Perry Mason 169: The Best of Season 5

Note: In the classic Perry Mason TV series, cultural quirks of 70 years ago abound: nearly everyone seems to keep a firearm tucked in a glove compartment or handbag, a norm that feels startling today. And then there’s the fashion. My Bride points out that Della Street sports what can only be described as “Barbie shoes”—even when traipsing through rugged foothills alongside Perry and Paul in pursuit of clues. Practicality clearly wasn’t part of the costume design brief. Plus, the show is sepia-toned postcard from a California that hadn’t yet been strip-malled into oblivion. Back when palm trees were romantic, not ironic, and the freeways hadn’t metastasized like an experiment in urban planning gone horribly wrong. Even in monochrome, those locations had a kind of accidental enchantment, the kind you can’t fake with CGI. 

The Best of Season 5 (1961-62)

The Case of the Shapely Shadow. Elaine Devry lights up the little black and white tube as the wallflower secretary turned into hachi-machi with the help of a makeover. With Devry, the viewer wonders how in hell she made her red hair and green eyes come across on the monochrome screen. Not to mention any responsible cardiologist would advise us codgers to avoid prolonged exposure to her ultra-feminine voice and manner. The court room scene is excellent with Burger falling into Mason’s cunning trap and having a blustering sputtering meltdown. That’ll learn him for all of those triumphant smirks.

The Case of the Travelling Treasure. Any episode that has Lisa Gaye in swimsuit gets an automatic four stars. But in fact the acting is top notch in this episode. Arch Johnson plays a cranky gangster who ends up croaked in a locked cabin on board a fishing boat. Our pal Vaughn Taylor plays a mild-mannered chemist who’s too absent-minded to be devious. Familiar TV face Jeff York plays Perry’s client, a relatable working man. Most of the action is set on boats so it’s invigorating to be outside for half of this episode. Rare too for the story to turn on a classic puzzle mystery involving a locked room.

The Case of the Absent Artist. Many different personalities engage our attention: loud boy cartoonist Pete Manders (Wynne Pearce), world-weary sculptor Alexander Glovatski (Victor Buono), and a sneaky artist Otto Gavaert (Mark Roberts) that yearns to get away from it all and paint like the louse Charles Strickland in The Moon and Sixpence. Plus, the snoopy landlady Daphne (ZaSu Pitts), sensuous beat girl Fiona Cregan (Arline Sax), and nervous accountant Monty (Richard Erdman). Besides the outstanding cast, unique settings make episode unlike any other: an oily fishing village that’s also an artist’s colony and the craft and business of syndicated comic strips. Finally, in the studio of the sneaky artist, in the background, we spy the purple woman painting from season 2 and a crying cherub painting from Season 3.

The Ides of Crime: Bodyguard

Note: This is a movie that doesn’t ask for your approval - it demands your attention. It’s messy, moody, and weird. And in the pantheon of RKO B-movies, it deserves a place of honor, preferably somewhere between Out of the Past and The Narrow Margin, with a meat hook dangling nearby.

Bodyguard
1948 / 1:15
Tagline: “A Real ‘Who-done-it’ Thriller”
[internet archive]

I hesitate to over-sell old movies like this one, a noir oddity that feels like it was stitched together from the dreams of Raymond Chandler and the nightmares of a union-busting plutocrat. It opens with a scene so absurd it could only be true: a tyrannical dowager, imperious and upholstered like a Victorian fainting couch, berates her nephew for hiring a bodyguard. She’s receiving death threats, but she’s more offended by the bodyguard’s lack of etiquette than the possibility of being murdered. This is the kind of Post-WWII existentialism-lite where the absurdity is the point.

The bodyguard, Mike, is played by Laurence Tierney, a man whose face looks like it’s been carved out of granite. Tierney, usually cast as the heavy, gets a rare turn as the hero here - but don’t worry, he’s still unpredictably violent. Mike is an ex-homicide detective with a chip on his shoulder and fists that do most of the talking. He’s got integrity, though, the kind that inspires loyalty in street kids and a blonde girlfriend named Doris who records case notes on vinyl. Yes, vinyl.

The plot is a tangled mess of class warfare, murder, and meat hooks – ah, good old meat hooks - and it’s all delivered with dialogue that crackles. A young Robert Altman had a hand in the script, and you can hear his chortle in lines like “It’s as cozy here as Grand Central Station” and a butler being called “Dracula” with no irony whatsoever. The film doesn’t wink at you - it stares you down and dares you to snicker.

Visually, it’s a feast. Shot in black and white, the cinematography is rich with texture: cracked glass, fringe, tassels, and shadows that conceal sprites, pixies, goblins, oh my. There’s a scene in an eye doctor’s office that looks like it was directed by hyper-caffeinated Fritz Lang full of coffee from South Sulawesi. And the Southern California setting is a time capsule - Los Angeles with streetcars, arcades, and meatpacking workers in neckties. It’s surreal in the way only the passing time can make something surreal, like visiting a place you’ve not been to since childhood.

The film’s best moments are its strangest: Mike playing catch with a disabled boy inside a trailer, sailors picking a fight in an arcade because he’s nagging a clerk, and Doris using a “Record Your Voice” booth to store evidence. On vinyl. These scenes don’t advance the plot, but they deepen the world. They make it feel lived-in, like a place where people love, work and belch even when the camera isn’t rolling.

Tierney’s Mike is a bulldozer in a trench coat. He impersonates cops, commits burglary, beats up optometrists, and steals a police car - all in the name of justice. The final fight scene, set in a meatpacking plant, is a ballet of brutality featuring swinging meat hooks – ah, good old meat hooks. It’s the kind of climax that makes you want to cheer and wince at the same time.

As for the Perry Mason connection, June Clayworth played a small part as the neglected wife of the deserving victim in the TCOT Fraudulent Foto, one of the most noirish episodes of the series. Steve Brodie, a meatpacking toiler in this one, was a political fixer in a great episode TCOT Witless Witness.

Matinee Musings: Ann Harding Turned Misery

Note: The sad girl trope in movies features a female protagonist who is profoundly melancholic, visibly traumatized, or emotionally fragile, often styled in an aesthetically pleasing or poetic way. Movie-goers have to decide for themselves whether this validates female grief and aggravation and fosters empathy or promotes passive heroines or reduces identity to pain. Me, I like how the sad girl trope rejects the societal expectation that women must always be put-together. It's okay to be a mess. It'll pass.

The Gallant Lady Weeps: How Ann Harding Turned Misery into Luminous Heartbreak

Ann Harding belongs to a brief moment in early sound cinema when a woman could be intelligent, self-aware, and fated to suffer beautifully. Projecting the modern "sad girl" trope backward into the 1930s, Harding emerges as a performer who turns emotional suffering into an aesthetic experience.

In the early talkie era, Hollywood prized actresses who combined beauty with vocal control. Harding's stage training allowed her screen persona to take rapid, unmistakable shape. By the early 1930s she was consistently cast as the "beautiful, virtuous, self-sacrificing woman," a type studios revisited with near ritual insistence. Across these roles, her characters absorb frustration, disappointment, and renunciation with a composure that approaches stylization.

In Paris Bound (1929), Jim and Mary begin their marriage with modern, permissive ideals, yet it is Harding’s Mary who pays the emotional cost when theory collapses. Left with a child and her suspicions, she becomes the film’s still center of suffering, waiting and doubting. Harding renders Mary's anguish with restraint. When she insists that marriage requires "vacations," her faltering voice reveals the strain beneath the pose.

In Her Private Affair (1929), Harding plays Vera, whose life is derailed by guilt, blackmail, and secrecy. Harding makes her suffering palpable through her expressive face and stage-trained voice, conveying anxiety, fear, and moral anguish. The film is static and stage-bound, but her performance gives it emotional weight and helped launch her stardom.

If Paris Bound establishes this pattern, East Lynne (1931) refines it into its purest form. As Lady Isabella, Harding portrays maternal loss and social disgrace not through melodramatic display but through restraint. Her face registers grief in subtle ways, lingering sadness in the eyes, hesitation in a glance, composure maintained at evident cost. The drama lies in watching her struggle to contain emotions that threaten to overwhelm her.

In Westward Passage (1932), Harding plays disillusionment as a state of suspended aftershock. Having left a failed marriage, she moves through her new life with composed restraint, even as the past intrudes. When her first husband returns, the emotional conflict sharpens: whether the past can ever be recovered.

The Animal Kingdom (1932) centers on a love triangle, but its emotional weight comes from Harding's Daisy. After Tom impulsively marries another woman, Daisy discovers too late how deeply she loves him. Harding gives the character a wounded tenderness that makes her heartbreak memorable. Her farewell, "Good-bye... 'til Doomsday," transforms loss into a form of grace.

In Double Harness (1933), Harding plays Joan, whose determination to reform the irresponsible John gradually turns into painful love. After tricking him into marriage, she is consumed by guilt and struggles to earn the affection she fears she does not deserve. Harding balances strength, vulnerability, and restraint, making Joan one of her most affecting heroines.

As film critic Molly Haskell has argued, Hollywood often turned female suffering into emotional spectacle, inviting identification while encouraging resignation. Harding’s films exemplify this tendency. They ask viewers to admire endurance - to value the woman who transforms loss into moral clarity and composure.

What distinguishes Harding is the intelligence she brings to this paradox. Her performances lend psychological credibility to roles that might otherwise seem same-old, yet their repetition across films exposed the limits of the type itself. Her performances are never trivial; they possess a psychological clarity that deepens even conventional roles. Yet that same clarity, repeated across films, lends the suffering a certain predictability. Press resentment - fueled by her reserve offscreen - hardened into sarcasm, dubbing her “Noble Ann Harding.”

With the stricter enforcement of the Production Code in the mid-1930s, Hollywood retreated from the kind of adult emotional material that sustained Harding’s* career. Her achievement endures: she demonstrated how cinema could render wounded feminine energy** as something formally persuasive and aesthetically compelling.

 +++++++++++++

* And the careers of Leila Hyams, Evelyn Brent, Mary Nolan, Genevieve Tobin, Marian Marsh, Madge Evans, Helen Twelvetrees and the wonderful Mae Clarke and Nancy Carroll.

** Look it up! I can’t do everything for you. I give and I give….

Perry Mason 168: Godzilla

Note: Too heavy to be a leading man in the movies, Raymond Burr usually gave terrific performances in supporting roles, most often as villains, in the ten years after WWII. Many movie fans of all ages are still watching his turns with Alfred Hitchcock (Rear Window) and George Stevens (A Place in the Sun). And hardcore fans of noir still watch Raw Deal (Anthony Mann), The Blue Gardenia (Fritz Lang), Horizons West (Budd Boetticher) and Great Day in the Morning (Jacques Tourneur).

 Godzilla, King of the Monsters
1956 / 1:20
Tagline: “Makes KING KONG look like a Midget!”
[internet archive]

The Japanese studio Toho (Treasure of the East) made the original Gojira in 1954. I think it is one of the few monster movies that transcends its genre because it makes me feel the horror and tragedy of the monster's rampage: the thousands killed and the destruction of infrastructure painstakingly rebuilt after the war. The waste of life and property is simply terrible.

Haunting too is that unforgettable roar – that combo of shriek and factory klaxon.

To make the film more accessible to American audiences, new scenes featuring Raymond Burr as reporter Steve Martin were shot and inserted into the Japanese original. Martin serves as a Western point-of-view character, our man in Tokyo, much like Edward Murrow reporting from London during the Blitz while a national catastrophe unfolds around him.

Nowadays it is easy to mock this narrow-mindedness, but I remember being a kid in the Sixties and hearing rude comments about the Japanese. Only twenty years had passed since World War II, about as long ago then as Hurricane Katrina is to us today. So only 11 years after the cessation of hostilities, in 1956 feelings must still have been raw.

Burr’s scenes are rather jarring in places, feeling disconnected from the original footage. He talks to characters in the original film but all we see are the backs of their heads. Scenes are of him listening at meetings, giving a voiceover to describe what’s going on. A Japanese American guy translates for him since Martin says, “My Japanese is a little rusty.” This is lame, since nobody would expect him to speak the Japanese of paleontology. A funnier line might have been: "My conversational Japanese is fine, but this geological and biological mumbo-jumbo is way over my head."

Burr, ever the professional, rises above the sometimes weak material and never gives the impression that he is merely collecting a paycheck. He gives a serious and stoic performance. Burr's best scene comes when he finds himself trapped in a vulnerable office building. Fighting back panic and maintaining his professional composure, he records what he believes may be his final report.

To my mind, there are two unintentionally amusing scenes.  One is a Japanese-American as an Odo Island peasant that speaks what even I know is kitchen Japanese. The other is seeing Burr so heavily bandaged that he looks as though a group of children had practiced first aid on him, calling to mind the funny scene in TCOT Grinning Gorilla.

Burr reportedly joked that he received a generous paycheck for only two days' work on Godzilla, but that claim seems doubtful. In the sequence on Odo Island that suspensefully leads up to the first sighting of the monster, there is a day scene and a night scene that would have taken at least a couple days to set up and film. In fact, Burr and crew worked six days to do his scenes.

The American version, I think, does not cut any of the monster’s depredations. So it feels just as grim as the original. For example, it retains the dreadful scene in which a mother is assuring her two little kids they will soon meet the father they lost in the war while the trio is cowering in a shop’s doorway as the monster is only steps down the street. Given moments like this, it is easy to understand why some countries initially restricted the film to adult audiences.

Matinee Musings: Conquest of Space

Note: To keep this blog's connection with the classic TV series Perry Mason, I'm compelled to point out that Dr. Elsbach is played by Michael Fox who appeared in 25 episodes, usually as a doctor or forensic pathologist. Chinese guy playing a Japanese guy named Imoto, Benson Fong guest starred as the accused in TCOT Caretaker’s Cat. For some odd reason, William Hopper (Paul Drake) is billed higher than Fong though Hopper is in only two brief scenes and Fong is almost always in a scene. 

Conquest of Space
1955 / 1:20
Tagline: “Dramatic Effects Never Before Equaled - Or Even Imagined!”
[internet archive]

The Commander, a figure carved from the granite of military tradition, is a cinematic archetype - stern, rule-bound, and yet quietly aware of the psychological erosion that comes with prolonged duty in space. The Wheel, a rotating space station that doubles as a construction port and a fort, becomes a metaphor for the grinding monotony of interstellar vigilance. The crew, suffering from the tedium of their orbital tour of duty, begins to unravel: irritability, nausea, dizziness, and a creeping sense of existential dread permeate the mise-en-scène.

When the mission is unexpectedly re-routed from the Moon to Mars, the Commander’s reaction is not rebellion but resignation - a classic gesture of the professional soldier, the kind of man who thinks “Mine is not to reason why.” His stoicism is not heroic in the sense Marcus Aurelius would endorse, but tragic: a man burdened by his unbending sense of duty, but also haunted by the dark implications of his own obedience. The stakes are high - Earth’s survival depends on the success of this mission - but the film’s true drama lies in the Commander’s internal conflict, his slow descent into metaphysical unease.

As the narrative unfolds, the film anticipates a familiar trope in science fiction cinema: the psychological breakdown of a crew member, the “madness in space” motif that would later be explored from 2001: A Space Odyssey to Ren & Stimpy. But here, the breakdown is not merely personal - it’s philosophical. The Commander begins to question the very premise of the mission, suggesting that humanity’s reach into the cosmos may be a form of cosmic trespass, a violation of the divine order.

The supporting cast, while not given the depth of characterization one finds in Citizen Kane, nonetheless serves the themes the director explores. The members of the crew are unable to articulate the moral dimensions of space exploration to their CO and thus unable to dispute his religious and philosophical misgivings about the mission. Their inability to form and express an argument becomes a critique of technocratic culture - a reminder that scientific progress is a hollow, if not hazardous, enterprise without reflection about values and the ability to formulate and argue your point of view to unknowing or unsteady authority.

Visually, the film is a mixed bag. The Technicolor palette is both a strength and a liability: the close-ups, a staple of television aesthetics, sometimes betray the limitations of the medium, but the spacewalk sequences are genuinely striking. The Angry Red Planet, rendered in vivid hues, is a painterly abstraction - a hostile, beautiful terrain that reflects the inner turmoil of the characters.

Not wanting to oversell this picture, I grant that this is a film that lacks the polish of later sci-fi epics. But in the final analysis, it compensates with a sincerity of purpose and a thematic ambition that elevates it above its pulp origins with a meditation on duty, doubt, and the limits of human ambition.

Perry Mason 167: Pass the Gravy

Note: I like the Cool & Lam series and this 1959 outing is one of Gardner’s sturdier contraptions, the kind that looks at first like two unrelated annoyances and then reveals itself to be one of those infernal little boxes where every side folds into the next. 

Pass the Gravy – Erle Stanley Gardner writing as A. A. Fair

Pass the Gravy (and you can already hear Bertha Cool snort at the title) is Gardner nudging a mess of details until they cry uncle and confess.

We begin, as usual, with PI Donald Lam being handed two problems that he is explicitly directed by partner Bertha not to combine. First: a fifteen‑year‑old girl with more anxiety than cash wants her Uncle Amos retrieved from his latest alcoholic orbit - except this time the orbit has widened past what the family can endure. Second: a far more remunerative proposition, courtesy of a sleek wife whose missing salesman husband has vanished into exactly the sort of fog Gardner enjoys. Bertha Cool, patron saint of billable hours, votes decisively for glamour over pathos. Lam, professionally a risk-taker all the way, declines to choose.

The miracle (or the trick, depending on your tolerance) is a pair of postcards from the same nowhere gas station, which Lam seizes on like a man on a mission. Off he goes, ricocheting through Sierras, Reno, and a parade of low‑rent America - hitchhikers, ex-cons, predators - each one offering a clue that mostly serves to make the previous clue look stupid. Gardner keeps the tone breezy, but the method is almost scientific: accumulate detail, distrust it, repeat.

Meanwhile Bertha looms - half partner, half thrower of Lam under busses - coiled like that famous spool of barbed wire, measuring morality in invoices. Lam, no one’s idea of a saint, nevertheless insists on helping the broke kid, as if he’s dimly aware that a detective who ignores the poor stops being a detective and turns into furniture. Secretary Elsie Brand thinks dark thoughts, looking askance at Lam's desire to assist a teenage girl - it was an age when literally millions of sixteen-year-old girls got married every year.

It is here that Lam can be read in light of Seneca’s observation that “the wise man is fortified against all inroads.” Lam is no Stoic adept - he is too ironic, too improvisational, too entangled in contingency - but he approximates Stoic flexibility and resilience in practice. He does not retreat before uncertainty, financial pressure, or physical danger; nor does he allow Bertha’s mercenary calculus to wholly dictate his course. Poverty (his own professional precarity), sorrow (the girl’s desperation), disgrace (his disbarred past), and pain, disability, and disfigurement (the ever-present threat of bodily harm to his small frame) all press upon him. Yet Lam persists, not with serene detachment, but with a dogged alertness and dedication that mirror Seneca’s ideal in a compromised, modern form.

In the end, the puzzle snaps shut neatly, Gardner having tidied the room with efficiency. But the aftertaste is better than that: beneath the wisecracks and coincidences, a faint, unfashionable idea - that decency may be impractical, but is nonetheless binding. Lam doesn’t win because he’s invulnerable. He wins because he refuses to take the sensible exit and he does not like seeing vulnerable people abused.

The Nones of Crime: Mystery House

Note: As for the connection with the classic TV series Perry Mason, Sheila Bromley was both a goody and a baddy in five episodes. Her most outstanding performance was in TCOT Nervous Neighbor in which she had amnesia, one of the very few credible instances I’ve seen of that “convenient for the script” condition. 

Mystery House
1938 / 56 minutes
Tagline: “A piece of wire...a toupee...a rifled safe..3 CLUES! 3 MURDERS! 3 TIMES The Thrills of Any Other Mystery Hit!”
[internet archive]

This Warner Brothers B-movie begins at an autopsy hearing where Gwen (Anne Nagel) insists her father was murdered - after all, he’d accused his business partners of shady dealings. But the evidence points to suicide: a locked room, a gun, and no sign of foul play. 

Gwen, unconvinced, vows to hire a private detective. Enter Sara (Ann Sheridan), nurse to Gwen’s cranky Aunt Lucy (Elspeth Dudgeon), who recommends her boyfriend, PI Lance O’Leary (Dick Purcell).

Gwen’s own beau is played by William Hopper - yes, Paul Drake from Perry Mason. Here he’s a society fop with an insipid smile and enough makeup to suggest he wandered in from a silent film. His main talent? Looking game for gin rummy even after a supposed suicide.

At Lance’s urging, Gwen gathers suspects for a weekend hunt at her country estate.

Tension simmers; secrets hover. One guest hints at explosive knowledge - then turns up dead, another “suicide.” The police? Never summoned. Lance inspects the body, pockets evidence, and deduces strangulation by a wire from the now-broken radio.

Purcell brings expected vigor to the role, his athletic ease lending the PI some presence. Sheridan, known as “The Oomph Girl,” does what she can with thin dialogue - though one longs for Technicolor to revel in her red hair. Ben Welden, in a toupee, plays against his usual lug type as a respectable if pushy exec.

Based on a mystery by Mignon Eberhart - once dubbed the “American Agatha Christie” - the film offers locked-room intrigue, country-house tension, and a dash of pulp charm. Forgotten today, it’s still a curious relic for fans of B-movie sleuthing.

As for clothes, the mystery is set in winter so the fur-trimmed coats are pretty nice. The cars are swanky; that might be a cool 1938 Ford Deluxe Tudor Sedan.  At only an hour, this works for a Saturday evening in winter.

Perry Mason 166: Respectability on Trial

Note: Erle Stanley Gardner came to Perry Mason with two useful educations. One was acquired in the small mining towns of his youth, where power rarely showcased itself but was understood through money, reputation, and long acquaintance. The other came from legal practice, where he saw how such informal arrangements could shape formal outcomes, particularly for outsiders. Together they help explain a recurring pattern in the Mason novels: tightly knit local elites, suspicion directed toward the socially vulnerable, and justice arriving only when an outsider breaks the circle.

Respectability on Trial: How the Rural Elite Rig the Game (Until Mason Shows Up)

Gardner's small towns often resemble a miniature version of what C. Wright Mills would later describe as a power elite. Property owners, professionals, and established families do more than possess wealth; they help determine what counts as common sense. Influence accumulates into networks. Families, attorneys, business associates, and dependents form interlocking circles whose judgments have a curious habit of aligning with their interests.

In The Case of the Golddigger's Purse (1945) and The Case of the Cautious Coquette (1949), reputation is a form of capital guarded as jealously as any stash of undeclared income. When scandal threatens, suspicion drifts toward those at the margins, often women whose social standing is uncertain. The machinery of law initially serves as a social reflex: protect the inner ring and export blame. Facts are smothered beneath more convenient interpretations.

The Case of the Lame Canary (1937) shows the same dynamic in a harsher key. Divorce law, social standing, and the threat of public scandal become tools of domination. The resulting violence grows from unequal power, while the impostures and misdirections that follow reveal how confidently privileged figures assume they can avoid scrutiny.

In The Case of the Screaming Woman (1958), Gardner examines power at its most subtle. Credibility attaches itself to status before evidence has even entered the room. Property owners and professionals are presumed truthful; the lone dissenter is treated as suspect. Persistence itself becomes evidence of instability. Disbelief functions as social control.

Running through these novels is a quieter but revealing pattern. Trust circulates within a closed circuit. Legal representation, financial oversight, guardianship, and family interests often occupy the same social orbit. No grand conspiracy is necessary. Familiarity provides its own protection.

This is where Perry Mason becomes important. He acts as a detective who is a disruptive force. He insists that claims be tested by evidence rather than station, and he breaks the tacit agreements that shield respectable people from uncomfortable questions. His real offense is treating respectability not as proof but as background.

The larger implication of Gardner's fiction is that injustice rarely presents itself wearing a villain's cape. More often it arrives in a clean suit, sits on the chamber-of-commerce board, and speaks confidently about community standards. Wherever a cohesive local elite dominates the landscape, the danger is not merely corruption but a narrowing of perception itself. Truth becomes filtered through status. It takes an outsider, or at least an outsider's method, to pry it loose.

The Kalends of Crime: The Maltese Falcon

Note: Don't get your feathers up, as Sam Spade warns, but you won’t find comparisons with the John Huston’s 1941 version in this review of the 1931 version. Comparisons are odious  - they obscure a film’s own merits. Refusing to compare demands discipline: to judge a work on its own terms. I assume, despite industry pressures, the filmmakers aimed in good faith to make a solid movie. Besides, Una Merkel, Thelma Todd, and Bebe Daniels all turn up in the same movie. At that point, everything else is merely a formality.

The Maltese Falcon
1931 / 1:18
Tagline: “Hard as nails, leader of a crime ring, but still a woman.”
[internet archive]

This Pre-Code version of the Dashiell Hammett’s 1929 novel kicks off with the implication that private detective Sam Spade (Ricardo Cortez) has just had intimate congress with a woman in his office. During working hours, no less. Spade and his secretary Effie (Una Merkel) exchange knowing looks as the woman leaves the office after adjusting her hosiery.

That the Spade character is quite the ladies’ man is confirmed as his partner Miles Archer (Walter Long) listens in on the extension to gather that Spade and his wife Iva Archer (Thelma Todd) are having an affair. The new client, a worried Ruth Wonderly (Bebe Daniels), in a fur trimmed outfit, hires the two detectives to locate her missing sister.

In a beautifully filmed scene, a dark bedroom with the breeze blowing in the curtains, Spade is woken by his ringing telephone. The police inform him that apparently while on the job, Miles Archer was murdered, shot to death in an alley.  Near the scene of the crime, Spade speaks in Cantonese with a Chinese-American merchant. The police learn of Spade and Iva’s affair so they figure Spade as the perp.  The only way for Spade to get out from under police suspicion and scrutiny is to find the real killer, but his meeting with three manic collectors looking for the statuette of a black bird impedes his efforts to clear himself.

Near the beginning of the movie the lines are delivered in a kind of stagey way, as if they are being declaimed rather than spoken in a natural way. The delivery gets better as the movie unfolds. Bebe Daniels has limpid lamps, as wide and wet as the eyes of a Dandie Dinmont Terrier. Her femme fatale is persuasive: attractive and “using her charms to her great advantage.” “Don't you ever get lonesome” she asks Spade as if she could something about that. Daniels in the bubble bath is Pre-Code as is her being strip searched in the kitchen. Also, in Pre-Code fashion, it’s obvious that Spade and Wonderly sleep together.

Ricardo Cortez puts in a good, not great, performance as the satanic PI who only seems to be looking out for himself. Spade’s goat-like lechery is a creepy act to make people let down their guard by underestimating him. Robert Elliott and J. Farrell MacDonald as San Francisco police detectives are both excellent: tough as nails but too middle-aged weary to employ the rubber hose.

Dudley Digges (the heavy in Condemned) plays the Guttman character as jumpy on the outside but bleak on the inside. In Pre-Code fashion, it’s evident that Guttman and Wilmer (Dwight Frye, looking psycho) sleep together when Guttman strokes Frye’s cheek. Guttman sincerely regrets sending Wilmer over as the fall guy.

Spade becomes rather a flat character because his self-revealing monologue at the end of the novel is not persuasive. At least he says, “I'll get over it in time” which shows he’s philosopher enough to take the long view, which helps in run of the mill dilemmas like handing over to the law somebody one has slept with.

This picture has a final scene in which Spade visits Wonderly in jail. I thought it worked because the cell block was dismal beyond words, the incarcerated women deserted and hopeless. Just an amateur critic, I’m easy-going enough to march where the director points.

European Reading Challenge #8

I read this for the European Reading Challenge 2026.

A Voice in the Night – Andrea Camilleri

Inspector Salvo Montalbano works in Vigata, Scility, where the sun bakes the streets and the rot runs centuries deep. He’s got two cases on his desk: a supermarket manager found dead by his own hand, and a young woman butchered in her apartment. The supermarket’s owned by the Cuffaro crime family. The girl’s boyfriend is the son of the provincial president - a spoiled brat with too much money and too little conscience.

Montalbano’s used to this kind of mess. The criminals are predictably stupid and ferocious. The politicians are worse. His bosses are scared of stepping on the wrong toes, and the mafia has its fingers in every pie. So Montalbano does what he always does: he digs with his bare hands when there’s no shovel in sight.

His crew is the usual cast. Fazio takes notes like he’s building a case against time and space. Catarella mangles names and addresses with comic precision. Dr. Pasquano curses like a sailor and pokes at Montalbano’s creeping fear that age is catching up with him. The inspector feels it in his bones - he’s not as sharp as he used to be, and the world isn’t getting any cleaner.

Camilleri’s prose moves fast, like a car chase through narrow alleys. Dialogue drives the story, and the scenes play out like a stage drama - misunderstandings, interrogations, midnight break-ins. Montalbano lies when he has to, manipulates when he must. He knows when to wait and when to strike, even if it means flushing out the guilty with a TV interview or a voice in the dark.

There’s no hottie love interest half his age this time, thank the stars. Just Montalbano, aging, stubborn, and still trying to hold the line in a country sleepwalking through corruption. Camilleri’s voice is clear and skeptical, like a man who’s seen too much and still cares. The crimes are brutal, the politics worse, but Montalbano keeps going. Someone has to.

Perry Mason 165: TCOT Caretaker’s Cat

Note. The year 1932 was the worst year of the Depression in the USA. Many adult men (i.e. the readers of pulp mysteries) were feeling demoralized by long-term under- or unemployment and difficulties supporting a family. So in digressions in the novels Erle Stanley Gardner sometimes donned his life coach hat.

Perryisms to Live By:  “What the hell can a man lose? He can't lose his life because he doesn't own that anyway. He has only a lease on life. He can lose money and money doesn't mean one damn thing as compared with character. All that really counts is a man's ability to live life, to get the most out of it as he goes through it, and he gets the most kick out of it by playing a no-limit game.”

The Case of the Caretaker’s Cat – Erle Stanley Gardner

So dig this: 1935, the Great Depression still doing its slow grind, and here comes a Perry Mason yarn that kicks off with Karl Jackson, Mason’s short-lived assistant, laying out the Laxter family soap opera with the clarity of a bookie reading off odds. Old Peter Laxter croaks in a house fire, leaves his grandsons Sam and Frank sitting pretty, while granddaughter Winifred gets the royal shaft. The caretaker, Ashton - crippled, cranky, and living in a basement with his Persian cat named Clinker (named after the coal furnace crud, for you non-stokers) - gets a job for life. Cozy, right?

Except Sam hates the cat. Claims Clinker’s a bed-muddying menace, running up laundry bills like a Beverly Hills princess. Threatens to poison the poor beast. Ashton, who’s got a bankroll fat enough to choke a horse, stomps into Mason’s office, waving his wad but balking at a $500 retainer. Settles for $250 to keep Clinker breathing. Mason, cool as a gin fizz, dictates a letter to Della Street warning Sam he’ll lose his inheritance if he so much as looks at the cat cross-eyed. Ashton exits, and Della spots him being tailed by a guy in a green Packard - because of course.

Cue Nathaniel Shuster, bargain-basement shyster with a rep for jury bribing, barging in with Sam and Frank in tow. Wants to settle Winifred’s beef out of court. Mason says he’s only in it for the cat, tosses them out like yesterday’s racing form. Then tells Paul Drake they’re gonna challenge the will “over a cat.” Drake’s assignment: find Winifred, dig dirt on the grandsons, and sniff out the truth about Peter’s crispy demise.

Winifred turns up flipping waffles at a joint called Winnie’s Waffles - because nothing says American grit like syrup and batter. She’s signed away her rights thanks to Shuster’s sweet talk, but doesn’t care. She’s hell-bent on making it solo in the cold, hard world. Mason, digging her style, drops a line fit for a motivational poster: “It’s not the future that matters; it’s the present. It’s not what you save, but what you make and how you make it.” Heavy, man. Then he mentions the cat, and good-hearted Winifred’s all in. Her boyfriend Doug Keene tosses Edith DeVoe, Peter’s nurse, into the mix, and suddenly the plot’s got more twists than a pretzel factory.

From there, it’s pure pulp fireworks: Edith spins a lurid yarn, Mason huddles with DA Hamilton Burger, they dig up Peter’s charred remains, and then - bang! - a strangulation murder, a blunt-instrument murder, missing diamonds, Holcomb slamming desks and chasing streetcars like a Keystone Cop on Benzedrine. Della breaks speed limits, Perry plays square-shooter hero, and the courtroom finale rocks harder than a Chick Webb set at the Savoy Ballroom. All this, and we’re still sweating bullets over that damn cat.

The Thirties Mason? He’s less buttoned-down barrister, more two-fisted adventurer, grousing to Della about paperwork while dodging death and dishing Stoicism. Sure, the cars have running boards and California still hangs its killers, but the vibe? Timeless. Cool as a cat named Clinker.

Perry Mason 164: The Mean Girl Rewrites the Script

Note: Gail Patrick left law school to become a movie actress. Often cast as the bad girl or the other woman, she appeared in more than 60 feature films between 1932 and 1948, notably Stage Door and My Favorite Wife. Retirement bored her so she created her job as executive producer for the hit TV show Perry Mason from 1957 to 1966.

The Mean Girl Rewrites the Script (and Wins the Case)

It is hardly a contradiction, though it can appear that way at first glance. Gail Patrick, cool, lacquered, bored, amused, built an acting career on surfaces that concealed intent. She played the socialite, the interloper, the mean girl, the woman lingering just beyond the boundaries of propriety and therefore exercising influence over them. In My Man Godfrey among others, she embodied something subtler than chaos. She was an arrangement of tone, posture, and advantage. Of self-knowledge as well: social butterfly Cornelia understood perfectly that she was squandering her time, energy, and talent; super-thief Myra possessed the icy confidence required to match wits with the cunning George Sanders in Quiet Please: Murder.

Then came television. Executive producer of Perry Mason. Less performance than stewardship of performance. Something carries across. As producer, Patrick favored scripts and characterizations that rewarded intelligence, discipline, and competence, particularly in the portrayal of Della Street.

The look of the series, its restraint, polish, and almost chilly cleanliness, feels more like an insistence than an aesthetic preference. Nothing extraneous. Every gesture purposeful. One can hear the echo of those earlier roles: the woman who knew exactly when to speak, when to hold back, how to allow silence to accomplish its work.

Many of Patrick's screen roles centered on social performance and concealed motives. As producer, she showed a similar sensitivity to credibility, helping maintain Perry Mason's disciplined tone and avoiding the melodramatic excess common in contemporary television.

And the women, often relegated to the margins in comparable series, are altered here, quietly but decisively. Della Street neither flutters nor waits. She anticipates, investigates, and verifies. Her work functions less as secretarial support than as a parallel enterprise. She is competent without fanfare, and because the series treats that competence as routine rather than remarkable, it becomes all the more convincing.

This matters, if only because the period so reliably preferred the opposite. The endangered woman, the nosy neighbor, the childlike witness, the decorative secretary still appear in Perry Mason, yet they are displaced, or more accurately, balanced by another possibility. Della, and often other women* moving through the show's tight architecture, possess a self-command that resists easy categorizing. Rescue never enters the equation; they are already in motion, solving, adjusting, correcting.

Whether this emphasis originated directly with Patrick or emerged from a broader creative collaboration is difficult to determine. Nevertheless, the show's treatment of Della Street reflects qualities associated with Patrick's best screen performances: intelligence, composure, and self-possession.

So the irony, villainess turned arbiter of truth, dissolves somewhat. Villainy was never the essence of those performances. What mattered was expertise in appearances: understanding how deception settles into the body, how it sounds when it speaks. Repurposed, that knowledge becomes vigilance. The architect of duplicity becomes, quite plausibly, its most efficient detector.

The skills that made Patrick effective as an actress - discipline, observation, and control - appear in a different form in the series she helped produce. Patrick spent much of her acting career portraying women whose intelligence carried a hint of menace. On Perry Mason, that intelligence loses its threatening quality and becomes professional competence. Della Street and many of the series' female characters are neither ornaments nor victims. They are people with work to do, and the show takes that work seriously. If Patrick helped shape that perspective, her most lasting role may have taken place behind the camera rather than in front of it.

Links to Gail Patrick movies and my reviews can be found here.

* Amazing actresses such as Constance Ford, Audrey Totter, Frances Reid, Joyce Meadows, Marie Windsor, Katherine Squire, Geraldine Wall, Lurene Tuttle, Sheila Bromley, Louise Latham, and Jeanne Cooper, to name only a few. They all played women with souls – and elbows.

Matinee Musings: Ned Sparks

Note: Ned Sparks (1883 -1957) was born in Guelph, Ontario and raised in St. Thomas. As a teenager prospecting in the Klondike, he ran out of money and took to performing. After some turns to a seminary and the railways, he got chosen for his first New York show in 1912.

Ned Sparks: Canadian, Comedian, Curmudgeon

Pull out my fingernails and the nuclear codes die with me. Make me carry a box of glazed donuts, though, and after ten minutes of sticky fingers I’ll sing like a canary about what makes Ned Sparks so goddamn funny. Everybody has a breaking point. Mine is sticky fingers.

Most comedians of the early sound era attack a scene. Sparks endures it. Hal Skelly and Jack Oakie would get a laugh being a clownish type. Sparks would just perch a sour face atop that neck, a neck so tom-cotton thick for such a slight man that it looked like it had been borrowed from sumo wrestler Chiyonofuji.

Trixie Lorraine: Isn't there going to be any comedy in the show?
Ned: Oh, plenty! The gay side, the hard-boiled side, the cynical and funny side of the Depression! I'll make 'em laugh at you starving to death, honey. It'll be the funniest thing you ever did. - Gold Diggers of 1933

The typical comic performer of the Thirties is all motion, all enthusiasm, all noise. Wheeler does the innocent, Woolsey plays the sharper, Eddie Collins makes mouth noises. Sparks reacts as though he has just been informed of a yet another damn thing comin’ down the pike. His face conveys the nagging suspicion that he is always the last to find out. Always.

What makes this work is that he never appears to know he's being funny. The run of comic actors want the laugh. Sparks seems to regard the laugh as yet another glitch in the works. He delivers every line in that famous gravel-dump monotone, as though the effort of speaking exceeds the value of communication.

Ned: Without my wife, I'm comparatively alone in the world. Even with my wife, I'm comparatively alone in the world. - The Bride Walks Out

And yet, somehow, he is usually the funniest person on screen.

The secret, I think, is contrast. Put Sparks next to romantic lead Joel McCrea delivering a heartfelt declaration and he becomes hilarious as the humorless puritan (Kept Husbands). Put him next to put-upon heroine Mae Clarke and he becomes even funnier as not the least of her trials (The Fall Guy). The greater the emotional temperature around him, the more amusing his glacial indifference becomes. He is a one-man corrective to excessive enthusiasm.

T. Fenny Sylvester: You know, dat song gives you somethin' to work to. Sort of a prod to do big things. In the hustle and bustle of daily life, a guy's liable to forget his mudder. But that song brung me back me babyhood. Ain't them words swell? "Who calmed your baby fears, and brushed away your tears? Your mudda." Boy, nuttin' can take the place of your mudda, can it?
Ned: You can't prove it by me - I was an incubator baby. - Sing and Like It

There is also something surprisingly modern about him. Many silent and early talking-picture funny guys can feel trapped in their own period. Sparks does not. The deadpan one who refuses to play along with the emotional assumptions of the room is now a staple of American comedy. You can draw a line from Sparks to Jack Benny, from Benny to Bill Murray, and from Murray to every sitcom character whose principal personality trait is being tired of everybody else's nonsense.

Mae Clark: And get cleaned up!
Ned: I already took a bath. I'm so clean I'm uncomfortable. - The Fall Guy

The strange thing is that many Ned Sparks jokes are not especially remarkable on paper. Read them and you may smile politely. Watch Sparks deliver them and they become funny through sheer force of personality. The line is rarely the joke. Ned Sparks is the joke. His exhausted gaze, his world-weary voice, his absolute certainty that mankind cannot be helped: that is the schtick.

Ned: Yeah, what's caviar to the few is applesauce to the gander. – Kept Husbands

He perfected a comic character so thoroughly that he turned pessimism into a performing art. The perpetual irritation of Sparks’ supporting character stole scenes for years, much in the stock character of fluttery fragile ZaSu Pitts whom audiences also loved. W.C. Fields cultivated a larger-than-life persona: a blustery, self-serving schemer with verbal flair and physical comedy. In contrast, though Ned used his stiff movements to great comic effect – talk about man in crying need of yoga time on the mat - Sparks embodied sardonic restraint.

Nobody ever looked less delighted to be in a motion picture. Nobody ever got more laughs from it.

Dave the Dude: If we have to dig up a husband for Annie, let's to it and get over it.
Ned: Now you got to dig up a husband for...
[shouting]
Ned: Where you gonna get a husband just like that?
Dave the Dude: How about you, Happy?
Ned: Me?
Missouri Martin: Oh, that's a swell idea. I think you'd be just precious.
Ned: That's a wonderful idea but there's one thing that stands on the way. I got a wife that is very fussy. She don't like me to go around and marrying people! - Lady for a Day

Perry Mason 162: TCOT Duplicate Daughter

Note: I’m not a reader that pays much attention to titles. The thing is, titles of Perry Mason books always promise meaning, but often in the same way horoscopes do: vaguely, and only after you’ve shrugged off confirmation bias. In this 1960 production, the title is practically the only clue we get - until the courtroom explodes like a Fourth of July firecracker. Is it fair that the next real clue arrives when the novel is 96% over? Of course not. But fairness is for afternoons in May and virtue ethicists, not Perry Mason plots. Gardner knows his readers will wait patiently for that last-minute twist, because nothing tastes sweeter than watching Mason pull a rabbit out of a hat while Burger is still deciding between the homburg or the fedora.

The Case of the Duplicate Daughter – Erle Stanley Gardner

The story begins with a game of deception so subtle that the reader, if reading too fast, will be left bewildered by its sudden reversals. Carter Gilman, investment wizard and pillar of respectability, vanishes one morning while his twenty-year-old daughter Muriel (talk about a name that screams dutiful daughter) is preparing the kind of Anglo breakfast that has sent generations of men to early graves - bacon, eggs, buttered toast.

When she returns, her father is gone. In his workshop, she discovers a broken chair, a pool of crimson liquid, and ten thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills scattered like confetti. Convinced she has stumbled upon a murder scene, Muriel obeys the instructions in her father’s briefcase: “If anything happens, call Perry Mason.”

Mason arrives to find the “blood” is paint, but the money is real - worth over a hundred thousand in today’s currency. He dispatches Paul Drake to probe the Gilman household: Carter, his daughter Muriel, his second wife Nancy, and Nancy’s daughter Glamis. Before the detective can report, Gilman materializes in Mason’s office, delivers cryptic instructions, and disappears again - this time for good.

Enter Vera Martel, a private investigator with ethics as flexible as a rubber band. She telephones Mason, warning him to abandon Gilman’s cause and to tell the man his troubles are worse than imagined. Mason, intrigued, consults Drake, who brands Martel a blackmailer - a woman who turns sensitive information into cash. Soon after, Martel is found dead, and Carter Gilman is indicted for her murder.

The courtroom becomes a theater of psychological warfare. Hamilton Burger, savoring the prospect of humbling Mason, subpoenas him as a witness for the prosecution. But Mason, master of timing, unmasks the killer before taking the stand. The solution, resting on an ancient fictional device, is not fair play - but it is dazzling.

Beneath the legal fireworks lies a motive steeped in the mores of mid-century America. Nancy’s youthful Bohemianism - she was an artist, which in the 1950s was shorthand for the moral laxity of beatniks - becomes a weapon in the hands of the prosecution. Gardner exploits this cultural hypocrisy with relish, reminding us that blackmail thrives where society clings to its taboos. Today, when scandal has lost its sting, such plots seem quaint.

This late-career Mason novel is a study in contrasts: the glitter of money against the shadow of murder, the brittle façade of respectability against the raw nerve of desire. It is a story of greed, fear, and the perilous games people play when secrets become currency.

Perry Mason 162: Goodbye, Tragg; Hello, Procedure

Note: By the time Ray Collins was cast as Perry Mason’s nemesis, he was a seasoned actor on the stage, screen and radio. Collins had one of those movie careers that wandered cheerfully from Citizen Kane to Ma & Pa Kettle.

Goodbye, Tragg: Hello, Procedure (Or, How the Fun Got Filed Away)

Ray Collins played Lieutenant Arthur Tragg, the gruff homicide detective on Perry Mason. He did it with the kind of lived-in authority as though he’d been on the scene for every murder in Los Angeles since Prohibition. He remained a comforting fixture on Perry Mason until emphysema forced him to retire in 1963 - an exit that felt less like a casting change and more like a frail uncle quietly leaving the family party early so that no one who liked him would worry he’d overdone it.

As a kid, I just accepted Tragg as a kind of prehistoric lawman - at least a generation older than Perry Mason, possibly older than the courthouse itself. He had that “I remember when the uniform’s finishing touch was a rubber hose” vibe.  So imagine my adolescent shock - eager to take umbrage as teenagers are - when the novels reveal that Tragg and Mason are roughly the same age. Suddenly Tragg isn’t a veteran but a contemporary who seems to have aged an extra twenty-five years from presiding at crime scenes that would make EMTs blanch.

Ray Collins’ played Lieutenant Tragg in the spirit of the novels. Though adversaries, Tragg and Mason feel grudging admiration for the detective skills of the other. They respect each other, though Tragg would mockingly call Mason “Counselor ” and Mason would say tightly, “I feel I spend all my time introducing you…,” when Tragg would pop in unannounced during an office conference with the hapless scared client.

Tragg circled Mason like a seasoned chess adversary, occasionally smiling as if to say, “Well played – till next time.” In the first three seasons, the show breathed the smoky pulp air of radio suspense and film noir. Tragg’s authority rested in experience and force of personality, not in paperwork or protocols. He intuited, from seeing it scores of times before - how the pieces of evidence probably fit - not usually correctly, but with enough good faith that his thinking errors felt human, never lazy or malicious or stupid.

Enter Lieutenants Andy Anderson and Steve Drumm, played with a clean, almost antiseptic efficiency by Wesley Lau and Richard Anderson respectively. Suddenly the temperature drops. These dour dudes are not there to play; they are there to get the Freedom Deprivation Logistics humming. If Tragg embodied the instincts of the beat cop elevated by experience but eschewing the rough methods of yore, Andy and Drumm are the modern bureaucrats shaped by college degrees and workshops on Carceral Workflow Optimization.

Andy and Drumm do not wink. They never seem bemused. Della is not granted their courtly attention. One suspects they file reports in triplicate and torture subordinates over trifles. Where Tragg sparred with Mason, Andy and Drumm simply stand in opposition, bitterly assuming Mason is just a showboat trying to get the obviously guilty off for who knows what nefarious reasons.

The tonal shift is unmistakable, if understated. Without Tragg, the cases still unfold and Mason still prevails - but the journey ticks like an administrative metronome. The law, once personalized through Burger and Tragg’s relatable fallibility, becomes impersonal - an apparatus staffed by professionals who don’t have time to add respect to an adversarial relationship.

In replacing Tragg, the show traded passion for efficiency. The stories become cleaner, yes, but also colder. And in that chill, we glimpse Sixties television’s own evolution: from storytelling that invites audiences to play along to storytelling that expects them simply to watch - and to endure hearing, yet again, “You’ve got 24 hours to wrap this up.”

Perry Mason 161: The Count of Nine

Note: I use AI as an editorial tool so that my writing weaknesses won't annoy you or waste your time. AI helps identify excess wording, repetition, plot-heavy passages, unsupported claims, and places where my fondness for silly metaphors or wooly-headed abstractions obscures the point. I review its suggestions critically and use them to make the writing clearer, more concise, and more focused on analysis rather than summary.

The Count of Nine – Erle Stanley Gardner writing as A. A. Fair

Donald Lam has finally made partner in the private detective agency run by Bertha Cool - an achievement long overdue. Ex-lawyer Lam has always done most of the legwork while Bertha lines up the cases, spends the fees, and keeps expenses tight enough to squeak. Partnership doesn’t change the balance of power much, but it does give Lam a little leverage, which proves useful when Bertha lands what looks like an easy job: guarding a high-society party from gatecrashers.

The client is Dean Crockett, a wealthy eccentric obsessed with privacy and security. Three weeks earlier, one of his lavish parties ended with the theft of a valuable carved jade Buddha. This time, Crockett wants absolute control. He lives alone on the twentieth floor of an apartment building with a special elevator that runs only to his penthouse. Guests must be cleared at the front desk, approved again by Crockett himself, and possess a verified invitation before they’re allowed upstairs. Bertha is there to check names and keep out gatecrashers. Simple enough.

Naturally, the security arrangements fail. Despite Crockett's elaborate precautions, another theft occurs, pushing Cool and Lam from security guards to investigators and drawing them into a case that soon turns deadly.

Gardner's great strength is efficiency. Scenes arrive late, end early, and rarely waste a sentence. The result is a novel that moves at a brisk pace while giving Lam plenty of opportunities to demonstrate his understated intelligence. Unlike the hard-boiled detectives who dominate much mid-century crime fiction, Lam wins through observation and persistence rather than toughness. His small stature and unassuming manner encourage others to underestimate him, usually to their regret.

Gardner is known for his plotting, not characterization but in this outing amusing is the comic friction between Lam and the people he meets along the way. A lecherous photographer prides himself on manipulating women, prompting a sharp, funny exchange where Lam pretends admiration for the lady’s man while despising every word the crumb says. The reader catches the contempt immediately; the photographer, blinded by ego, misses it entirely.

The Count of Nine is the eighteenth book in Gardner’s long-running Cool and Lam series, written under the pen name A.A. Fair. Bertha is her usual loud, greedy, tightfisted self, eternally convinced she can handle things alone. Lam - slight, brainy, and chronically underestimated - ends up doing the real detective work, taking a few beatings, attracting unwanted romantic attention, and finally putting the pieces together. Gardner's portrayal of the police is decidedly unsympathetic; they are as fallible, stubborn, and self-interested as anyone else in the story.

Structurally, this is Gardner’s version of a locked-room mystery. Most of the action takes place over a only a day or two, with little emphasis on gunplay or brawls. It showcases Gardner's strengths: airtight construction, memorable eccentrics, and a detective whose intelligence consistently proves more effective than force. For readers who enjoy classic puzzle mysteries with a hard-boiled edge, it's an easy recommendation – no wonder Hard Case Crime re-released it in 2018.

The Ides of Ann Harding: Condemned

Note: Ann Harding was to the play the gallant lady many times in the first half of the Thirties. By 1935, soured by the Depression that had no end in sight, stoked by a press that didn’t like her not talking to reporters, a cynical America was sick of the self-sacrificing roles of brave Ann Harding. A movie-goer also wonders if what happened to Harding was what happened to Anne Hathaway: one gloomy day America decided they disliked Ann/Anne because she was too smart, too beautiful, too famous, too rich, too talented, over-staying her welcome among us homely fickle mortals. Perhaps due to feeling over-exposed by a nasty press corps and coupled with a rancorous custody battle, Harding went on a break in 1936 and didn’t return to movies until 1942 with Eyes in the Night, in which she was scolded by cruel Donna Reed for being so noble.

Condemned
1929 / 1:26
Tagline: “Ronald COLMAN As A Rough, Tough Convict Who'd Kill For A Kiss”
[internet archive]

Devil's island was a French penal colony in the Salvation Islands of French Guiana, demonstrating the diabolical talent of The Man to turn a tropical paradise into a hellhole. Set in the late 1920s, the warden Vidal (Dudley Digges) scolds his wife Mme. Vidal (Ann Harding) for having no sense of her high position as the wife of an important man in the colony.

Disrespecting her feelings and opinions as usual, he brings in the incarcerated individual Michel Oman (Ronald Colman) as a houseman. Michel is Parisian thief who took the fall for a bank robbery gone bad. But like Charles Boyer trapped in the Casbah in Algiers, Michel is debonaire and a dandy given the chance.  How Vidal justifies to himself having such a good-looking man spend days with his comely wife is left unexplained. Maybe he figures his peasant wife is so cowed by his blustering, that marriage vows are so sacred to her, and the power of gossip so over-powering among the expatriate women that the obvious and cynical predictions will never come to be.

Mme. Vidal warns her husband he’ll be sorry for bringing an incarcerated individual into the house. But in the end, as we would expect of a country woman who grew up with 13 brothers and sisters in a village in Alsace in the early 20^th century – now there are some onerous intersectionalities -  she is submissive to her sadistic buffoon of a husband with the caterpillar mustache and revolting soul patches. As Michel points out when they talk while shopping in the outside market, they are both prisoners.

Movie-goer, Mme. Vidal and Michel fall in love. Michel buys her a capuchin monkey on which she needs to lavish her love  and concern. This gesture pisses off the warden who is a pet-hater on top of being conceited. His tossing the simian out a window precipitates a crisis with a climactic chase after two escapees through a jungle swamp at night.

A movie-goer has to be patient when watching an early talkie. They tend to be stagey, with the actors motionless and intoning theatrical lines in front of a camera. But the experimentation with camera movement in this picture is cinematic and interesting. Many scenes are outdoors. The tossing ship at the opening, with water water everywhere, was totally unexpected  A fast tracking shot pictures the warden as he snarls his welcome address to a new batch of unlucky wretches, “Prison is a poor place to be proud.” The camera pans as we movie-goers take in silhouettes of the prisoners, some of whom we can guess are cognitively disabled, others acting out anger and hatred. Within and without solitary confinement is filmed like a nightmare of a French existentialist.

The light and camera make 27-year-old Ann Harding look about five years younger. She wears strange Romany makeup in the heart-to-heart conversation scene but this is balanced in another scene in which she lets down her ash blonde hair. Be still, O beating heart. This sight is almost as affecting as her looking into space with a worried look in which you can see her anxious thoughts racing each other. In the scene where she finally shucks the upbringing to keep your (female) opinions to yourself and tells the warden where to get off, she’s dynamite. I believed her when she said she would die for Michel. At the end, Harding stands on the ship as it pulls out and the light on the water does that bobbing thing light on water does and Harding gradually leaves the frame, holding back her tears. It’s emblematic of her intensity and her restraint in the entire picture.

Another point about early talkies, the veteran movie-goer expects the sound to be so-so unless it is a monster movie where they really get into tolling bells, creaking doors, and screams in the night. However, in the movie the soundtrack is excellent. In the opening there is a swirl of sound as the wind blows, water splashes, the ship creaks and the inmates jeer at each other and the guards. The inmates sing a mournful song as they march back from hard labor. The maniac boy screams when solitary drives him around the bend. The motor on the boat pursuing our heroes sounds like technology gone ape.

Anyway, this movie should also be seen for Ronald Colman. Besides that great voice, he puts in a fine reserved performance, one that got him a Best Actor nomination that year. Harding and Colman make an attractive couple. Dudley Digges’ warden was sometimes over the top, but he was pretty effective as the character that richly deserves his ultimate fate at the hands of Louis Wolheim as Colman's convict friend – he’s got a dotted line tattooed on this neck “cut here.”

Perry Mason 160: Murder Most Furry

Note: Erle Stanley Gardner was very much an outdoorsman. He wasn't just a courtroom author - he was a hunter, camper, archer, sportsman, and prolific travel photographer. Gardner documented extensive hunting trips, camping expeditions, bow‑hunting competitions, fishing trips, and yachting adventures across the Western U.S., Baja California, and even Alaska, Mexico and the Philippines. He was an animal lover.

Murder Most Furry: Three Perry Mason Tales with Animals

The Case of the Grinning Gorilla (1952)
Perry Mason buys a dead woman’s diaries for five bucks and, naturally, all hell breaks loose. Helen Cadmus is missing, drowned, or just being difficult. Enter Nathan Fallon, a cousin with the ethics of a pickpocket, and Benjamin Addicks, a millionaire who dabbles in gorilla neurology - because why not? Addicks waves money; Mason waves him off. Mason hates lies more than unsound logic.

Paul Drake snoops, finds gorillas, and a mansion fortified like Fort Knox. Cue murder. Addicks ends up dead, stabbed with something sharp enough to make Freud blush. The housekeeper is accused, and she’s as talkative as a clam. Mason nearly dies twice, which is twice more than usual.

The case? Weird, wild, and worth every page.

The Case of the Careless Kitten (1942)   
Published during WWII, this Perry Mason novel hums with wartime tension even though it never says so outright. The story pivots on identity: Komo insists he’s Korean, but everyone else calls him Japanese. In those days, truth didn’t matter - perception did. Gardner uses Komo as a quiet indictment of snap judgments.

The mystery begins with Franklin Shore, a banker who vanished a decade ago. Now he resurfaces - sort of. Mason arrives for a meeting and finds a corpse instead. What follows is eighteen hours of relentless motion: no trial theatrics, just Mason maneuvering while Della Street takes the fall and Burger grins like a cat in cream. There’s a kitten too - Amber Eyes -whose soft fur hides sharp claws and sharper consequences.

Gardner keeps it taut, brisk, and oddly poignant. Beneath the puzzle lies a hum of fear and suspicion, a reminder of what America looked like when trust was rationed.

The Case of the Fan Dancer's Horse (1947)
This Mason romp is pure Gardner in overdrive: two fan-dancers, one horse, and a murder in which the overbearing rancher is skewered with a samurai sword. It starts with a car wreck and a wardrobe that looks like it escaped from a burlesque revue. Mason runs an ad to return the goods, and suddenly the plot is juggling mistaken identities, borrowed names, and a timetable that eats half a page. There’s a victim, an ostrich burr on the blade, and a client who buries evidence like it’s a garden chore.

The courtroom scenes? Fireworks. Gardner doesn’t do character studies - he does detonations. Perry blows up a witness like a pinwheel on the Fourth of July. Sure, you can guess the killer, but who cares? The ride is the thing. If you want plausibility, read a tax manual. If you want fan-dancers, a horse, and a murder with style - step right up.

Matinee Musings: Lady of Burlesque

Lady of Burlesque
1943 / 1:31
Tagline: “Mirth! Murder! Melody! Mystery! and Girls! Girls! Girls!”
[internet archive]

Barbara Stanwyck slips into Dixie Daisy’s sequined skin with a verve that feels like liberation. Forget the noir siren or the ruthless schemer - here, Stanwyck is earthy, commonsensical, and unpretentious. Dixie is  shimmying her way to the top, armed with a grin and a gag. She sings, she dances, she cracks wise, and suddenly an opera house turned burlesque palace hums with her electricity.

But success breeds venom. Enter Lolita La Verne, a redhead with a temper - how unusual -  and Princess Nirvena, a White Russian with hauteur to spare. Both rivals wind up strangled, and Dixie - our accidental femme fatale - must pivot from pirouettes to peril, sleuthing her way out of a noose of suspicion.

William Wellman directs with his trademark robustness, giving the backstage chaos a pulse that’s equal parts grit and glitter. Edith Head’s costumes - feathers, sequins, and audacity stitched into every hem - are practically characters themselves. Arthur Lange’s score, Oscar-nominated, swells and swoons like a knowing wink to the absurdity of it all. Yes, Michael O’Shea’s Biff Brannigan can grate - his wisecracks clang like cracked cymbals in 2026 - but maybe that’s the point: burlesque thrives on noise, on excess, on the gaudy collision of artifice and appetite.

The film’s pleasures are tactile: the authentic seediness of the setting, the backstage antics that teeter between silly and sly, the one-liners that land like water balloons. And those costumes - outlandish, unapologetic, a parade of fantasy. Really, what more could you want, even if you're a fashion ignoramus like me?

Perry Mason 159: Rear Window

Note: It is impossible to examine Raymond Burr’s Pre-Mason Oeuvre without a look at his most memorable movie part among the general public. By 1954, Burr had played an evil goon (I Love Trouble, Abandoned, M)  or sadistic gangster (Raw Deal, Red Light, Borderline, His Kind of Woman) or corrupt professional fixer (Unmasked, FBI Girl, Mara Maru) but he was also persuasively gruesome as a psycho private eye (Pitfall), commie spy (Walk a Crooked Mile, The Whip Hand), and serial date rapist (The Blue Gardenia). So Alfred Hitchcock figured Burr would be a natural as the heavy in this suspense movie.

 Rear Window
1954 / 1:52
Tagline: “YOU won't be able to tear your eyes away from this window!”
[internet archive]

In this movie Raymond Burr plays Lars Thorwald, a salesman of wholesale costume jewelry in the Big Apple. His wife is chronically ill. She is not patient in her suffering but seems ever demanding and never satisfied. Lars is a bad neighbor in that he tells people in the shared court to shut up and leave him alone. Nor is he a good husband because he apparently telephones his girlfriend, for which his wife mocks him. Mr. and Mrs. Thorwald bicker all the time because the “in sickness and in health” clause that they slip in when people are too young and dumb to know the serious implications of “in sickness” does not mean anything to Lars though with his curly grey hair you’d think he’d be old enough to know what an ageing couple have to deal with.

On one rainy night Lars is observed leaving his apartment three times, carrying something away in his sample case. He is also observed wrapping a butcher knife and small saw in newspapers. And his wife with the health challenges is nowhere to be seen in the apartment. Lars is also spotted wearing the look a man has when he's afraid he's being watched.

The observer of The Bickersons and this curious activity is a photo-journalist Jeff (James Stewart) who is laid up with a broken leg due to an on-the-job accident. His insurance nurse (Thelma Ritter) warns him not to be so curious about and observant of the people in the various apartment buildings around the court, because her trouble detector is flashing yellow.

But Jeff is rather a dumb guy so he ignores the nurse’s sensible advice. We movie-goers can safely conclude Jeff is dumb because he refuses to marry Lisa (Grace Kelly) who is smart, sympathetic, considerate, funny, steely, and looks movie-star bodacious in anything she wears. Lisa wants Jeff to move from photo-journalism to fashion and portrait photography because she loves him so much she doesn’t want to see him hurt again and wants him in the Big Apple where she works in the fashion industry. Jeff calls her vision of their future “nonsense,” which hurts her deeply but he doesn’t seem to notice. He is also unsympathetic to the loneliness of a middle-aged woman neighbor and the artistic frustrations of young composer. Jeff is also merely amused when he observes a ballet dancer doing what Lisa calls a woman’s hardest job, “juggling wolves.” Jeff has no respect for people, no feeling for the crosses other people have to bear.

Because of his observations of Lars’ odd nocturnal activities, Jeff comes to think Lars knocked off his poor afflicted wife. Jeff persuades Lisa and his nurse that he’s on to something, like murder. Jeff is not so successful convincing his war buddy Doyle (Wendell Corey) who is a police detective. At least until the climax.

It’s really daring of Hitchcock to make a huge indoor set of apartment buildings around a court, but make us movie-goers feel we are watching a tiny little claustrophobic world consisting of Jeff’s apartment and Lars’ apartment. We see most of the action across the court but sigh with relief when we can see action a bit closer through Jeff’s telephone lens, called a “portable keyhole” by the nurse.

It is also daring to trust the audience that they will understand in mime a cranky disabled person (Irene Winston) making demands and needing constant care. As the couple mimes incessant quarrels, we can see Burr’s body language express impatience, frustration, and the contempt the hale and hearty feel for the weak and fragile. Burr of the heavyset stature has the physical bulk that’s communicative but his facial expressions tell volumes too. We agree with the nurse when she says that he gave “an expression such that he'd never get a loan at the bank.” We can also see Lars thinking, calculating, trying to control his anxiety about being caught and brought to account. And when he confronts Jeff, he croaks in a tight desperate voice, “You want money? I don’t have any money! Tell me what you want.”

Reviewers have said many times how great the acting is so I don’t need to do that again here since the focus here is on Brother Ray. It’s not illogical that this non-Mason part is the for which Raymond Burr is best remembered since Rear Window was probably the most popular picture he appeared in as the heavy. That he worked with other famous directors – Anthony Mann, Fritz Lang, Andre De Toth, Jacques Tourneur – is known nowadays only to buffs of film noir like us. One wonders if nowadays Burr would be remembered only by we happy few if William Hopper had won the part of Perry Mason or Fred MacMurray, who was offered the part of Our Favorite Lawyer, decided he didn’t want to deal with the grind of a TV series making 30 episodes a year.

As for the connection with the Perry Mason TV series, Wendell Corey appeared as the victim, an obnoxious oil man, in TCOT Unwelcome Well, one of the better episodes in the last season, which did not have many good outings.

Pre-Mason Raymond 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]
Pitfall (1948) [internet archive] [my review]
Walk a Crooked Mile (1948) [internet archive] [my review]
Raw Deal (1948) [internet archive] [my review]
Station West (1948) [my review]
Red Light (1949) [internet archive] [my review]
Abandoned (1949) [internet archive] [my review]
Borderline (1950) [internet archive] [my review]
Unmasked (1950) [internet archive] [my review]
The Whip Hand (1951) [internet archive] [my review]
Bride of the Gorilla (1951) [internet archive] [my review]
M (1951) [internet archive] [my review]
His Kind of Woman (1951) [internet archive] [my review]                
FBI Girl (Nov 1951) [internet archive] [my review]
Mara Maru (April 1952) [internet archive] [my review]
Horizons West (1952) [internet archive] [my review]
Blue Gardenia (1953) [internet archive] [my review]
Gorilla at Large (1954) [internet archive] [my review]
Rear Window (1954) [internet archive] [my review]