Perry Mason 142: The Blue Gardenia

Note: Raymond Burr battled his weight his entire life. At 6’2” he looked his best at 185 pounds but reached peaks between 250 and 300 pounds. Because of his weight, he was typecast as the villain. Over and over and over. But he never just phoned in a performance. His performance in this movie is second only to his outstanding performance in Pitfall.

The Blue Gardenia
1953 / 1:28
Tagline: “There was nothing lily-white about her!”
[internet archive] 

Raymond Burr's performance in the 1953 picture The Blue Gardenia is an outstanding example of his ability to portray the heavy. Directed by Fritz Lang, this thriller with noir trappings features Burr as Harry Prebble, a sleazy and manipulative “painter of calendar girls.”

Burr's portrayal of Harry Prebble is marked by a chilling blend of the smooth charm and predatory menace of the stereotypical ladies’ man. He effortlessly embodies the character's ravenous nature, making Prebble as repellant and compelling as a wolf. His interactions with Anne Baxter's character, naïve Norah Larkin, are particularly striking. Burr's ability to switch from suave to sinister in seconds adds a layer of tension to their two scenes together.

One of the most vivid aspects of Burr's performance is his physical presence. He uses his imposing height and rotundity to dominate scenes, creating a sense of unease. His physicality is complemented by his nuanced facial expressions, especially his rare smiles and expressive eyes. He laughs gently as he asks caressingly, “"Do you know what a mermaid's downfall is?"

Burr's body language highlights his versatility as an actor. I don’t know how Burr does it, but when Prebble spikes the woman’s drink with Roofies, his movement seems practiced. This gives the movie-goer the distinct impression that Prebble has date raped many times before.

Burr knew how to use his deep voice too. His warm, confident voice seems trustworthy, which contrasts sharply with the character's remote calculating eyes and underlying malevolence. This vocal performance helps to create a sense of duality in Prebble, making him both alluring and threatening. On the telephone, in a voice devoid of care, sympathy, or support, he deals with a distraught woman who needs to talk about their future together. In the upscale Chinese restaurant, his voice is warm and friendly as he urges the woman drink up, have another Polynesian Pearl Diver. “These aren't really drinks. They're trade winds across cool lagoons. They're the southern cross above coral reefs. They're a lovely maiden bathing at the foot of a waterfall.”

By the middle 1950s, Burr had put in dozens of performances playing a portly villain. As an actor serious about his craft, he must have kept himself from getting bored by creating heavies who were believable and multifaceted. As an illustrator, Prebble genially entertains the women working the switchboard at a newspaper in LA by drawing caricatures. Naturally, he flirts with them and that does not make us feel foreboding. But Prebble also eavesdrops and grabs women’s hands inappropriately, both of which indicate he is not to be trusted.

Overall, Raymond Burr's performance contributes much to this critique of 1950’s dating culture of ladies’ men with black books; good girls being responsible to stop men from “trying something” or if not, running the risk of being labelled a hussy; putting out or walking home so women carried change on dates in case they had to call somebody to pick them up. Burr worked with director Fritz Lang on this movie, not the only time he worked with a well-regarded director; for example, Anthony Mann in Raw Deal and André De Toth in Pitfall.

As for the connection with the classic Perry Mason TV series, Richard Erdman, a brilliant character actor, appeared in seven episodes, as a villain, victim and upstanding citizen. In TCOT LostLast Act, the movie-goer wonders if he was expressing his own opinion when his character says, "The theater is something very special to me, Mr. Mason. It's been my family, my home; everything I've ever wanted. When I'm inside a theater, I'm in a church. When I see a great play, I hear angels singing. When I see great performances, I'm walking the streets of Heaven. Those streets are very clean and beautiful, Mr. Mason. They should be kept that way." 

Perry Mason 141: TCOT Borrowed Brunette

Note: This mid-period novel is highly regarded despite downsides. Rather talky: Mason and Drake have extensive and complicated conversations exonerating the persons of interest. Boo. Familiar characters such as Della, Lt. Tragg, and DA Burger don’t play roles. Boo. But there are many more suspects than the usual three or four, all of whom have cool retro names: Orville L. Reedley, Cora Felton, Daphne Gridley, Carlotta Tipton, Arthur Clovis and Helen Reedley. Yay.

The Case of the Borrowed Brunette – Erle Stanley Gardner

The 28th Mason outing (1946 vintage) arrives with quaint relics such as ration books and rules still written by men with loud voices and heavier wallets. Gardner obliges with two enterprising women: one trying to wriggle free from a husband who treats matrimony like a deed of ownership; the other dabbling in Hollywood fakery for rent money and a shot at being noticed. Naturally, they end up in Mason’s office - who else handles the odd and the risky with such breezy assurance?

Soon enough, the expected corpse appears (Gardner never taxes the reader’s patience once a gun is introduced), and the police, with their touching faith in surfaces, decide the case is already solved. A blackmailer is perforated, a pistol turns up where it shouldn’t, and the DA’s bulldog begins sharpening procedural knives. Mason, as ever, cares less for appearances than for chronology: when, precisely, did the curtain fall on the extortionist - and how inconveniently does that timing clash with the official story?

What’s curious this time is who isn’t crowding the stage. The regulars - Della, Tragg, Burger - hover in the wings while Gardner parades a livelier rogues’ gallery, all named as if christened by a casting director with a flair for the Trollopian: Reedley, Gridley, Tipton, Clovis. Mason and Drake talk - and talk- but the chatter has caffeinated purpose, an almost mathematical pleasure in elimination.

It’s a surprisingly gripping exercise in pure reasoning, provided the reader can swallow the old impersonation chestnut without stamping a foot. If you can, Gardner rewards you with one of his tidier contraptions: fewer courtroom fireworks, more clockwork intrigue - brisk, clever, and difficult to set aside even for dinner.

Perry Mason 140: The DA Holds a Candle

Note: The Thirties. After the Crash. Streets full of men with empty pockets and eyes like busted windows. Gardner’s lawyers - Mason, Selby - grinding through the gears of a system built on hustle and hope. Dog-eat-dog law, chiseling as survival, free enterprise chewing its own tail while the headlines scream and the ink runs. We Americans used to read everything – books, magazines, comics, almanacs – even newspapers. 

The DA Holds a Candle – Erle Stanley Gardner

This 1938 mystery is the second of nine Doug Selby mysteries Gardner published between 1937 and 1949. Like its siblings, it first ran in The Country Gentleman, a rural magazine with 2.5 million subscribers - a fact that tells you plenty about Gardner’s intended audience and about his deliberate turn from big-city Perry Mason theatrics to the moral politics of small-town justice.

The setup is classic Gardner: Selby, the idealistic young D.A., and his loyal sidekick Sheriff Max Brandon jawing about a roadhouse that smells of trouble. Big-city gamblers run poker games involving local rich kids with more allowance than sense. One of those kids is heir to a sugar-beet empire, and Daddy Beet isn’t shy about throwing his weight around at city hall. Brandon is a straight-shooter out of pulp tradition. Sylvia Martin - Selby’s girlfriend and crusading reporter, a sassier cousin to Della Street - would love nothing better than to see the beet magnate taken down a peg.

Unlike The D.A. Calls It Murder, the first Selby outing, Gardner keeps his plot lines separate until the right moment. It starts small: a poor kid in hot water over a bad check - an offense that exposes how casually the town’s well-off can endanger the children of mechanics and secretaries. Then the screws tighten. A hitchhiker turns up dead in an auto camp, carbon dioxide the killer. Two buckos rented the cabin, but five other suspects lurk in the wings. Gardner spins the web with his usual skill, pulling threads until everything knots in a neat, satisfying finish.

No courtroom pyrotechnics here. Gardner is less interested in legal showmanship than in the everyday bargaining of a pastoral county where everybody knows everybody - and expects favors. Sylvia wants scoops in exchange for endorsements. The beet baron wants slaps on the wrist for his DWI-charged son and sneers that Selby can’t “hold a candle” to big-city D.A.s, branding Brandon a “comic-opera sheriff.”

Gardner makes it clear that reformers like Selby fight uphill battles against cronyism and corruption, and must match the toughness of the crooks they pursue. Social justice matters to Gardner, but so does individual grit. Selby believes reason and logic can untangle the nutty behavior of ordinary folks and curb abuses of authority such as nepotism, cronyism and favoritism. That faith drives him, even when the change-hating system - and incurable human nature - push back hard.

Gardner also touches a hot Thirties theme: generational friction. The old guard clings to Victorian proprieties; the young toss them aside for ‘free love,’ mistaking license for freedom and charm for character. Gardner doesn’t preach, but the warning is there.

Readable? Absolutely - especially for the plot mechanics, which are first-rate. Mystery expert Mike Grost calls the 1938–1942 stretch one of Gardner’s peaks, and this book backs him up. No fireworks, no Perry Mason theatrics - but a clear sense of why Gardner kept setting stories in towns like the ones where he grew up, where power operates not formally, but through position, money, and reputation.

Perry Mason 139: Perry Mason in the Forties

Note: On TV, Perry Mason sailed into WWII and came back with a wounded arm. In Gardner’s books? Mason never enlisted - though Donald Lam did, serving in Naval Intelligence. I get teary-eyed reading the scene in which Elsie Brand expresses her pride when he enlists. Honoring loyalty, one day I’m going name a Weimaraner after Elsie Brand.

Perry Mason in the Forties: The Ultimate Trio

The Case of the Baited Hook (1940)
Topped FictionDB’s list with a perfect 5/5 rating, marking it as the highest-rated Mason mystery of the decade. Celebrated for its intricate gripping plot.

The curtain rises on Perry Mason’s office at midnight, stale with smoke. A wealthy architect arrives with a masked woman. He warns Mason to watch the newspapers; ruin looms for them both. No questions, no answers. Mason accepts half of a $10,000 bill - a staggering sum in the early Forties.

From this cryptic start, Gardner spins a web of law, finance, and identity. Mrs. Tump, a shrewd advocate for a young woman scarred by an illegal adoption, adds depth as one of Gardner’s tributes to forthright womanhood. Action unfolds in dialogue: Mason fencing with men whose words conceal more than they reveal. 

The stakes? A stock swindle, a trust fund in peril, and a lucid exposition of agency law. Russian émigrés, a baby farm, and a fraudulent share deal complicate the maze. Mason’s first challenge: discover who his client is. 

No courtroom fireworks this time - only hearings and maneuvers on arcane legal points. Della Street stands as partner in peril and strategy. TCOT Baited Hook is Gardner at his most intricate: a drama of masks and motives, completed only on the final page.

The Case of the Careless Kitten (1942)
Also earned a 5/5 FictionDB score. Heralded for its clever twist and tight legal drama within its serialized Saturday Evening Post run.

Published during WWII, this Perry Mason novel carries the wartime undertone of fear and suspicion. Japanese families were being sent to internment camps, and though the book never names it, that shadow lingers. Komo, a character who calls himself Korean but is seen as Japanese, embodies the era’s prejudice. Gardner uses him as a mirror for judgment and misunderstanding.

The mystery begins with Franklin Shore, a banker missing for ten years. His sudden message summons Mason to a meeting, but Mason finds a corpse instead. From that moment, the story races through eighteen sleepless hours of danger and deception. Della Street, Mason’s loyal secretary, is arrested; Tragg gloats, Burger smirks, and Perry plays chess with the law.

Threads of greed and jealousy tighten as Shore’s reappearance threatens family fortunes. A kitten named Amber Eyes sparks the plot, proving even small things turn big wheels.

Gardner writes lean and vivid, blending human drama with legal maneuvering. Beneath the intrigue hums a question of belonging - what kind of American are you? Komo doesn’t answer. His silence and presence speak for the times.

The Case of the Lonely Heiress (1948)
Another 5/5 FictionDB favorite, widely praised by readers and critics for its emotional depth and suspenseful pacing. Frequently cited for character-driven storytelling.

In early 1948, Perry Mason faced one of his most unusual cases. It began with Robert Caddo, a dubious publisher of Lonely Hearts Are Calling, a magazine mixing plaintive ads and lurid confessions. Among its columns appeared an ad from Marilyn Marlow, a young heiress seeking a suitor “untainted by avarice.” Police suspected fraud, claiming Marilyn was a fiction to boost circulation. Caddo begged Mason to prove her real.

Mason doubted the story - until he learned Marilyn’s mother had inherited a fortune from eccentric George Endicott and planned to pass it to her daughter. This prospect enraged Endicott’s relatives. Soon, the nurse lay murdered, the weapon found in Marilyn’s car. Circumstantial evidence tightened around the girl as the law moved to indict her.

From lonely hearts to lethal passions, Mason unravels a skein of greed and deception.

Honorable Mention: TCOT Silent Partner (1940) and TCOTVagabond Virgin (1948)

The Ides of Dick Powell: Susan Slept Here

Note: This 1954 comedy has a plot that would not fly today. A middle-aged man and a minor six months short of legal fall for each other and get married. Back then lots of people probably said “peeyew” at May/December romances but at the same time just as many folks just shrugged at teenaged girls getting married. The early Fifties saw the peak of teen marriage in the US.  In 1954, approximately 6.1% of women who were 16 years old got married. This translates to about 6,361,000 women who got married at the age of 16.

Susan Slept Here
1954 / 1:38
Tagline: “WHAT GOES ON? When a girl almost 18 latches on to a man-about-town?”

In the early 1950s, millions of American girls under 18 were marrying, yet this comedy cheerfully ignores that reality and plunges into pure fantasy. Dick Powell plays a weary Hollywood screenwriter desperate to escape the fluff factory. Like Sullivan in Sullivan’s Travels, he yearns for grit and truth, so he asks his police pals to find him a genuine juvenile delinquent for research.

On Christmas Eve, two vice cops deliver Debbie Reynolds to his apartment. She’s been arrested for brawling - specifically, breaking a bottle over a drunken sailor’s head because he was acting like, well, a drunken sailor. Rather than jail her for the holidays, they beg Powell to babysit until she’s shipped to detention.

Convincing audiences that Reynolds – the impossibly adorable singer of Tammy - could be a JD takes effort. At first, she’s a wildcat, rattling Powell’s underemployed household of secretary and houseman. Then she discovers she’s read one of his novels and softens. The Christmas morning phone call from Powell’s fiancée Izabella (Anne Francis) is a comic gem: Reynolds innocently makes Powell sound depraved, chirping that they stayed up all night “playing games… card games.”

Soon Powell learns Reynolds faces six months in reform school unless she shows “visible means of support.” His solution? Marry her. Cue a neon-lit Vegas spree, dancing till dawn, then snoozing in a cab back to L.A. - a $1,500 fare in today’s money.

Powell flees Hollywood to write his magnum opus, aided by Glenda Farrell’s world-weary secretary (still funny, though the old-school man-hungry shtick hasn’t aged well). Les Tremayne supplies comic surprises as Powell’s frazzled lawyer, and Alvy Moore shines as the street-smart houseman. Red Skelton pops in for a cameo - mercifully silent, though his trademark mugging sneaks through.

Meanwhile, Reynolds tries to “grow up” with mixology, horseback riding, and golf - Izabella’s turf. Her mimicry of Francis in home movies is priceless, as is her ambush of Powell lip-syncing to one of his own dreadful scripts on the late show.

Technicolor is the film’s secret weapon. Anne Francis, with eyes like animated sapphires, looks alternately divine and deranged thanks to genius costuming. And Reynolds’ dream sequence? A riot of color and surreal comedy that actually advances the plot.

This is a looney holiday fantasy - half screwball, half satire - wrapped in eye-popping hues. It’s not reality by longshot - Powell’s Oscar statue sometimes narrates from its own point of view - but it’s a fascinating artifact of mid-century Hollywood.

Perry Mason 138: Not So Innocent

Note: A handful of Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason novels keep tripping over the same joke on humanity: proving you didn’t commit murder doesn’t mean you behaved like a blameless lamb. Mason’s clients are innocent, sure, but also economical with the truth and spectacularly bad at making sensible choices.

Not So Innocent

Across these Perry Mason novels, Erle Stanley Gardner returns to a paradox that the courtroom can resolve officially but human life cannot: legal innocence does not cancel moral fault. Mason’s clients, in these novels, did not commit the murder. Yet they behaved in ways that made murder plausible, attractive, even efficient for someone else. They lie, delay, conceal, improvise, and negotiate privately when, as tedious and dumb as it is, law would have been safer. 

In The Case of the Curious Bride (1934), Rhoda Montaine responds to the reappearance of her first husband, Gregory Moxley, not with disclosure but with evasion. Rather than clarifying her marital status through legal channels, she lets the situation hover in a gray zone of fear, bargaining, and silence. The threat Moxley poses - to her social position, her second marriage, her respectability - is real, but her response to that threat is to suppress the truth rather than neutralize it. In doing so, she turns Moxley into a walking liability: a blackmail risk and a financial irritant whose continued existence inconveniences too many people. When Mason finally goes to confront Moxley, he finds him already dead. Rhoda did not kill him, she merely creates the conditions under which someone else decides it would be cleaner if nobody ever saw Moxley again.

The Case of the Sulky Girl (1933) sharpens this pattern by adding temperament to concealment. Fran Celane is secretly married and pregnant, facts she hides while aggressively pressuring her uncle, Edward Norton, to release her trust. Her duplicity poisons every interaction. Norton feels manipulated; Fran’s husband feels cornered. Poster girl for flaming youth, Fran’s volatility - her loud scenes, her storming out of rooms, her fierce unpredictability - completes the picture. She looks capable of anything, which means that when violence occurs, it reads as the emotional climax everyone has been bracing for. By forcing the situation to a breaking point while refusing transparency, Fran endangers not only herself but those around her. The murder does not arise from malice so much as from panic generated by her refusal to choose clarity over drama.

In The Case of the Howling Dog (1934), Gardner explores a quieter but equally corrosive form of culpability: prolonged passivity. Bessie Foley is the lawful wife of Clinton Foley, yet allows another woman to occupy that role publicly for years. She does not assert her identity, does not demand legal recognition, does not intervene. This abdication enables a sprawling deception that infects wills, property, and domestic arrangements. A neighbor, Arthur Cartwright, becomes entangled in the question of who Foley’s “real” wife is and begins redirecting his estate accordingly. What should have been a simple legal clarification metastasizes into accusations of insanity, staged threats, and elaborate ruses. By remaining invisible, Bessie allows others to treat her as expendable. When she finally appears and asserts herself, the architecture of lies collapses. Foley attempts to weaponize the good-hearted dog and murder erupts at the precise moment her long‑delayed claim to identity forces a reckoning.

The Case of the Dangerous Dowager (1942) replaces secrecy about identity with secrecy about addiction. Poker degenerate Sylvia Oxman accumulates gambling debts whose danger lies not in the expense but in the evidentiary power of IOUs: they can be used to label her an unfit mother and strip her of custody of her child. Rather than confronting this through counsel immediately, she attempts to retrieve the IOUs privately, placing herself alone in negotiation with a crook whose incentives align perfectly with exploitation and intimidation. The conflict slides from law into blackmail. In desperation, Sylvia brings the family gun to the confrontation. She does not fire it - but by introducing a weapon, she ensures that any later violence will point back to her. Guns are bad medicine in the hands of the desperate.

Finally, The Case of the Careless Kitten (1942) dramatizes the dangers of misplaced trust. Helen Kendal receives a late‑night call from a man claiming to be her uncle Franklin Shore, long presumed dead. She does not verify, does not alert authorities, does not buttonhole Perry and Della in a restaurant. Instead, she acts. Recklessly. She keeps the matter informal, familial, ambiguous - exactly the conditions under which funny business thrives. By agreeing to arrange a clandestine meeting, she turns a dormant inheritance dispute into a physical rendezvous fraught with peril. When Mason arrives, they find not Uncle Franklin but a corpse.

Perry Mason’s genius is not moral absolution. He rescues clients from the law while quietly permitting readers to recognize a harsher truth: innocence is not the same as blamelessness. These clients are spared conviction and Q's smokehouse, not consequence. Gardner’s world insists that violence rarely arrives out of nowhere. It is sometimes invited - indirectly, inadvertently, through silence, fear, and the belief that postponing clarity is safer than facing it.

The Nones of Dick Powell: You Never Can Tell

You Never Can Tell
1951 / 1:18
Tagline: “A Picture for People who Think they've Seen Everything!”

In this quiet comic fantasy, the German Shepherd King is living large. He has the run of a millionaire’s mansion, eats tasty morsels daily, hangs out with doggie buds, and is spoiled rotten by Peggy Dow, the millionaire’s smart, kind and comely secretary. But the millionaire dies of ornery old age. His misanthropic bequest of his estate is to the canine. If and when the canine dies, millions go to the secretary.

Unfortunately, poor King does die. The cops bring in the secretary for questioning and the state freezes the probating of the will. The secretary is released for lack of evidence but her reputation is besmirched. In animal heaven, loyal and devoted King requests that he be allowed to return to earth in order to find his killer and clear the name of kindly Peggy. The request is granted. He is sent back with the companion Golden Harvest, who in life though a filly was a moderately successful race horse.

King in the human guise of Rex Shepherd, PI, is played by Dick Powell. This is rather a take-off, because Powell on screen and radio played hard-boiled private investigators as in Murder My Sweet. Golden Harvest, or Goldie, is played by athletic 21-year-old Joyce Holden. What’s funny is that they both retain preferences and behaviors from their former incarnations. Powell likes munching down Kibble and playing with a ball with a bell inside it. He has a phobia about the dog catcher. Speaking in a charming Kentucky accent, Goldie can run like the wind. She has an encyclopedic knowledge of turf matters and keeps a proud eye on her grandchildren’s career progress. Her purse is a feed bag.

The movie is not a parody of noir private eye movies but has its share of cynical asides. Powell observes to Holden, “These are humans we're dealing with. You can't tell them the truth and expect them to believe it.” With a mix of compassion and cynicism, Holden remarks, “People can’t help being people.” When Powell is placed in a holding cell, the deviants and degenerates are enraged and beat him up when they think he is a dog poisoner. While it’s very human to go off violently on no evidence whatsoever, even misfits have their standards of behavior.