On the 15th of every month, we publish a review of a mystery - or something - starring our favorite lawyer. For the hell of it.
Good Riddance: Victims that Needed Killing
The final season (1966) of the Perry Mason TV series was marked by numerous clinkers. But three of the episodes are noteworthy for exceptional portrayals of stinkers who had it coming.
In The Case of the Unwelcome Well, the murder is caused by a mistake on the part of our favorite lawyer. Without the knowledge, consent, or signature of the husband, Perry gets the wife to enter into a contract with an oil exploration company. They strike oil and the husband goes on a spree spending money he doesn’t really have. When the oil company decides to cap the well for 10 years, the husband is enraged at the company president Jerome Klee, played by Wendell Corey. The big oil man says, “If I were in the habit of explaining my actions, most of the time I'd use one word... MONEY!” But the viewer senses that he just likes getting his boot on the necks of other people. In a creepy scene in an industrial park where the victim is creating a weird echo by shouting for attention, the blow across the back of his head by a huge monkey wrench is one of the very few on-screen snuffings in the series. Like Brian Donlevy in The Case of the Positive Negative, Wendell Corey looks like the drinking is taking its toll though the bleary dazed look doesn’t detract too much from the relentless awfulness of the character.
Dennis Patrick, with a typical snide look on a belligerent face, often played louses and rats but puts in the bravura performance of the final season as pro golfer Chick Farley in The Case of the Golfer’s Gambit. Chick is a booze-hound, brawler, embezzler, blackmailer, and golf cheat. He browbeats his long-suffering wife who got him started in his golf career. Chick is forcing himself on the beautiful Dina Brandt (Nancy Kovak – hubba hubba), whose sad sack husband Erwin (Harry Townes) he tosses into a fountain in the most memorable fight scene of the whole nine-year series. When Erwin stands up in the pool, he’s got a lily pad on top of his head and the viewer, though a sympathetic person at heart, has to laugh at such a clownish sight. When somebody bashes Chick’s skull in with a driver – a poetically just choice of a murder weapon, n'est-ce pas - the viewer wants to give the culprit a medal.
The final episode of the series was The Case of the Final Fade-out. Its theme summed up the negative attitude the show’s producers and writers had of dog-eat-dog Tinsel Town. James Stacy plays snotty action star Barry Conrad – one wonders if this is a slap at cocky combative egomaniacal James Conrad, star of Hawaiian Eye and Wild Wild West. Just because it’s fun to do so, Barry likes to cause problems, create delays, sow confusion and consternation, undermine careers and reputations, and blow smoke rings in no-smoking areas. He’s a liar and hypocrite, even betraying an old lady down on her luck who did him a good turn in the past. It’s a loose, funny episode with some overacting and what must be inside jokes but Denver Pyle and Jackie Coogan put in excellent turns. Estelle Winwood (born 1883, on stage by 1888) camps it up in her cell interview with Perry, putting her hands to head and saying, “It's hopeless - hopeless! They'll send me to the chair.”
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