).

I'm the kind of movie-goer that's also a moralistic prude so I get the message often sent in film noir: it doesn’t take much to go off the rails and once off, really bad stuff can come down. 

Pre-Mason Burr
Please Murder Me (1956) [internet archive] [my review]
I Love Trouble (1948) [internet archive] [my review]
Sleep, My Love (1948) [internet archive] [my review]
Ruthless (1948) [internet archive] [my review]

Taoist Tradition

The Importance of Living - Lin Yutang

Along with Pearl Buck, Lin enjoyed a vogue in the 1930s when many Americans were interested in our ally the Nationalist Chinese. Lin was not a philosopher but he interpreted Confucianism and Taoism in light, readable essays. Widely read in traditional literature, he translated many obscure Taoists and drunken poet-scamps so in this book, he includes wonderful passages on the Taoist good life that we English speakers won’t find anywhere else.

This book covers topics like fine living, reasonableness, education, art, and wisdom in a refreshing way, though we post-moderns have to be patient with regard to his views on gender and monumental silence about social class. He doesn't provide a counter to the argument of, "Hey, what if everybody listened to his inner layabout all the time? Where would society be then? Buncha slackers!  Huh?"

Lin's voice is humane and mildly dissenting. For instance, he writes

In this present age of threats to democracy and individual liberty, probably only the scamp and the spirit of the scamp alone will save us from becoming lost as serially numbered units in the masses of disciplined, obedient, regimented and uniformed coolies. The scamp will be the last and most formidable enemy of dictatorships. He will be the champion of human dignity and individual freedom, and will be the last to be conquered. All modern civilization depends entirely on him.

His thesis – that it is up to the individual to set his own standards for enjoying life and find her own pleasures – brings to mind Robert Graves' idea that "When people have lost their authentic personal taste, they lose their personality and become the instruments of other people's wills.

In the Taoist tradition, Lin says the point is not to “have a great philosophy or have a few great philosophers” but rather it is “to take things philosophically, to live in a way that makes life not only bearable but delightful.

Reading is key to enjoying life: “… [I]f one knows the enjoyment of reading, one can study anywhere, even in the best schools.”

Also by Lin Yutang

• Moment in Peking 
• My Country and My People

The Kalends of Perry Mason 85

Note: Gardner dedicates this 1953 story to Ralph F. Turner, author of Forensic Science and Laboratory Techniques, a publication that contributed to the field of Criminal Forensic Science. Turner's advances in the field of criminalistics added to the scholarly reputation of then Michigan State College, now my alma mater Michigan State University. The reveal of this mystery is, among Mason fandom, one of the most famous of all.

The Case of the Green-eyed Sister – Erle Stanley Gardner

What has poor old Ned Bain done to deserve such a troubled old age? He’s got the guilts on account of over-dutiful daughter Hattie who’s sacrificed her chance at a loving husband and family so she could nurse him and his dodgy heart. Instead of getting an honest job like any man should, his son Jarret has married rich and spends his wife’s money anthropologizing at ruins – i.e. fallen down buildings --  in the Yucatan. His daughter Sylvia is a loose-cannon manipulator and divorcee to boot. Snooty and cold Sylvia makes a poor impression on intuitive Della Street who sums up Sylvia with, "She'd cut your heart out for thirty-seven cents."

As if his children were not worry enough, a false friend, J.J. Fritch from their sketchy past, is trying to blackmail him. J.J. is threatening to tell the bank that Ned’s fortune is based on money stolen in a heist. Such a tale, of course, would wipe out the Bain family. Pal J.J. is using crooked PI Brogan to plague him. Daughter Sylvia goes to Perry Mason to get the family out from under its vulnerable position.

The actions careens around tight corners with the upshot being Perry Mason finds himself having to defend daughter Hattie on a murder charge. Who would have thought such a mousey woman would take a bad guy out with an icepick?

Gardner has socially-conscious fun as Mason dissects questionable police procedure such as priming witnesses and not bothering to look for evidence because their "gut instinct" tells them they've got the perp. Police corner-cutting happens so often in Perry Mason novels that one wonders if Gardner got guff from cops and DA’s who didn’t like their short-cuts and thinking errors being publicized. 

The trial scene in Chapter Fourteen, about 50 pages, is one of the longest in all the Mason novels. The reveal is clever and counts as one of the more famous endings among Mason fans. Mystery fans who like retro expressions (“lead pipe cinch”) will enjoy this readable story.

European Reading Challenge #6

The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life - Tom Reiss

This biography examines the life and times of Lev Nussimbaum, a stateless Azerbaijani writer who lived between the two world wars.

The narrative is a bit less on the mercurial, magnetic, and elusive personality of the subject than on the major geopolitical upheavals of the 20^th century, such as the collapse of empires after WWI, the rise of Russian Bolshevism, the tragedy of Weimar democracy and the rise of Hitler’s National Socialism.

Reiss departs from the intricate story of Nussimbaum’s short life (from the Caucasus to Central Europe to America to end in Posillipo, Italy) to give primers on the horror of the Cheka; the brutality of the Freikorps; and the global rise of conflicting revolutionary and counter-revolutionary groups. This will interest readers (like me) who knew about such phenomena only superficially.

Reiss’s narrative captures and holds our attention because he continually draws from eyewitness accounts in memoirs and interviews, and Nussimbaum’s letters to intimates and fragments of his autobiography. He compares this evidence against historical sources. Did Nussimbaum soften frightful events due to his own nostalgia? Or conversely when did he see harsh reality but soften it in his fiction? This critical approach allows the biographer to substantiate the claim that Nussimbaum was probably the author Kurban Said, who wrote the iconic novel Ali and Nino ​​(1937).

An exceptional work. The book is well-worth reading if a reader can’t stop reading about the painful history of 20^th century Europe. Historical figures are presented in an interesting way (such as the young bank-robbing Stalin knowing the subject’s mother). The vision of Baku at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries as the Paris of the East brings us closer to the culture, customs and peoples of the Caucasus and neighboring regions that are never mentioned in our schools or the mass media.

Chandler but More Heart & Soul

Ask for Me Tomorrow - Margaret Millar

Gilda was married to B.J. Lockwood, a nice guy that bad stuff just happened to since he never learned from experience and was too dumb to evaluate the risks of impulsive decisions. B.J.’s decision to run off with their pregnant 15-year-old house girl back to her natal village in Mexico left Gilda at loose ends. Gilda then married Marco, who had a paralyzing stroke soon after their nuptials.

Wanting to conclude unfinished business with B.J., Gilda hires young lawyer Tom Aragon to go down Mexico way and find him. Though he’s by no means an experienced detective, Tom is bilingual and quickly finds out B.J. and a con man named Jenkins were jailed on fraud charges. 

Their hapless plan to convert a poor Baja California village into a resort transformed into a criminal enterprise mainly because they were both out of their financial league. As Tom gets closer to his quarry B.J., however, three brutal murders eliminate informants.  

I found the ending a surprising hoot, while harder to please, less willing to be tricked readers of mystery may be less impressed.

Millar’s settings of Southern California and Mexico in the mid-1970s feel authentic and evocative though the attacks on the corruption in both places may put off readers who like those places. The dialogue is snappy and funny, but sometimes we wonder if it is likely that sleazy Mexican cops would really come up with such witty rejoinders. Many scenes shine as Gilda and Tom interact with each other, mainly by phone, and with a variety of curious characters. I think the exposition, dialogue and characterization make this one worth reading.

Margaret Millar was married to Kenneth Millar who wrote mysteries under the pen name of Ross Macdonald.