Perry Mason 116: FBI Girl

Note: Before the Perry Mason TV series, in almost all his movies Raymond Burr played The Bad Guy. With his heavyset stature, deep commanding voice and expressive eyes, he was the brightest light in nearly forgotten film noir outings such as Walk a Crooked Mile (1948), Borderline (1950), The Whip Hand (1951) and this movie in 1952.

FBI Girl
1952 / 1:14
Tagline: “Woman ... on a Man-hunt”
[internet archive]

Raymond Greenleaf has kept his skirts clean as Governor of Capitol City for 20 years. Now his politician’s peepers are fixed on the U.S. Senate - but a decades-old first-degree murder conviction under another name threatens to haunt him. He is concerned that a special investigative committee may have his fingerprints sent to the FBI and thus dash his dreams of joining that most prestigious gathering of solons in the world.

Greenleaf's Mr. Fix-It, Raymond Burr, in heartless mode, recalls Burt Lancaster’s ruthless flack in Sweet Smell of Success. Here, Burr suborns two FBI clerks to steal the governor’s fingerprint records - a move that triggers three murders and the death of his own assassin, a larger-than-life Southerner played by Alexander Pope.

As the heavy, Burr cuts a leaner figure this time - his suits sharp, his ethics nonexistent. When the Governor has feelings of remorse and anxiety, thinking it might be best to come clean, Burr tells him to buck up, determined not crash in flames with the governor. The spider in the middle of the web, his eyes look wary, remote, calculating. A victim of his plots warns Burr to stay away in the future and Burr smiles gently and says chillingly, “Well, that depends.”

Caesar Romero and George Brent play FBI men who relentlessly tumble to the fact that somebody big in Capitol City is behind the death of a clerk in their own fingerprint department. In police procedural style, they interview a variety of marchers in the human parade, including a flirty boozy landlady, an unctuous funeral director, and a wiseacre morgue attendant. In one odd scene Romero, sandwiched between two blondes (Jan Kayne and Joi Lansing) on the couch, has to suffer watching on TV the unfunny frolics of Peter Marshall (Hollywood Squares) and Tommy Noonan (sad sack Charlie Hatch in TCOT Crying Comedian).

The story races ahead, leaving key moments undercooked. The interrogation of the poker-obsessed squirt lacks bite, and the assassin’s hospital ledge scene never induces the vertigo it promises. The climax is the usual mix of car chase, helicopter, Audrey Totter wearing a wire, dark headlights, speeding motorboats and Tommy guns. The music is sometimes intrusive. The only lighting and shadow that look interesting is due to the noir standby of venetian blinds. The actors are skillful, of course, given their years of experience but not given a good script to work with.

Unusually for a B-noir, the script toys with ethics: FBI agents debate using a civilian (Audrey Totter, superb) as bait, while Brother Carl wrestles with selling out ideals for Burr’s Faustian bargain. Brother Carl (Tom Drake) feels like a shit because he is a lobbyist, just subverting integrity in government and taking the money, in contrast to his father who fought for angelic causes and died broke. Bro Carl is ripe pickings for satanic Burr’s inveigling him to just focus on externals like career, work duties, and a future happy life with smart sexy tough Audrey Totter.

As for the connection with the classic Perry Mason series, Tom Drake was a downtrodden writer in TCOT Jaded Joker and downtrodden son in TCOT Crying Cherub. Audrey Totter was great as an independent mine owner in noirish TCOT Reckless Rockhound. Morgue attendant Byron Foulger was in TCOT Polka Dot Pony and TCOT Mischievous Doll. Funeral Director O.Z. Whitehead was in TCOT Cowardly Lion.

The Kalends of Gail Patrick: Reno

Note: Gail Patrick was an American actress in the 1930s and 1940s and television producer from 1957 to 1966. She is best known for her movies roles as the mean sister My Man Godfrey and the other woman in My Favorite Wife. She was one of the few women in a powerful position when she was producing the popular television series Perry Mason.

 Reno
1939 / 73 minutes
Tagline: “He gambled on love as he gambled on life---and lost!”
[internet archive]

Gail Patrick plays a nice gal, though a bit headlong when she hustles Richard Dix to the altar in early 1900s Nevada. Dix is one of those granite-faced fellows - think Gary Cooper without the light touch - slow to catch on when it comes to other people’s feelings. So, our smart country woman grabs the reins. 

Dix and Patrick convince me they love each other and their toddler. But, as men do, he buries himself in work and forgets the family needs him in the flesh. His job? He’s the lawyer who made Reno the divorce capital for well-heeled women tired of their husbands. Nevada’s lenient laws were a gold mine for him. Hollywood’s Production Code, however, insists divorce is shameful, so the film ladles on moral disapproval like gravy at Thanksgiving.

Is it melodrama? Sure, but not the kind that makes me roll my eyes. I’m a sucker for earnest hokum if it’s not slathered on with a trowel. Dix can do that soulful stare that says, “If the moon’s right, I might feel something.” Patrick suggests depth without drowning in sentiment. Dialogue? Serviceable. No purple prose here.

The script, alas, skimps on motivation. Why does Patrick fall for Dix after five minutes, other than that’s how they roll in Hollywood? He’s no dynamo in brains or ambition. And when she leaves him - why? Yes, he dines with rich, flighty clients who puff up his ego, but he never strays. If he wobbled near Astrid Allwyn, I’d understand whole-heartedly. He doesn’t.

Meanwhile, the movie moonlights as a Reno history lesson: boomtown, bust, rebirth as divorce mecca. Treat it as gospel and you’re a ninny, but I didn’t mind the flashbacks. The hokey saga stuff is offset by Anita Louise as the loyal daughter and Hobart Cavanaugh as the faithful sidekick mourning Dix’s lost soul.

Bottom line: It’s glossy soap with a dash of social commentary and a whiff of historical pretension. I bought the romance, shrugged at the logic, and enjoyed the ride. 

Other Gail Patrick Movies: Click on the title to go to the review
·         If I Had a Million
·         The Phantom Broadcast
·         The Murders in the Zoo
·         Death Takes a Holiday
·         The Crime of Helen Stanley
·         Murder at the Vanities
·         The Preview Murder Mystery
·         My Man Godrey
·         Murder by Pictures
·         Artists and Models
·         King of Alcatraz
·         Wives Under Suspicion
·         Disbarred
 

European Reading Challenge #1

I read this for the European Reading Challenge 2026.

Eastern Approaches - Fitzroy Maclean

To read Eastern Approaches is to be swept into the vortex of the 20th century’s most turbulent theatres - Moscow, the Western Desert, and the mountains of Bosnia - by a narrator who combines the composure of a diplomat with the audacity of a commando.

Fitzroy Maclean, a young British envoy with a taste for the forbidden, begins his odyssey in Stalin’s Moscow, where in the spring of 1937, the air is thick with suspicion and the streets cower in silent terror of Stalin’s bloody purges. Assigned to the embassy, he slips the leash of officialdom and in the autumn ventures into Soviet Central Asia, a land of minarets and mirages, where commissars frown and peasants whisper. His accounts from Samarkand are not those of a tourist, but of a witness - one who sees through the Potemkin facades to the machinery of repression beneath.

Maclean’s reportage of the 1937 Moscow show trials is chilling in its clarity. Here, the Old Bolsheviks - Bukharin among them - confess to crimes they did not commit, in a masquerade of the absurd that Orwell and Koestler would later echo. It is a portrait of gangsters devouring democratic socialists, and Maclean captures it with the precision of a man who knows he is watching history as nightmare.

From the snows of Russia, the narrative shifts to the sands of North Africa at the end of 1942. As a soldier in the Special Air Service, Maclean trades his diplomatic briefcase for explosives, executing raids behind enemy lines with a flair almost stereotypical of English and Scots doggedness. His account of the Benghazi raid is a narrative of controlled chaos, and his capture of a pro-Nazi Iranian general reads like a scene from a John Buchan novel.

But it is in Yugoslavia – Bosnia - that Maclean’s story reaches its crescendo in the late summer of 1943. Parachuted into the mountains by Churchill’s command, he becomes Britain’s man with Tito - a liaison, a strategist, and, at times, a partisan himself. The Yugoslav resistance, fierce and fractious, is rendered with nuance and admiration. Maclean’s mission was to assess and assist, but he also observed, with the eye of a writer and the conscience of a believer in democracy.

Eastern Approaches is not merely a memoir; it is a testament to the strange glamour of peril and the enduring value of bearing witness. For hardcore readers drawn to the shadows of totalitarianism, the dust of desert warfare, and the fire of resistance, this is essential reading.

Perry Mason 115: TCOT Cautious Coquette

Note: Break out the thinking caps, kids - Gardner cranks complexity up to DefCon 5. You’ll either love the brain-bending or throw the book across the room.

The Case of the Cautious Coquette – Erle Stanley Gardner

Mike Grost, tireless cataloger of detective fiction, observes that Gardner possessed “seemingly inexhaustible ability to generate complex plots.” TCOT Cautious Coquette, Mason’s thirty-fourth outing from 1949, is a case in point. Gardner’s ingenuity here is not merely technical; it reflects a worldview in which contingency rules so your practical wisdom - your mother-wit - had better be sharp.

Perry Mason, personal injury lawyer. Sounds not only wrong but like you got a hair in your mouth, doesn’t it? Eee-yew. Like Celine Dion singing Gimme a Pigfoot and a Bottle of Beer.  But here he is, chasing a hit-and-run for a college kid with a busted hip and a mother who’s got nothing but grief and a mortgage. Mason’s usual gig is saving the innocent from the criminal justice meat grinder, so why not take on Big Insurance?

The plan is simple: find the driver, squeeze the insurer, collect the check. Mason runs an ad, and simplicity is trumped by contingency. Two drivers show up, two cars, two settlements. Then a chauffeur named Hartwell L. Pitkin turns up dead in a garage, and the garage belongs to Lucille Barton - a woman who wants Mason for an alimony case. He said no. He doesn’t do family law - too much bad behavior bad actors can't help. He does criminal defense.

Lucille didn’t call the cops like Mason told her. A neighbor saw her, maybe saw Mason, and now the cops want answers. Mason gives them attorney-client privilege instead. It’s legal, it’s clever, and it’s the reason he’s stuck with a client he doesn’t trust. Lucille’s beautiful, cunning, and about as reliable as sarcasm.

Enter Lt. Tragg, homicide detective, smart enough to know Sgt. Holcomb - his rival - is a bull in a china shop. Holcomb wants headlines, Mason wants daylight, and Tragg wants to keep his job. So Mason and Tragg team up, sort of. Mason feeds Tragg a tip, then makes Holcomb look like a fool in court. There’s even a car chase. Yes, a car chase in a Perry Mason story. Gardner must’ve been feeling frolics were in order.

The plot’s a pretzel. Gardner builds it with his usual tricks - false leads, courtroom fireworks, and names that sound like they came from a Dickens fan club. Willard Allison Barton? Roscoe R. Hansom? Really?

Language? Well, let’s just say “well-upholstered woman” isn’t aging like fine wine. But the bones of the thing hold up. For the faithful, it’s Gardner in full convoluted mode. For newcomers, it’s a crash course in a world where motives collide, ethics bend and gaaaw-lee those clients sure are economical with the truth.

Perry Mason 114: Novels versus TeeVee

Note: From Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, "The Combine" is a term Chief Bromden uses in his "delusions" to represent a vast, oppressive, and mechanical force that controls society, with the psychiatric hospital acting as a "factory" to "fix" people into conformist, machine-like workers. Chief Bromden, a tall Native American patient who pretends to be deaf and mute, sees Nurse Ratched and the orderlies as agents of The Combine.

Perry Mason: Novels versus TeeVee

Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason novels are precision machines, engineered to deliver models of legal suspense with the efficiency of a pulp assembly line. Each begins with a client in extremis - bewildered, imperiled, and anxious - wandering into Mason’s office like a refugee from a film noir backlot. What follows is a procedural ballet: murder, investigation, confrontation, and the inevitable courtroom climax, where Mason’s logic pins the culprit and the innocent walks free. Gardner, a lawyer turned pulp impresario, revels in evidentiary reversals and clipped dialogue, trusting readers to navigate a maze of legal minutiae and fill in exposition and business as they like. These are not whodunits but howdunits, their pleasures rooted in the mechanics of fraud and the thrill of watching The Combine outfoxed.

Television, from 1957 adapting the novels, streamlines this intricate machinery for the small screen. The hour-long format demands compression: subplots vanish, pacing accelerates, and the narrative arc - client, killing, investigation, trial - becomes a metronome. Gardner’s labyrinthine plotting gives way to clarity; crimes are staged early, investigations truncated, and courtroom theatrics foregrounded, with the mute defendant wedged between Perry and Della like a prop. The result is sleek reassurance, calibrated for mid-century living rooms. Accessibility triumphs over complexity. Where Gardner traffics in nuance, the series offers closure - a world where truth emerges on cue. No wonder Neil Postman and every smart-aleck sophomore in the Seventies (like me!) called teevee The Boob Tube.

Characterization undergoes similar sanding-down. Gardner’s Mason is a trickster in pinstripes, a gambler who thrives in gray zones. His moral compass points toward justice, but the route is circuitous, and the novels occasionally wink at his appetite for risky misdemeanors. Della Street, far from a stenographic ornament, is Mason’s co-conspirator - breaking and entering, impersonating gold diggers, and piloting getaway cars with pulp élan. Paul Drake, amiable and perpetually harried, rounds out a trio that calls to mind Nervous Overheated Ron, Brainy Cool Hermoine, and Wise Mind Harry.

Television domesticates this trio. Raymond Burr’s Mason radiates gravitas and ethical rectitude, a figure of calm authority in a universe of moral certainties. Della becomes a note-taker; Paul morphs into comic relief. Hamilton Burger, Gardner’s snarling prosecutor, is softened into genial foil, his vendetta ritualized into courtroom banter. The novels’ simmering antagonisms – graceless Burger stamping off as cross as a frog in a sock - are replaced by post-verdict bonhomie. Gardner approved the scripts, but one suspects he muttered “like hell” under his breath.

Tone is the final transmutation. Gardner writes in a brisk, not-quite-hard-boiled register, his dialogue clipped, his atmosphere tense with disquiet. Wartime shadows and cultural tremors haunt the margins, and the novels inhabit a world where the policeman is not your friend.

The TV series bathes Mason in the glow of Eisenhower-era optimism. Courtrooms gleam with California sheen; decorum reigns; law becomes sanctuary. Gardner’s recurring cautionary motif - never talk to the authorities without your lawyer - vanishes, along with his warnings about improper police procedures, misidentifications by witnesses and misconstrued circumstantial evidence. The show offers reassurance; the books, a lingering unease that instead of presuming innocence, The Combine thinks "horses" when it hears hooves, given circumstantial evidence, a plausible motive, and a lack of an airtight alibi.

In short: Gardner’s Mason prowls a morally ambiguous landscape, improvising justice in a flawed system. The televised Mason presides over a universe of order, where truth is punctual and the good guys always win. One is pulp with a purpose; the other, prime-time anesthesia.

Perry Mason 113: TCOT Silent Partner

Note: I grew up with Raymond Burr’s Perry Mason lodged in my brain like a battleship in dry dock - piercing stare, commanding voice, and enough bulk to block out the sun. So imagine my adolescent shock when I cracked open the original novels and discovered that Mason was not, in fact, Raymond Burr in a snappy suit, but a tall, lanky fellow who often moonlighted as a hard-boiled private eye. The written Mason speeds through traffic, slugs bad guys, outfoxes cops, and even scolds his own clients. Meanwhile, Burr’s courtroom stoicism sat in my head like bedrock. Naturally, I prefer the books (of course I do; I’m that sort of person), but every so often Burr’s unflappable Mason and Gardner’s fedora-wearing Mason square off in my psyche like two heavyweight champs. Half Burr, half Mason, all Gardner.

Perryism to Live by RE Empathy: You don't need to see a man, look in his face, shake his hand, and hear him talk, in order to know him. You can watch the things he does. You can see him through the eyes of others. You make allowances for [ ] prejudice when you know the others. You can then judge the extent of their distortion. That's the only way you can solve cases, Della. You must learn to know the characters involved. You must learn to see things through their eyes, and that means you must have sympathy and tolerance for crime.

The Case of the Silent Partner – Erle Stanley Gardner

Seventeenth Mason novel, 1940. TCOT Silent Partner. You want it straight? This one matters. Tragg walks in for the first time - cool, sharp, same age as Mason. Forget Ray Collins on TV; Gardner envisioned Tragg about the same age as Mason and educated enough to be embarrassed about the wielders of rubber hoses.

The story starts with a flower shop, a woman tough enough to run it and still play nurse to a disabled patient. She’s got grit, but grit doesn’t stop trouble. Trouble comes fast, out of nowhere. A partner with sticky fingers, a deal that smells wrong, and then murder. The cops want her for it. They’ve got motive, means, everything but the truth.

Tragg works the angles. He’s no Holcomb - he knows psychology. Gets a suspect talking with a word-association trick while Mason’s out of the room. That’s new. Usually Perry’s in every scene, pulling strings. Not here. Gardner lets Tragg steal the spotlight.

Paul Drake? Late entrance about half down the road, small part. Della Street? She’s in deep, moving pieces, not just answering phones. That’s why the books beat the TV show cold - Della’s a player, not a prop.

The climax? Not your usual Mason blowout in criminal court. It’s civil. No fireworks, but Perry still makes the other lawyer look like a sap. Gardner keeps it tight, no fat, no frills. Just moves and counter-moves.

And under it all, Gardner’s old tune: respect for women who fight their way through a man’s world. He doesn’t make saints, but he doesn’t make fools either. Maybe he was playing to female readers. Maybe he just liked women who drove fast and ate like fieldhands. Doesn’t matter. It works.

TCOT Silent Partner isn’t just a case. It’s a turning point. Tragg’s here to stay. And Mason? He’s still the guy who walks into court when the evidence screams, ‘Start polishing the gas chamber seat for Mason’s client,’ and somehow walks out with the jury asking for his autograph.

Perry Mason 112: Crows Can't Count

Note: I’m not fond of comparisons, but here goes: Cool and Lam versus Perry Mason. The A.A. Fair novels are shorter, faster-paced, and full of funny situations between Donald Lam - a former lawyer with a knack for trouble - and Bertha Cool, a brassy, no-nonsense detective. Their contrasting styles make them entertaining: he’s quiet and insightful; she’s as sensitive as a fire hydrant. These stories lean into the seedier side of life, focusing on family problems and the vagaries of human behavior rather than courtroom drama. 

Crows Can’t Count – Erle Stanley Gardner writing as A. A. Fair

This 1946 outing is Gardner in his “let’s see how many plot threads I can tangle before the snarl weighs as much as a bowling ball” mode. We’ve got emerald mines in Colombia, a trust fund with middle-aged trustees who can’t keep their male gazes off the young heiress, a crow with kleptomania, and at least one corpus. If you came here for the usual mix of comedy from Bertha Cool and deduction by Donald Lam, disappointment awaits. The first-person narration is by Donald Lam: pure deduction, minimal action, and dialogue that often lacks Gardner’s typical snap, crackle, and fizz.

The setup: fifty-ish Harry Sharples hires Cool and Lam to trace an emerald necklace that shouldn’t be in a local dealer’s hands. Sharples and Robert Cameron co-manage the estate of Cora Hendricks, late owner of a Colombian gold mine. The heirs? Shirley Bruce, a knockout who kisses like a teenage boy’s dreamboat, and Robert Hockley, a gambler with issues like unstable emotions and impulsivity. Before Lam can get a line on the players, Cameron turns up dead, his crow missing, and a necklace minus emeralds sitting on the table. Cue the parade of suspects: young Shirley, a mysterious Juanita Grafton, her artist daughter Dona (currently crow-sitting), and assorted main-chancers.

What follows is a marathon of meetings, phone calls, and enigmatic conversations that make you nostalgic for the days when detective fiction maybe didn’t involve so much talk talk talk. Eventually, everyone decamps to Colombia for an “exotic idyll,” which Gardner renders with the genuine sympathy and respect he brought to Mexico - though Bertha Cool’s culture shock is milked for humor that feels past its expiration date by about 50 years. The crow subplot? Cute and welcome, but not enough of a diversion.

The mystery itself is a ball of yarn untangled by Lam in a multi-multi-page monologue that reads like the reveal in a whodunnit from the Twenties. The solution makes sense – when the hard-core reader squints - but getting there is like jogging with shoes on the wrong feet. Gardner’s usual sparkle? We fans gaze the horizon in vain, from our crow’s nest. Bertha, once a comically profane bulldozer, is reduced to a cartoon homebody out of her element. Lam fares better because we fans are used to his never being forthcoming but his deductions feel like the physics theory that depends on the step “Then a Miracle Happens.”

Bottom line: Crows Can’t Count isn’t terrible, but it’s Gardner seemingly distracted which is weird in a year when he was not his usual hyper-productive self, publishing only TCOT Borrowed Brunette and The D.A. Breaks a Seal, a D.A. Doug Selby novel. Maybe he finally gave himself some well-deserved vacations.