On the 15th of every month, we publish something about Our Fave Lawyer. Next month is the third anniversary of doing this monthly piece. I don't know how much longer this can go on because I don't want to be the guy that has read all 82 novels and 4 short stories.
A Tribute to Victor Buono
Victor Buono was a heavy man when about only 10% of American adults were diagnosed as obese (nowadays the rate is about 40%). In an interview, he resigned himself to being typecast as the villain in the Sydney Greenstreet mode.
If you weigh more than 280 pounds, you better get out the black hat and forget about getting the girl at the end of the picture. I’ve been shot, stabbed, run over, and been pushed off of, out of, under and over more things than you can imagine. I never get the girl. In fact, I’m not even allowed to have a friend.
Besides his imposing six-foot-four presence, he brought to his acting skills a dollop of campy kookiness. In the early Sixties he was cast as off-kilter characters in A-movies such as Whatever Happened to Baby Jane (1962), The Greatest Story Ever Told (1964), Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964) and Robin and the 7 Hoods (1964). He was all over TV in shows such as The Untouchables and 77 Sunset Strip. He appeared in Perry Mason four times.
The Case of the
Twice-Told Twist (1966) … Ben Huggins
Bill Sikes - perhaps an allusion Oliver Twist? - runs a gang of car strippers who look like members of the Young Engineers Club at Brentwood High School. In one of only three color episodes, the look is so shiny and glossy that the action and sets look cartoonish, which makes the weak script and meh acting impossible to take seriously.
The only bright spot is Buono as the rotten Big Boss of the ring. He’s camping around in a smoking jacket, keeping tabs on the boys in the gang and pronouncing words like "penchant" correctly for once, unlike an uncoached actress I once heard say the French writer’s name as “kaymus.” Buono is extreme in the role, putting him the Top 5 Most Blatantly Flamboyant Villains in the Perryverse.
Sadly, none of the Perry Mason episodes involving juvenile delinquents are worth watching. It’s funny the writers get them so wrong because when the show did topics ripped from the headlines – the space race, the organization man, industrial espionage, civic corruption - they usually were persuasive.
The Case of the
Grinning Gorilla (1965) … Nathon Fallon
One of the oddest episodes ever. Perry is bossy and short with Della, which must be a first and only. Perry is then curt and dismissive of deal offered by a blabby fawning Buono, playing a personal assistant so transparently untrustworthy you can’t believe any hard-headed business executive would hire him as a rep. Then, to clear a housekeeper (Lurene Tuttle, a fine character actress) of slander, Perry and Paul find a fistful of jewelry in a big vase, put there by the various non-human primates gamboling about a rich miser’s mansion.
Buono has some excellent scenes with the scenery-chewing Gavin MacLeod. Mason fandom, however, is split on this episode. Some fans miss the courtroom scene. Others are heteronormatively disturbed by the implied “relationship” between the Buono and MacLeod characters. Many more detest the guy running around in a gorilla suit. Me, though there are some plot-holes you could drive an ATV through, I dig this pulpy episode because of the over-the-top quality of the overall situation.
The Case of the
Simple Simon (1964) … John Sylvester Fossette
A young man approaches actress Ramona Carver, and claims to be her long-lost son. But in the university town where Ramona’s troupe have landed, Ogden Kramer, a former theater critic turned Theatre professor of UC Santa Barbara, is murdered. The police think hot-tempered ego maniac Ramona did the deed out of pique at his nasty reviews in the past.
Buono plays the manager of the troupe. He is persuasive as a man who must be part-artist and part-businessman and logistics expert. He also radiates an aura of humbug that makes you assume he is up to no good, not telling everything he knows. In contrast to the vivacious Virginia Field as Ramona (one of her six appearances in the Perryverse), Buono is refreshingly restrained in this part, reminding the viewer that he was a commanding stage performer and that Hollywood is a waster of talent.
The Case of the
Absent Artist (1962) … Alexander Glovatski
Any opening scene where characters are splitting a doobie is alright with me. Buono shares a joint with another artist as they discuss the bad old world the squares made. Pretentious Buono has a dismissive line he often uses, “I repudiate him.” In the excellent courtroom scene when he is being grilled and skewered by Perry, caught in perjury, he says, “Very well. I repudiate myself!” Hee-hee, scratch a beatnik, find a hypocrite. Funny that the writers got JD’s so wrong but beatniks so right.
The writing is pretty good in this episode. The settings are unusual. One is an artist’s colony in a fish-oily town that reminds us of Robert Altman’s Popeye’s Sweethaven Village. The other is the business of the syndication of comic strips. And the many dubious characters are topped off with Arlene Martel, who plays a beat chick with blasé sensuousness.
Victor Buono died of sudden heart attack in his California house on New Year’s Day, 1982. He was only 43 years old. In the last line of his obituary, the New York Times signaled reality in the way media did back then, noting that he was not married. Like Montgomery Clift and Raymond Burr, Buono was one of the gay actors that pushed back against the idea of marrying women to conceal their true sexual identity.
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