Perry Mason 182: TCOT Daring Decoy

Note: In this 1957 mystery, an elevator operator is nose-deep in a twenty-five-cent novel titled No Smog Tomorrow. Which tells you two things - first, Los Angeles was already choking on smog in the Eisenhower era, and second, you could buy an entire novel for less than the price of a cup of coffee today. Twenty-five cents! You can’t even get a parking meter to smile for that. Meanwhile, Mason has upgraded his fuel. No more bourbon or rye - he’s drinking Scotch with soda now. Was rye seen as a Depression-era drink, or was scotch just a sign that even Perry needs something rich and peaty to wash down the taste of other people’s troubles?

The Case of the Daring Decoy – Erle Stanley Gardner

Jerry Conway was thirty-five, handsome in a way that made secretaries blush and competitors sharpen their knives. He had oil under his fingernails and ambition in his bloodstream. What he didn’t have was time. Gifford Farrell, ex-employee turned Judas, was mounting a proxy fight to pry Conway’s company from his grip. Farrell had the moustache for villainy and the charm to make it stick.

Then came The Woman. There’s always a woman, isn’t there? She telephoned with promises of salvation wrapped in secrecy. If Jerry wanted her information, he’d have to play her game - switch cabs, dodge shadows, and meet her in a hotel that smelled of old wallpaper and older sins. He opened the door expecting answers and found a different woman, wearing nothing but underwear, a mudpack, and a revolver. Hubba, as they used to say. Hubba.

The gun coughed once before Jerry wrestled it away. He left with the weapon and a sense that the floor beneath him had tilted. Later, Perry Mason and Paul Drake walked into the same room and found another woman - beautiful, lifeless, and punctuated by a bullet from Jerry’s gun. The frame was perfect, like a picture in a gilt frame, except for the blood.

From there, the story spirals. Two women, one dead, one vanished. Two guns - or is it one?

A room-service tray with peas that matter more than they should. A mudpack that hides more than pores. Mason moves through it all with his usual calm, though even he cracks a joke or two. There’s comedy here, brittle and bright, and a flicker of romance that feels like a match struck in a dark room.

Hamilton Burger circles like a shark that smells blood and ethics. He wants Jerry for murder and Mason for accessory. Mason, gallant as ever, saves his sharpest thrust for a courtroom scene where he springs a trap so elegant it could hang in a museum. Della Street appears briefly, but when she does, it’s a humdinger - a moment that reminds you why Perry fights so hard.

In the end, the plot runs as smooth as a just-tuned engine. You might even guess the killer if you’re alert, though Gardner would smile at your confidence. Because in this world, motives are murky, masks slip, and the truth - when it comes - is just another stranger in a hotel room.

 

 

Matinee Musings: Ruth Chatterton’s Beauty

Note: I’m old so I take it for granted that beauty, physical characteristics, and charisma are legitimate objects of analysis. Film is a visual medium. Faces, bodies, and presence are part of meaning as well as the reason actors and actresses got hired. I note that some modern bloggers – i.e. whose parents were still wearing three-cornered pants when I was content watching* Casablanca and My Favorite Wife as a teenager - often avoid that territory entirely because, I suspect, they associate talking about looks with objectification. 

She Doesn’t Pose - She Decides: My Late Appreciation of Ruth Chatterton

When I was younger - young enough to think youth itself a credential - I used to admire Ann Sheridan and Ida Lupino for their looks. That was the word for it then: looks. It covered a lot of ground and excused a good deal of laziness. You saw a face, you approved of it, and that was that.

Time passes, and if you are lucky it takes some of your certainties with it. You begin to notice other things. In my case, it was Ruth Chatterton.

Chatterton came to pictures late, which is another way of saying she came prepared. In her late thirties, she had none of the damp innocence - think Evelyn Venable or Rochelle Hudson - the studios liked to photograph and sell. Chatterton looked as though she knew what she was doing and, worse for the illusion of romance, why she was doing it. In The Rich are Always with Us or Charming Sinners she doesn’t ask for your belief; she proceeds as if she already has it. The remarkable thing is that she usually does.

There are actresses who feel (naturalistic Myrna Loy), and actresses who show that they feel (passionate Bette Davis). Chatterton gives the impression of thinking. You can watch something occur to her. It is not a trick and it is not decoration. It is an activity. Her face does not simply register emotion; it arrives at it. That is where her beauty begins to assert itself, makes her character complicated and fascinating. The movie-goer is not looking at a set of features but at a process of blending thinking and feeling.

She’d been on the stage since she was a girl, and the stage is a hard teacher. It does not forgive vagueness. By the time she reached the camera she knew how to use her face the way a good speaker uses grammar. Early sound pictures needed that. The microphone was merciless. Stage-trained Chatterton could deliver a line properly.

If you line her up with her contemporaries, the differences are plain enough. Janet Gaynor had that breakable quality, as if a strong opinion might do her damage. Miriam Hopkins fluttered; she seemed to be in a state of continual adjustment. Dolores del Río belonged to another climate altogether – the border ethereal maybe. Chatterton, by contrast, looks as though she has already made up her mind. The jaw is set, the gaze direct. She does not invite; she considers and concludes. It suited the Pre-Code moment, when a woman might be allowed to know something and act on it as though she were her own person, though the movie-goer yelled at her, begged her, to do something else, like not marry the worthless Jim in Sarah and Son. Yet she could turn, when required, and show hurt in a way that suggested not weakness but cost, as in Anybody's Woman and The Laughing Lady. There were men in the audience who wanted to comfort her, and others who suspected she would not thank them for it.

There is also the matter of stillness. Genuine poise is so rare as to be unexpected, but it’s a real strength. Chatterton can stand in a scene and let it come to her. She does not arrange herself for the camera; she occupies the space and obliges the camera to adjust. The effect is not dramatic in the usual sense. The tranquility is closer to authority, to presence, to excellence. Like the pause between two notes, it gives shape to what surrounds it.

All this is to say that her beauty does not begin or end with her features, which are good enough without being extraordinary. It lies in a combination of intelligence, control, and a certain independence of manner that refuses to apologize for itself. You are aware of a mind at work and of a will behind it. There were men in the audience who wanted to get her opinion on something (or anything), and others who suspected she would not tell them what they wanted to hear. 

I used to think beauty was something you could recognize at once and be done with. Chatterton suggests otherwise. She is beautiful in the way a well-made argument is convincing: you follow it, you wonder at it, you resist it even, and in the end you find you have been persuaded.

++++++++++

* On TV in Detroit from 1956 to 1983, Bill Kennedy hosted old movies weekdays with a dry, sardonic wit, for example, dismissing Ida Lupino’s epic courtroom meltdown in They Drive by Night as “pretty corny.” On a simple studio set, he introduced movies, ran contests and giveaways, chatted with viewers, and interviewed visiting stars - becoming a familiar, slightly irascible afternoon companion for local audiences.

Perry Mason 181: Ride the High Iron

Note: Raymond Burr loved to act, appearing in dozens of feature films between 1946 and 1957, of which many built him up as an icon of film noir. He typecast as the villain because his stoutness gave him a commanding menacing presence. Film historian Alain Silver concluded that Burr's most significant work in the genre is in ten films: Desperate (1947), Sleep, My Love (1948), Raw Deal (1948), Pitfall (1948), Abandoned (1949), Red Light (1949), M (1951), His Kind of Woman (1951), and The Blue Gardenia (1953).

Ride the High Iron
1956 / 1:09
Tagline: “Sure I'll Keep Your Name Out of the Papers, Baby...For a Price..”
[internet archive]

Raymond Burr dominates this low-budget melodrama with a performance that underscores controlled menace. His character’s worldview - dog-eat-dog, shaped by immigrant roots and a sense of perpetual scarcity - gives the film its sharpest edge. Burr embodies a man who believes success is fragile and must be seized with both fists, and that conviction radiates through every scene.

The movie’s real fascination lies in its blunt commentary on class and identity. It probes the uneasy tension between aspiration and authenticity, showing how the hunger to escape one’s origins can hollow out a sense of self. The contrast between Burr’s aggressive self-fashioning and the quiet dignity of working-class values becomes a cultural critique as much as a character study.

Though made for television, the film ambitiously tackles themes of social mobility, pride, and the corrosive effects of shame. Sally Forrest evokes Ida Lupino’s emotional intensity, and while Don Taylor never quite matches Burr’s ferocity, the trio’s dynamic underscores the film’s central question: what does it cost to reinvent yourself - and is the price ever worth paying?

The Nones of The Thirties: Hitch Hike Lady

Note: In City Limits (1934) two homeless guys teach a tycoon to enjoy life. In Among the Missing (1934) a little old lady turns a front into a home. In The Fall Guy (1930) a sorely-tried woman supports both her teenager of a husband and her impossible brother with a loyalty that borders on sainthood. Midnight Mary (1933) is a fast, economical crime melodrama with a tough shell but a tender center – the heroine’s longing for a better life and real connection gives the film its emotional weight. This is another little movie of the time, with a big soul.

Hitch Hike Lady
1935 / 1:16
Tagline: “Highway hilarity that will tie up titter traffic!”
[internet archive]

This modest Depression-era comedy-drama offers more than its Poverty Row pedigree might suggest. It’s a tale of unexpected friendship and the quiet dignity of an older woman determined to find her son - and peace of mind - on the other side of the world.

Alison Skipworth, in a performance that is both sturdy and touching, plays Mrs. Amelia Blake, a British mother who believes her son is thriving as an orange farmer in California. In truth, he’s serving time in San Quentin, but the film wisely delays that revelation, allowing us to see Mrs. Blake not as a victim of deception, but as a woman of hope and grit.

The story unfolds with a series of misadventures that feel both comic and poignant. Mrs. Blake’s journey from Kent to California is marked by hardship and humanity. Her bond with Judy (Mae Clarke), a young woman adrift in the economic whirlpools of the 1930s, is the emotional core of the film. Their shared struggles - hunger, exhaustion, and the indignities of hitchhiking - forge a friendship that feels sincere.

James Ellison provides romantic interest as Jimmy, a trailer salesman with a heart, and Arthur Treacher and Warren Hymer add comic relief as con men with more affability than menace. The ensemble is surprisingly effective, and the film’s tone - while occasionally veering into melodrama - remains grounded in character.

Mrs. Blake: My son has an orange ranch in California. I wonder if you've heard of it.
Mortimer: Really? What does your son call his estate?
Mrs. Blake: Rancho San Quentin. I see you have heard of it.
Cluck: Heard of it? Why lady...
Mortimer (poking Cluck to shut up): Of course we've heard of it. It's one of the most arresting places in America. Not only is the fruit of California golden, Cluck my knave, but so is silence.
Mrs. Blake: Oh, let him tell me about it.
Mortimer: No, no. He's not very poetic. I don't think he'd do it justice.
Cluck: Aw, you see, when it comes to talkin', I'm almost a dummy. 

Mortimer (as only an Englishman could say it): Yeah.

In one episode, the trailer unhitches from its coupling and ends up in the camp of large band of harvesters. The itinerant field workers immediately want to help Mrs. Blake and the two rogues by feeding them and making sure they aren’t hurt. The kindness of the salt of the earth was a strong theme in the Thirties; perhaps we Americans wanted to reassure ourselves that WWI, the rowdy Twenties, and the Depression didn’t turn us into complete monsters that had forgotten basic rules like “help others in trouble.”

The episode ends up with Mrs. Blake preventing vigilante justice from tar and feathering the two rascals for which they feel grateful enough to decide they owe her something. It’s weird but the juxtaposition of the frightening reality of mob violence and the cultural values of communal support and reciprocity seems quintessentially American.

Alison Skipworth was often cast as a battleaxe or harridan but here she is a nice old lady with a big soul. Arthur Treacher is an amusing blowhard with a pompous vocabulary and makes a hilarious contrast with inarticulate Warren Hymer who plays the lug-thug-mug in such a way that the movie-goer does not get short of breath (I’m looking at you, Leo Gorcey). James Ellison and Mae Clarke make an attractive couple. Like I always say, Mae Clarke deserves a lot better than to be remembered only for that nasty grapefruit scene. In this she is a spark of life, smart, sassy, delightful, resilient.

Yes, the plot is thin and the pacing uneven, but the film’s feeling is in the right place. It’s a story about finding connection in unlikely places, and about the strength of women who refuse to be defined by their circumstances. For viewers willing to look past its modest production values, this is a warm movie with a surprising amount of soul.

 

The Kalends of The Thirties: The Rich Are Always with Us

Note: I think about names too much so I pondered the origin of the female name Malbro. I thought at first it was a compromise of mom’s Mallory and pop’s Brooke. But neither name was popular in the early 20^th century. Then, I thought it’s the cigarette, marketed to women in the late Twenties as a brand “Mild as May.” But given the character was born in 1910 the cigarette brand didn’t yet exist. Finally, the obvious struck me: Malbro is from Utah. But I had to reject that too because it lacks the final /ee/ sound and is not double-barreled as in Jersey Jo or Pixley Wren. So I’m at a loss.

The Rich Are Always with Us
1932 / 1:11
Tagline: “A daring story of reckless love and bankrupt morals”

I’d seen Ruth Chatterton only in the superb Dodsworth with Walter Huston, so I was curious to revisit her in The Rich Are Always with Us (1932), a glossy soap opera about wealthy New Yorkers who, lacking money worries, invent emotional ones.

Carolyn (Chatterton) is a devoted wife and one of the richest women in the city. After ten childless years of marriage, she still loves her husband Greg (John Miljan), a stockbroker diminished by the crash. His insecurity makes Carolyn mother him through his professional woes. Yet Greg, despite relying on her, imagines he loves Alyson (Adrienne Dore), a younger woman whose immaturity and jealousy suggest she enjoys the idea of hurting Carolyn. Everyone admires Carolyn as “a real lady,” a status Alyson covets but knows she’ll never achieve.

Enter Julian (George Brent), a foreign correspondent and novelist who has long loved Carolyn. She flirts lightly but resists him, fearing passion will topple her better angels: “You know perfectly well I can’t think when I’m in your arms.” Her loyalty to Greg keeps her dithering.

For comic relief, there’s 24-year-old Bette Davis as Malbro, a flighty socialite chasing Julian. Carolyn offers wry advice: “Pursue him to the point where he either proposes to you or shoots you. If he shoots you, your troubles are over. If he proposes, they’re just beginning.”

Malbro is an appealing mix of goofy teenage girl and determined adult woman. Nobody can predict if the next thing she says will be from the girl-savage or from the worldly-wise woman. Julian observes the world will be blessed the day Malbro learns to think before she speaks. As the comic relief, she gets the best lines. Here, she is horning in on the extension when Carolyn calls Julian from Paris:

Malbro: Far from loving Julian, I'm beginning to despise him. He's all flabby from not exercising and drinking too much. He's been running around with strange women.
Julian: She's a liar, darling! I've been to two parties in a month.
Malbro: I think he stays at home, smoking opium.
[laughs]
Malbro: He looks it anyhow!

The film plays like an inkblot test. Malbro may seem a sassy delight or a brat; Alyson, either immature or spiteful; Carolyn, either noble or indecisive. Brent is convincing as a patient, grown-up man, avoiding the heaviness typical of male leads of the era. Chatterton shines as a complex woman torn between duty and desire - dignified yet witty, with flashes of vulnerability.

With regard to the script, sometimes yesterday’s sophistication is today’s  puzzle. Could this be a reference to the modernist response to WWI, the loss of complacent certainty in the old pieties? Given Julian was born in 1900, he may have had dark thoughts in the aftermath of Verdun and the Somme ….

Carolyn: “Haven’t you got any morals at all?”
Julian: “Well, they began to ache when I was 16 so I had them pulled out.”

Visually, the film is a feast. The clothes are beautiful as are the cars (one might be an amazing 1933 Auburn 12-165). As for the sets, some drawing rooms look large enough to stable more than a couple of racehorses. It’s a portrait of privilege, but beneath the gloss lurks a question about shifting values in a world still reeling from war and economic collapse.

Stoic Week 2026 #7

Note: This week is Stoic Week 2026, the annual exercise in discovering whether inner peace can survive contact with social media. Enrollment is free, which immediately distinguishes it from most routes to self-improvement. Having lost my teaching outlet when the pandemic throttled the program, I now possess an excess of pedagogical energy. Stoic Week provides a useful release valve. Otherwise, I’ll end up sitting on a boulder in the middle of campus dispensing life advice like a Greek oracle that has seen too many Charlie Chan movies. “Man who read comments section voluntarily enters mosquito swamp.”

If Bad Girl teaches that strength requires vulnerability, Flaming Gold that wisdom requires questioning first impressions, The Sins ofthe Children that serenity requires focus on what is up to you, Parole Girl that character can be rebuilt through habit, and Undertow that happiness requires self-knowledge, then The Fall Guy teaches that adversity itself is seldom the real danger. The real danger is abandoning honesty and sound judgment in an effort to escape adversity. Face bad news immediately. Problems grow larger when procrastination based on fear delays action. 

The Fall Guy (1930): A Stoic Reading

The Fall Guy belongs to that fascinating group of early talkies made when the Depression had settled in to become a harsh daily reality. Jobs vanish, debts multiply, and small lapses in judgment snowball into major problems. From a Stoic perspective, the film is a reminder that the hardship of economic downturns presents serious risks but the genuine danger lies in how we respond to unemployment and money worries.

Johnny Quinlan (Jack Mulhall), a drugstore clerk, loses his job through carelessness and then makes things worse by concealing the truth from his wife, Bertha (Mae Clarke). Like many husbands under pressure, Johnny fears his wife's disappointment, dismay, anger, and worry so much that he chooses avoidance instead. The Stoics regarded this as a classic mistake. Bad news is manageable; it’s not fair to a spouse that they are not told what’s going on.

Desperate for money, Johnny accepts help from bootlegger Nifty Herman. The loan quickly becomes a leash. Everyone warns Johnny to keep his distance, but he convinces himself that necessity excuses poor judgment. Epictetus would have recognized the pattern immediately: one compromise leads to another until a man finds himself carrying burdens he neither understands nor controls. The title is less about bad luck than about the consequences of surrendering one's judgment 

Living with the Quinlans is Bert's brother Danny, played by the terrific Ned Sparks. Danny is unemployed too, but unlike Johnny he has elevated joblessness into something resembling a profession. He spends his days torturing a saxophone with the same miserable tune, creating an accidental soundtrack for Depression life: the same worries repeated endlessly with no improvement in technique.

Like Jason Compson, Sparks is hilarious as a man whose pessimism has ripened into a lifestyle choice. Danny complains about everything, contributes almost nothing, and seems permanently offended that the universe continues to expect effort from him. One begins to suspect that the family's most effective austerity measure would be leaving him on the nearest curb with his saxophone.

Yet the film remains valuable as social history. Bert supports both her irresponsible husband and her impossible brother with a loyalty that borders on sainthood. Meanwhile, despite financial desperation, almost nobody seriously considers the possibility of her seeking work. Economic collapse may shake society, but gender expectations remain remarkably durable.

The picture also captures a moment when Prohibition had lost much of its moral authority. Nobody seems especially troubled that Nifty sells liquor. The concern is practical rather than ethical. Speakeasies attract trouble, federal agents, and occasionally funerals.

As cinema, The Fall Guy is often stiff and unmistakably early-talkie. But its Stoic lesson remains relevant: unemployment, poverty, and misfortune may be beyond our control, yet honesty, judgment, and self-command are not. Johnny's downfall comes less from losing his job than from refusing to face reality directly.

The movie may be modest entertainment, but it preserves a timeless truth. Hard times test character, and avoiding the truth generally creates more suffering than the truth itself. Even when the film creaks, that lesson still lands.

European Reading Challenge #10

I read this for the European Reading Challenge 2026.

The Railway Children – E. Nesbit

A nice story for hardcore readers like us and children, though hard-boiled American kids may be impatient with English niceness and period corniness The didactic intent is more apparent here than in Nesbit’s other stories such as The Phoenix and the Carpet or its prequel The Five Children and It.

First published in 1906 and set in 1905 in rural England, the novel tells the story of Roberta (Bobbie), Phyllis and Peter, three siblings, who suddenly find themselves forced to move out of a pretty London suburb after the mysterious departure of their father one terrible night.

This change from suburb to country is experienced by the siblings as a real adventure, because arriving at Three Chimneys, they find themselves for the first time very close to the train station. The Railway infrastructure - its bridges, carriages, tunnels and signal sheds  - fascinates the three children. Everything to do with trains comes to life in the minds and reality of the three protagonists, who are brought into contact with a varied collection of people – railway workers, passengers, doctors, porters, schoolboys and all sorts of people in trades.

The move means becoming poor, which their mother does her best to make neither the kids nor other people notice. They don’t become poor in the sense that they are precariously on the edge of the abyss: they always have enough to eat, even if they have to be very careful about “either butter or jam, never both butter and jam.” Like E. Nesbit herself, the brave noble mother of Bobbie, Peter and Phyllis has to write stories for weekly magazines and annuals to get food on the table and pay the cook and maid.

Edith Nesbit must have had a wonderful mind to write the way she wrote. Her style is vivid, spontaneous, fresh and extremely fluent. I especially appreciated the metaphors that enrich the descriptions.

    They all climbed on to the top of the fence, and then suddenly there was a rumbling sound that made them look along the line to the right, where the dark mouth of a tunnel opened itself in the face of a rocky cliff; next moment a train had rushed out of the tunnel with a shriek and a snort, and had slid noisily past them. They felt the rush of its passing, and the pebbles on the line jumped and rattled under it as it went by.

    “Oh!” said Roberta, drawing a long breath; “it was like a great dragon tearing by. Did you feel it fan us with its hot wings?”

    “I suppose a dragon’s lair might look very like that tunnel from the outside,” said Phyllis.

As in the other books, the author will digress to confide in the reader. She’ll bust through that fourth wall, asking us unsociable and end-gaining post-moderns to see where our heroes Roberta, Phillys and Peter are coming from, as they worry so deeply about not hurting those who are close, about doing everyone a loving-kindness, without keeping score and without becoming prigs about it.

The happy ending will make most readers misty but just as touching is the Edwardian optimism that the world really is getting better, richer, healthier. Kind of melancholy too, our knowing that born in 1895 Peter is just the age in 1915/16 to be one of thousands of officers and squaddies whose life expectancy was about a year and a half in the trenches.

Happy Halloween

Dead on Arrival: A Field Guide to Teenage Death Songs

Teen tragedy records were essentially ancient folk ballads dressed in the clothing of postwar youth culture. Where earlier ballads told of drowned maidens, dead soldiers, and ill-fated lovers, the records of the early 1960s substituted hot rods, railroad crossings, motorcycles, and high-school romance. They transformed traditional narratives of youthful death into a commercial pop genre aimed directly at teenagers.

Like ghost stories, urban legends, and cautionary tales, teenage death songs allowed young listeners to rehearse fears about love, separation, sex, and mortality within the safe confines of a three-minute pop record. Their melodrama often seems excessive today, but it reflected genuine anxieties surrounding a generation experiencing unprecedented freedom, mobility, and risk of automobile fatalities.

Here are the classics:

Black Denim Trousers and Motorcycle Boots – The Cheers (1955)

Lieber and Stoller play the genre for laughs before it was even a genre by telling the story of a motorcycle rebel who dies in a high-speed crash, to the dismay of his ignored GF inevitably named Mary Lou.

Endless Sleep – Jody Reynolds (1958)

This rockabilly song is about a girl who walks into the ocean after a lovers' quarrel. A deep Southern darkness hangs over it, drawn from the same abyss that Dock Boggs had the courage to gaze into and name.

Teen Angel – Mark Dinning (1960)

Goosebumps for sure as a love-struck girl runs back onto railroad tracks to retrieve a ring and learns, in the most dramatic way possible, that jewelry is replaceable. Once, I saw police photographs of a man struck by a train. It is an image that has haunted me ever since, one I would give much to unsee.

Tell Laura I Love Her – Ray Peterson (1960)

It doesn’t get more sentimental than this tale of a boy who enters a stock-car race to win money for an engagement ring and dies in a fiery crash. I seem to recall dimly this song was popular when The Twist was a hit, which was the song that got me interested in listening to the radio all the time, to my parents’ consternation.

Laurie (Strange Things Happen) – Dickey Lee (1965)
Patches – Dickey Lee (1962)

Lee took multiple stabs in the genre. In Laurie, the somewhat awkward lyrics get across a story in which a boy dates a girl who turns out to have died a year earlier. Patches is much more effective lyrically; I still get torn up by the lines “pretty Patches there watchin' the door” and “floating face down in that dirty old river.” This song should not be confused with the sad inspiring song Patches with the immortal lines “Then one day a strong rain came | And washed all the crops away.”

Ebony Eyes – The Everly Brothers (1961)

Count on the Irish to be restrained but devastating in their treatment of a plane crash that separates lovers. That this great song is much less remembered than the inferior Wake Up Little Suzy makes me despise popular taste. In case you've not noticed, I’ve eaten for breakfast disdain for popularity - my own or anybody else's - since I was about ten.

Leader of the Pack – The Shangri-Las (1964)

I was eight when one of the era's greatest records was released. My friends and I thought the motorcycle crash that followed the lovers' rebellion against her parents was a hoot. We laughed at the doomed devotion of "Look out! Look out! Look out!" as children often do, with the effortless cruelty of the innocent. Only later did I recognize the shadow moving beneath the story: youth rushing headlong toward fate, love colliding with death on a dark stretch of road. Lawsy, what little monsters we were.

Johnny Remember Me – John Leyton (1961)

A dead girl's ghost calls to her lover but the realistic singer - an phlegmatic Englishman probably - figures “Well some day I guess I'll find myself another little girl To take the place of my true love.” Corny and eerie at the same time, which doesn’t happen very often.

Last Kiss - J. Frank Wilson & the Cavaliers 1964

The record's plainspoken sincerity is exactly why it works. No ghosts, no stock-car races, no doomed motorcycle rebels. Just young love, bad luck, and one of pop music's most efficient emotional sucker punches. Even listeners who spend most of the song rolling their eyes may find themselves surprisingly misty-eyed by “… she smiled and said Hold me darling for a little while.”

These form My Best Of List of teen tragedy records. They're melodramatic, earnest, and often unintentionally funny in our 2026, but they're also strangely moving. It seems such a long time ago, heartless kids snickering at ridiculous teenagers sniffling over 45-rpm records about train wrecks, car crashes, and doomed romances.

Stoic Week 2026 #6

Note: This week is Stoic Week 2026, a free online program devoted to the radical proposition that not every irritation requires a passionate reaction. Since my teaching career was collateral damage in the pandemic era, D. H. Lawrence’s “passion of instruction” remains sadly unemployed. If left unchecked, it may force me into the quad where I’ll offer unsolicited lectures under a cardboard sign reading, “Ask me about the Royal Order of Adjectives.”

A life that suits someone else may not suit you. Know your nature before making choices that shape your future. If Bad Girl teaches that strength requires vulnerability, Flaming Gold that wisdom requires questioning first impressions, The Sins of the Children that tranquility requires letting go what is not up to you, and Parole Girl that character can be rebuilt through habit, then Undertow teaches that happiness depends on honest self-knowledge. Many short-lived marriages begin when people fall in love with an idealized version of themselves or the SO rather than the person they actually are.

Undertow (1930): A Stoic Reading

"Know thyself" is the lesson at the heart of Undertow , a Pre-Code melodrama that understands how badly a life can go wrong when people mistake fantasy for self-knowledge.

The film opens with lifeguard Paul (Johnny Mack Brown) rescuing a child and winning the admiration of Sally (Mary Nolan), a city woman who claims she longs for the simplicity of life in a remote lighthouse. Paul, raised on the Georgia coast, believes her. Sally believes herself. Both are mistaken.

Three years later, they are married with a daughter and living in isolation. Paul is content because the lighthouse suits his nature. Sally is miserable. The endless waves, wind, and solitude that once seemed romantic now feel like imprisonment. She craves stimulation, company, and city life. What she imagined she wanted and what she actually needed turn out to be very different things.

From a Stoic perspective, Sally's mistake is not marrying Paul but failing to understand herself beforehand. Epictetus repeatedly warned against pursuing an imagined good without examining whether it truly fits one's nature. Sally falls in love with an idea: the noble lighthouse keeper, the lonely coast, the escape from crowds. She never asks whether she is actually suited for such a life.

Paul has his own blind spot. Because solitude comforts him, he cannot understand why it torments his wife. His failure is not cruelty but a lack of perception. He assumes that what brings him peace should bring peace to everyone. Like many Stoic cautionary examples, both husband and wife suffer from false judgments about reality.

The film becomes a study of what happens when people resist reality rather than seeing it clearly. Sally grows resentful and restless. Paul remains bewildered. Meanwhile, her rejected former fiancé Jim Payne quietly nurtures a grudge and uses his influence to prolong their unhappiness. Everyone becomes trapped by emotions they seem unable to examine head on.

The melodrama eventually escalates into blindness, revenge, and romantic conflict, with the neglected three-year-old child forgotten by both the characters and the screenplay. Yet beneath the overheated plot lies an interesting psychological insight. Sally is not wicked. She is self-deceived.

Mary Nolan gives the film's strongest performance, portraying a woman slowly realizing that she has built her life around a profound misunderstanding of her own temperament. The lighthouse itself becomes a symbol of that error: what once looked like freedom becomes a prison because it was chosen without self-knowledge.

The Stoic lesson is simple but enduring. Happiness depends not on romantic dreams or dramatic escapes but on understanding one's nature and living in accordance with it. Had Sally known herself, she would never have chosen a life she was fundamentally incapable of enjoying.

The tragedy of Undertow is not that Sally married the wrong man. It's that she never truly knew herself before making one of the most important decisions of her life.

Stoic Week 2026 #5

Note: This week is Stoic Week 2026, an annual opportunity to spend seven days practicing equanimity while the world does everything in its power to make that difficult. It’s online, free, and lacks the unpleasant side effects associated with retail therapy. As I no longer teach, the instructional impulse has become a hungry ghost searching for a body. Without Stoic Week, I risk becoming one of those campus eccentrics who corners strangers and begins sentences with, “Trousers, tongs, bangs – tell me more nouns that exist only in the plural form.”

If Bad Girl teaches that courage requires vulnerability, Flaming Gold that wisdom requires examining impressions, and The Sins of the Children that peace of mind requires distinguishing what is up to us and what is not, then Parole Girl teaches that virtue is a skill. People become better not through wishes, reading, or atonement alone, but through the difficult daily work of making better choices until those choices become second nature. The Fight Club reference at the end actually fits the Stoic point nicely: real moral improvement is usually quiet, incremental, and unglamorous. The work happens internally, one choice at a time, long before anyone notices the result.

Parole Girl (1933): A Stoic Reading

This movie sounds like a crime melodrama but seen through a modern Stoic lens, Parole Girl is story about moral reform. Its central question is one that would have interested Epictetus: can someone whose habits have been shaped by bad choices become a better person through reasoned action and self-discipline?

Sylvia Day (Mae Clarke) begins as a participant in fraud, but Stoicism distinguishes between a person's mistakes and their character. Her wrongdoing stems from misplaced loyalty to Tony Grattan, a con man who once helped her family. Like many of Mae Clarke heroines, Sylvia's problem is not a lack of virtue but virtue misdirected. Loyalty without judgment becomes a vice.

Even her prison scheme to secure parole reveals this conflict. The deception is real, yet so is her desire for respectability. Likewise, her hostility toward insurance investigator Joe Smith grows from wounded pride and resentment at being permanently defined by past mistakes. She feels condemned by appearances rather than judged by who she might become.

As the story unfolds, the real struggle becomes internal. Sylvia enters Joe's life intending manipulation, but continual exposure to decency slowly alters her own conduct. The Stoics believed character is formed through repeated choices. We become honest by acting honestly, courageous by practicing courage, and just by making fair decisions. Ironically, Sylvia develops these habits while merely pretending to be an honest wife. What begins as performance gradually becomes reality.

This transformation elevates the film above its often implausible plotting. When Sylvia refuses to join Jeanie Vance's blackmail scheme, she demonstrates something she lacked at the outset: moral discernment. No longer choosing between self-interest and loyalty, she chooses between right and wrong. 

One of the film's strengths is its refusal to treat redemption as a sudden conversion. Sylvia does not become good because she falls in love. Rather, love becomes possible because she changes her character. The ending suggests not rescue through romance but the achievement of self-respect through better judgment.

Much of the film's success rests on Mae Clarke. With her severe haircut and tough demeanor, she projects both resilience and vulnerability. She never asks audiences to excuse Sylvia's conduct, but she encourages them to understand it. Clarke captures a deeply Stoic insight: people should not be reduced to their worst actions.

Director Edward F. Cline handles the material with surprising economy and toughness. Though the plot depends on coincidences, the emotional logic remains convincing because the focus stays on character rather than mechanics. Ralph Bellamy also benefits from a role more complex than the agreeable romantics he later specialized in.

Ultimately, Parole Girl understands a truth central to Stoicism: human beings are works in progress. Bad choices can damage character, but better choices can repair it. Redemption is neither automatic nor impossible. It is the gradual work of making actions consistent with principles until virtue becomes habit and self-respect follows. Like doing mindfulness meditation, however, this kind of inner work is not something you talk about unless your interlocutor also belongs to a fight club.

Stoic Week 2026 #4

Note: This week is Stoic Week 2026, the yearly invitation to test whether your troubles shrink when viewed from the perspective of eternity. It’s free, online, and costs substantially less than angrily refreshing the news every fifteen minutes. Since I no longer have students upon whom to inflict learning points, I need somewhere to redirect what D. H. Lawrence called “the passion of instruction” before campus security finds me conducting impromptu seminars on collective nouns.

The Stoics were Socratics so they urged “Moderation in all things.” Managing our unhelpful thoughts and feelings is crucial if we want to experience serenity and deal with the inevitable sufferings of life. This is also crucial because our unhelpful cognitive silliness and craziness will literally break our hearts.

The Influence of the Mind on the Body (1908)

Paul Dubois The Influence of the Mind on the Body is one of the earliest and most influential attempts to explain how thoughts, emotions, and beliefs affect physical health. Writing as a Swiss neurologist and psychiatrist in 1908, Dubois challenged the prevailing medical view that mind and body operated as separate realms. His central argument was simple but far-reaching: many physical symptoms are shaped, intensified, or sustained by patterns of thought, particularly fear, anxiety, and suggestion.

Viewed today, the book reads almost like a bridge between medicine and Stoicism.

Dubois observed that patients frequently worsen their suffering by dwelling on symptoms or interpreting ordinary bodily sensations as signs of catastrophe. Fear creates vigilance, vigilance creates anxiety, and anxiety amplifies physical discomfort. He argued that both external suggestion, from physicians, family, and society, and internal suggestion, from one's own worries and expectations, can have profound effects on health. As a result, treatment should address not only disease but also the patient's beliefs about disease.

His preferred method, sometimes called "moral therapy," relied less on drugs than on conversation, education, and the correction of harmful thought patterns. The physician's task was to help patients replace fear with understanding and uncertainty with rational judgment. In essence, Dubois sought to teach patients how to govern their own minds.

Modern science has largely vindicated his intuition. While Dubois lacked the language of modern neuroscience, endocrinology, and immunology, contemporary research confirms that mental and physical processes are deeply interconnected. Chronic stress activates the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, elevating cortisol levels and contributing to inflammation, cardiovascular disease, digestive disorders, and metabolic dysfunction. What Dubois called worry and anxiety are now understood as physiological events that affect the entire body.

His insights regarding expectation have also been remarkably durable. The placebo effect demonstrates that belief can produce measurable changes in pain perception, brain chemistry, and physical functioning. Neuroimaging studies reveal that expectations alter activity in specific brain networks, lending scientific support to Dubois's claim that suggestion can create genuine bodily effects.

Perhaps the modern discipline most closely aligned with Dubois is cognitive behavioral therapy. Like CBT, his approach focused on identifying distorted beliefs, challenging unhelpful assumptions, and cultivating more balanced interpretations of experience. Although less systematic than contemporary psychotherapy, Dubois anticipated many of its central principles decades before the field formally emerged.

The connection to Stoicism is equally striking. Epictetus taught that people are disturbed not by events themselves but by their judgments about those events. Dubois repeatedly arrives at a similar conclusion. Patients often suffer not only from symptoms but from the fear, interpretations, and expectations attached to those symptoms. In both systems, the path toward relief begins with examining one's judgments.

Stoicism and Dubois share the conviction that tranquility depends upon distinguishing between what is and what we imagine. Both emphasize rational self-examination, disciplined attention to thought, and resistance to catastrophic thinking. A Stoic confronting illness seeks to judge symptoms accurately rather than emotionally. Dubois encouraged precisely the same habit. His efforts to teach patients calm interpretation, rather than fearful speculation, closely resemble Stoic exercises in cognitive reframing.

Not surprisingly, Dubois even prescribed reading Seneca* to some patients. He recognized that Stoic philosophy offered practical tools for reducing anxiety and restoring perspective. Practices such as monitoring internal dialogue, accepting uncertainty, and focusing on what lies within one's control complement his therapeutic methods almost perfectly.

There are differences. The Stoics pursued virtue and inner freedom as the highest goals of life, while Dubois was primarily interested in improving health and reducing suffering. Yet both arrive at a shared insight: the mind is an active participant in shaping experience and that shaping has an effect on health and well-being.

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* Judgmentex® – Corrects errors in thinking before they become errors in living. Equanimitol® – Restores calm by lowering the body's exposure to needless alarm. Ask your philosopher whether Seneca is right for you. Do not read Seneca if you are allergic to personal responsibility. 

Stoic Week 2026 #3

Note: This week is Stoic Week 2026, a free online experiment in voluntary sanity. Participants spend seven days trying to respond to life like Marcus Aurelius instead of a raccoon trapped in a dumpster. Since I no longer teach, thanks to the pandemic’s efficient pruning of my former program, the urge to explain things must find an outlet or I’ll be stationed outside the Student Union answering questions about the subjunctive in English nobody asked.

Unlike Bad Girl (fear of vulnerability) or Flaming Gold (failure to examine judgments), The Sins of the Children is about the Stoic Archer. That is, you can control how you release the arrow, but you can’t control the wind or a moving target. Adolf spends his life doing what he believes a father should do: sacrificing comfort, money, and opportunity for his children. His suffering arises not from these sacrifices themselves but from his expectation that they will be repaid with gratitude and loyalty. The children’s choices remain outside his control. The film suggests that peace comes only when Adolf learns that virtue is its own reward. A parent's task is to act well, not to expect appreciation, success, or obedience from those he loves.

A Stoic Reading of The Sins of the Children (1930)

One of the curiosities of this early talkie is that it functions as an extended meditation on what is and is not within our control. Adolf Wagenkampf is offered the possibility of greater wealth, security, and social advancement. Then tuberculosis arrives. Faced with a choice between expanding his fortune and caring for a sick child, he chooses the child. He sends his son to a TB sanitarium, works steadily as a barber, and commits his resources not to accumulation but to the duties immediately before him: raising, educating, protecting, and rescuing his children.

From a Stoic perspective, Adolf's mistake is that he assumes that good actions entitle him to good outcomes. In fact, the Three Sisters of Fate sniff at entitlement. Nobody can will good outcomes into being.

Like many parents, he believes virtue compounds like interest. Invest enough love, attention, and self-denial and one can reasonably expect gratitude, loyalty, and sound judgment in return. Yet the Stoics would remind us that another person's character is never our possession. We govern our own choices, not the choices of others. Adolf can provide examples; he cannot provide virtue. He can nurture judgment; he cannot guarantee it.

The film patiently demonstrates this lesson. One son rises socially by distancing himself from the family that enabled his success. Another pursues impractical ambitions. His daughter, despite a solid moral upbringing, falls under the spell of Robert Montgomery's charming aristocrat. None of these outcomes are the direct product of Adolf's intentions, and that is precisely the point. Parents are responsible for their efforts, not their harvest.

What begins as family melodrama gradually reveals itself as a study in attachment. Adolf's suffering comes less from what his children do than from what he expects them to do. He wants acknowledgment. He wants recognition. He wants proof that his sacrifices mattered. The Stoics would classify all of these as preferred indifferents, but indifferents not up to us nonetheless. Once our peace of mind depends upon them, we place our tranquility in the hands of others.

This is why Adolf is simultaneously a failure by one standard and a success by another. He is a poor capitalist and model father because he repeatedly chooses relationships over profit, duty over opportunity, and conscience over advancement. Yet these are precisely the qualities that make him admirable. He acts according to what he judges to be right, regardless of the material return.

The movie The Sins of the Children belongs alongside Mildred Pierce, Imitation of Life, and Stella Dallas in the long cinematic tradition of parents discovering that devotion does not purchase gratitude. Modern psychology reaches a conclusion not far removed from Stoicism: children often come to experience parental sacrifice as a normal feature of life rather than a debt requiring repayment. The more successful they become, the easier it is to embrace the comforting fiction of self-sufficiency and the myth of the self-made that they did it their way.

Adolf's tragedy, then, is not that his children disappoint him. Lots of parents are disappointed sooner or later. His tragedy is that he bases his contentment on something that was never his to command. Only late in life does he approach the Stoic insight that our actions belong to us, but their reception does not. The value of sacrifice lies not in being thanked for it, but in having performed one's duty with integrity. Gratitude, if it arrives, is a bonus. Virtue was always its own reward.

Perry Mason 180: Gems from the Gritty Thirties

Note: In his early Perry Mason novels, Gardner’s experience as a lawyer shines through in clever courtroom twists and procedural detail. Many early tales - like TOCT Velvet Claws  - captivate with inventive plotting and dramatic revelations. These early Mason novels move rapidly, keeping readers engaged through a steady succession of legal dilemmas and high-stakes maneuvering.

Three Perry Mason Gems from the Gritty Thirties

The Case of the Howling Dog (1934)
Frequently cited as the strongest early Mason novel, its average reader rating (~4.06 Goodreads) is the highest of the 1930s titles. Praised for its clever mystery - centered on snappy plotting, it remains a standout in Gardner’s early run.

In Gardner’s fourth Perry Mason novel, the case starts not with murder but with a peculiar request. Arthur Cartright, a man suffering the fatigue, poor focus, and headaches of insomnia, wants to leave his estate to another man’s wife - and stop neighbor Clinton Foley’s dog from driving him mad with its nightly howls. Foley calls Cartright a lunatic and accuses him of spying on his household, including a Chinese cook who becomes a symbol of being seen but not understood.

Cartright sends Mason $10,000 to change his will. Soon, the dog is poisoned, Foley’s wife vanishes, and secrets pile up. Mason and Paul Drake dig in while police blunder - Detective Holcomb is arrogant, and DA investigator Pemberton spews racist slurs, claiming expertise on “Chinks.” Gardner gives the cook dialogue that reflects the pidgin speech he likely heard as a lawyer for Chinese and Mexican clients.

Mason plays his trademark no-limit game: planting stories, hiding witnesses, crafting fake confessions. He explains Americans crave drama, not dignity - so he turns the courtroom into theater. His justice isn’t blind; it’s pragmatic, empathetic, and fearless. He bends rules to protect the innocent, guided by lived wisdom, not academic theory.

The ending is open. Justice here is messy, the law a maze. Gardner offers more than a mystery - he meditates on identity, perception, and the fragile bridge of language. A man with binoculars, a poisoned dog, and a missing woman unravel a world - and remind us how hard it is to make sense of the noise.

The Case of the Perjured Parrot (1939)
One of the most highly rated early entries, earning an average Goodreads score of ~4.05. Critics and readers applaud its inventive premise - murder with a talking avian witness, highly sympathetic accused, and its tightly wound courtroom drama.

The fourteenth Perry Mason novel opens with Della ribbing Mason about paperwork - until Charles Sabin hires him to probe his father Fremont’s murder and block a greedy widow from grabbing the estate. Gardner adds backstory: Fremont, a rugged individualist, oddly obsessed with avoiding publicity, makes choices that lead to trouble.

Fremont is found shot in his mountain cabin, while his parrot shrieks, “Helen, put down that gun!” But which Helen - his wife Helen Watkins or librarian Helen Monteith? And why swap parrots? Gardner makes Helen Monteith’s Depression-era choices believable, hinting at the demoralization of long-term unemployment.

Mason muses on “fixed beliefs” and misread signs - a Stoic-style digression on calculation and judgment. Meanwhile, Gardner keeps the plot brisk, mixing will-law technicalities with sharp-elbowed characters like Mrs. Watkins Sabin. The finale swaps a courtroom for a coroner’s inquest, complete with bully Sgt. Holcomb and a satisfying twist.

The Case of the Counterfeit Eye (1935)
Strongly regarded, with a ~4.01 rating on Goodreads. Admired for its eerie atmosphere and sharp legal maneuvering over a stolen glass eye, it’s often singled out as one of Gardner’s more imaginative early mysteries.

Perry Mason’s day starts with Brunold barging in, claiming someone swiped his glass eye and swapped in a dime-store dud. He’s sure the real one will star in a crime scene -because in 1935, glass eyes are the new fingerprints.

Before Perry can finish his coffee, in waltz a young woman and her puffed-up brother. Said brother worked for Hartley Bassett, a businessman with all the charm of a tax audit, and got caught embezzling. Bassett wants his money yesterday; sis begs Mason for an installment plan. Mason agrees - because wrecking a life over youthful stupidity isn’t his style.

Bassett, however, is about as flexible as a brick. No deal. Then his wife corners Mason with a question straight out of pulp: “Can you run off with another man without committing bigamy?” Mason’s day is now officially sponsored by Chaos Inc. And then - surprise! -Bassett turns up dead, clutching a glass eye like it’s Exhibit A.

Fun fact: the 1960 TV version swapped the eye for a toupee. Apparently, mid-century America had a lower cringe threshold. Gardner keeps the energy high, tossing Mason into scrapes and letting him bend the law like a pretzel. Della nails it: “You’re half saint and half devil!”

Bonus milestone: this sixth Mason novel introduces Hamilton Burger, future courtroom nemesis - here still polite, before evolving into the guy who hates Mason’s guts.

The finale? A courtroom circus with Mason pulling stunts that look reckless until his logic lands like a mic drop. If you want psychological depth or social commentary, look elsewhere. If you want the Thirties tough as taxes and full of legal acrobatics, this one delivers.

Stoic Week 2026 #2

Note: This week is Stoic Week 2026, the annual event that encourages participants to “live like a Stoic for a week.” It’s online, completely free, and considerably less laborious than massaging insights from childhood torments into a memoir. Besides, now that I no longer teach (the pandemic having euthanized the program), D. H. Lawrence’s “passion of instruction” must be directed somewhere before I end up on campus wearing a sandwich board that reads: “FREE WISDOM. LIMITED WARRANTY.”

So this Pre-Code movie's basic lesson is wisdom begins when we stop reacting to appearances and start examining our judgments. The danger is being deceived by our own unexamined value judgements. If yesterday's Bad Girl argues that smooth human relations come from honest vulnerability, Flaming Gold argues that Stoic justice comes from intellectual humility: the willingness to say, "I may be wrong about this person," and then look again.

A Stoic Reading of Flaming Gold (1933)

The Pre-Code movie Flaming Gold looks like a routine oil-field melodrama, but beneath the adventure plot lies a surprisingly Stoic lesson about perception, emotional reactivity, and the discipline of fair judgment.

Dan Manton and Ben Lear are successful oil wildcatters whose friendship is tested not by external competitors but by their own judgments. A powerful corporate rival threatens their business, yet the greater danger comes from suspicion, wounded pride, and the stories they tell themselves about one another. As Epictetus might observe, people are disturbed less by people and events than by the opinions they form about them.

The film's moral center is Claire Gordon, played by Mae Clarke. Claire's past as an escort becomes the basis for nearly every judgment made against her. Ben treats rumor as fact and prejudice as knowledge. Claire, however, displays a form of practical wisdom. Having lived through hardship and scrutiny, she understands human nature better than thems that wear pants who presume to judge her. She neither wallows in self-pity nor desperately seeks approval. Instead, she meets suspicion with resilience and composure.

Clarke's performance works because she refuses to play Claire as either victim or fallen woman. She portrays someone who has learned that reputation is not entirely within one's control, but character is. When confronted by Ben's accusations, she often appears less wounded than amused, recognizing that his hostility says more about his own misconceptions than about her.

William Boyd and Pat O'Brien make an effective pair as partners whose friendship balances loyalty and rivalry. Boyd's Dan frequently allows passion to cloud judgment, while O'Brien's Ben initially mistakes cynicism for wisdom. Ben's character arc is the film's most satisfying achievement because it is essentially a journey toward Stoic self-correction.

At first he is ruled by prejudice, quick conclusions, and the desire to be right. Yet unlike many stubborn men in melodramas, he is capable of examining his own judgments. After his confrontation with Claire, he recognizes that fairness requires more than confidence in one's opinions. It requires the humility to admit error. His eventual support of Claire feels earned because it grows from justice rather than sentimentality.

Viewed through a Stoic lens, Flaming Gold is about learning to distinguish facts from impressions. Ben's growth comes when he stops reacting to appearances and begins evaluating his own character. Claire succeeds because she understands what lies within her control and what does not.

The ending resolves matters too quickly, but the film remains engaging because it presents a timeless lesson: mistrust, pride, and prejudice can destroy friendships far more effectively than any business disagreement. Wisdom begins when individuals examine their judgments and choose fairness over snap judgements. Mae Clarke's modern, self-possessed performance gives that lesson much of its force.

Stoic Week 2026 #1

Note: This week is Stoic Week 2026, the annual event that invites participants to “live like a Stoic for a week.” It’s online, completely free, and considerably cheaper than years of therapy. Besides, now that I no longer teach (the pandemic provided the excuse to can the program I taught in), what D. H. Lawrence called “the passion of instruction” has to find a host lest I take to sitting on a rock in the middle of campus behind a sign saying “Ask Me Anything.”

This Pre-Code movie echoes Stoicism with its advice to stop managing appearances and start facing reality. Fear, pride, and false beliefs create more misery than circumstances ever do. What director Borzage ultimately dramatizes is a Stoic paradox: true strength is not lofty self-containment a la Mr. Spock or John Wick but the willingness to meet reality honestly, together with others, without fear of appearing vulnerable.

A Stoic Reading of Bad Girl (1931)

Frank Borzage's Bad Girl is often described as a Depression-era romance, but viewed through a modern Stoic lens it becomes a study of how fear, pride, and mistaken judgments can keep people from receiving the very things they most desire.

Dot Haley (Sally Eilers) and Eddie Collins (James Dunn) genuinely love one another. Their suffering arises from a failure of honest communication. Like many people who grew up among unsympathetic types, they mistake vulnerability for weakness. The Stoics would recognize this immediately as a problem of judgment rather than circumstance.

Both characters come from difficult backgrounds and have learned the same lesson: protect yourself by telling nobody nothing. They conceal worries, mute emotions, and avoid direct expressions of need. What appears to be strength is actually a defensive posture toward life. Epictetus warned that many people become prisoners of false beliefs. Dot and Eddie believe that revealing fear, love, or uncertainty will diminish them and lay them open to hurt. As a result, they create unnecessary isolation inside a marriage built on genuine devotion.

Eddie hides behind jokes and slang because humor feels safer than honesty. He dismisses affection as "mushy stuff" and mistakes emotional reserve for masculine strength when it is really fear in disguise.

Dot's pregnancy intensifies these fears. Haunted by her mother's death in childbirth, she suffers as much from imagined futures as present realities. As Marcus Aurelius observed, people often burden themselves more with anticipation than with the thing itself.

Eddie also ties his worth to his ability to provide, treating financial struggle as a personal failure rather than a circumstance to be faced honestly. The Stoics never condemned material success, but they insisted that it had better not become the foundation of self-respect. Eddie's refusal to discuss money openly stems from the belief that financial struggle reflects personal failure.

The film's most revealing irony is that both spouses think they are protecting each other. Dot hides her worries about pregnancy. Eddie conceals his anxieties about money and responsibility. Each assumes silence is an act of love. In reality, silence deprives them of true intimacy. Their suffering grows precisely because they attempt to carry burdens alone.

What makes Bad Girl endure is its understanding that people often fear emotional honesty more than hardship itself. Dot and Eddie's real obstacle is not poverty, pregnancy, or social pressure but the mistaken belief that strength means self-containment. Borzage's profoundly Stoic insight is that tranquility comes not from suppressing emotion but from confronting reality honestly. Nearly a century later, the film remains moving because its lesson is timeless: people suffer less from circumstances than from fear, pride, and false judgments. Happiness arrives when Dot and Eddie stop managing appearances and begin facing life together.

Perry Mason 179: TCOT Reluctant Model

Note: In the 66^th Mason novel from 1962, an anxious world finally learns Della Street’s address - the Crittmore Apartments on West Selig Avenue. The novel is dripping with mid-century cool: Drake records a phone call and casually kills the legal beep, credit cards are the new craze (though Mason’s client is strictly cash-only), and Drake name-drops the dye-transfer color photo process like a hipster snapper. Gardner even unveils a cutting-edge way to peg time of death - blood-cooling rates. The term “Lushbaugh method” is still used today because Gardner coined the name in this novel.

The Case of the Reluctant Model - Erle Stanley Gardner

It begins with something trivial, as these things often do: a question about a painting. Lattimer Rankin, an art expert, comes to Perry Mason with a grievance. Another expert, Collin Durant, has cast doubt on a canvas Rankin sold to Otto Olney. A model, Maxine Lindsay, claims it’s a fake. Rankin wants to sue. Mason advises restraint - better to secure Maxine’s sworn statement and let Olney handle the matter. Sensible, measured. But sense rarely prevails.

Maxine testifies. Olney makes a statement to the press, all bravado and polish. That evening, Durant appears at Mason’s office, demanding to be heard. Mason refuses. Then Maxine calls, her voice taut, saying she’s leaving town. No explanation. Mason sends Paul Drake to follow her. The next day, Durant is found dead - in Maxine’s apartment. She has vanished.

From here, the story coils tighter. Mason informs Tragg, but soon finds himself in another city, speaking to Maxine, only to be caught by Tragg again. Rankin’s lawsuit fades; Mason now defends Maxine, who is drowning in circumstantial evidence. Durant had leverage - knowledge of secrets surrounding Maxine’s sister and her husband - and he used it. He also commissioned fake portraits of Maxine, another grotesque example of punishing a woman for her beauty.

The preliminary hearing is a parade of damning fragments. A woman saw Maxine at a bus station phone booth; her gun was found in a locker there. That gun killed Durant. A neighbor glimpsed her near the apartment at the time of death. Canary has disappeared. The artist produces the disputed portrait. The judge listens, impassive, as witnesses file past. The case seems airtight. Is it? Who placed the gun in the locker? Who pocketed the $2,000 for the forgery? And why does every answer feel like a door opening onto another, darker room?

Gardner’s ending strains credulity. Coincidence piles upon coincidence: an unlocked door, a conveniently found gun, a victim oblivious to an intruder’s presence. The killer discards the weapon where Maxine had been, sealing her fate. It feels hurried, as if Gardner, weary of wandering in his own topiary labyrinth, chose escape with a trimmer shearing through the nearest hedge.

Still, the novel fascinates. It breaks Mason’s usual pattern, revealing his stoic philosophy and Tragg’s authoritarian fairness. And those antique Americanisms - “as dead as a mackerel,” “take a powder” - linger like ghosts of another age. These idioms seep into my vocabulary and make 50-something women at work say softly, wonderingly to me, “You sound like my dad.”

 

Perry Mason 178: Bachelors Get Lonely

Bachelors Get Lonely - A. A. Fair aka Erle Stanley Gardner

This 1961 effort serves up the usual Cool & Lam cocktail: Bertha’s penny-pinching optimism, Donald’s improvisational genius, and a murder that blows their plans sky-high.

Bertha is thrilled to land Montrose Carson, a respectable developer who looks like the kind of client that will help the firm dodge the messes into which clients usually drag them. Carson suspects someone in his office is leaking sensitive information to a rival who keeps beating his bids. Before Donald’s bunk detector even starts to flash yellow, Bertha has cooked up a plan to smoke out the mole and is her usual smug self over her brilliance.

Naturally, the case pops like the culture. A corpse appears, Donald is hip-deep in trouble, and Lt. Frank Sellers is measuring Lam’s neck for the noose. Bertha, buying into Sellers’ accusations, charges betrayal and accuses Donald of tanking the firm. The only suspense, as in past novels in the series, is whether this is the time Donald can’t find his way out.

The title nods to Lam’s bachelorhood and his role as a faux playboy heir in a sting operation to expose business espionage. Espionage leads to murder, murder to secrets, and secrets to rationalizations like: “How many people live the orthodox lives they’re supposed to?” Gardner was a sympathetic guy, ever ready to assure readers they weren’t nearly as weird as most people.

The novel is absurd fun: comic relief, snappy setups, and coincidences that glide rather than jar. Lam oscillates between out of control and cool as a cucumber, while Bertha clutches her purse like Mr. Krab in diamonds. Switchboards buzz, cafeterias hum, and motels come with separate units – Nostalgia City for readers born in the Fifties.

As always, every babe falls for Donald (including a stripper named Daffodil), though he’s mostly a gentleman - except when looking down Elsie Brand’s top and calling her “Sister.” Sellers, meanwhile, tramples constitutional rights, and Gardner slips in practical advice: “I refuse to talk to you… until I consult with an attorney.” Good to know if life plays dirty.

The wrap-up isn’t as baroque as a Perry Mason finale, but the dialogue crackles with antique slang and blessedly few ten-dollar words. Gardner, writing as A.A. Fair, keeps the tone light, the pace brisk, and the ethics flexible.

Bottom line: Bachelors Get Lonely delivers vintage Cool & Lam - industrial intrigue, murder, and morals as flexible as a yoga teacher’s spine - with enough charm to make you forgive the creaky coincidences. Not top-tier, but a solid slice of mid-century pulp entertainment.

 

Perry Mason 177: Great Day in the Morning

Note: Raymond Burr plays – surprise! – a heavy in this western. He brings to his performance as village potentate Jumbo Means his imposing physical presence (he looks close to 300 pounds) and his distinctive intensity. As the owner of palaces of vice and sin, his character has his shady side. He is an influential Northerner in a predominantly Unionist town in Colorado, so he is in the thick of pre-Civil War strains.

Great Day in the Morning
1956 / 1:37
Tagline: “I like walking alone - no ties.”

It’s a strange movie with an unlikely hero. Set just before the Civil War, it features Owen Pentecost, a character who keeps himself emotionally distant from everyone around him. Robert Stack, an actor with a range up there with Fred MacMurray and George Raft, was perfectly cast to play a loner who says “Sure, I'm loyal. I've got an undying loyalty to myself and no one else, nothing else.”

On the eve of the Civil War in 1861 Owen Pentecost of North Carolina arrives in Denver as a stranger. But he quickly achieves the American dream (money and influence) by winning a saloon cum hotel in a card game rigged in his favor by Ruth Roman, mama of the attached brothel. He is thus able to invest in gold digging start-ups, gathering in half their findings in exchange for his financing.

In the over-heated times before the Civil War, everybody has to choose a side. There’s no “let us all reason together” here, the times don’t allow for subtleties like conscience or brotherhood. Pentecost is from North Carolina but the other Southerners don’t like or trust him because they’ve not known him for years. The Union men in town don’t like him because he is a Tar Heel.

Pentecost's interactions with women highlight his strange solitude. Boston Grant (Ruth Roman) ardently pursues him and not just for his money and power. Though she wants to be his helpmeet in business, he evinces zero affection for her. His relationship with Ann Merry Alaine (Virginia Mayo) intermittently sparks up but romance sputters out. This triangle in the movie features good acting by the actresses.

But the triangle adds to a crowded movie. Pre-war stresses, amoral jerk as hero, two plucky women after the same grouchy jerk and more – the subplot of an orphan boy who is hoorawed by the local kids because they’ve not known him for years so they don’t trust him. The gorgeous Technicolor is the reason to watch this movie.

As for the connection with the classic Perry Mason TV series, hate-filled Yankee Leo Gordon appeared in TCOT Dangerous Dowager as an honest casino owner. Bar employee who has a great scene with Stack, Peter Whitney played an ill-tempered farmer in TCOT Pathetic Patient, an irascible gangster in TCOT Stand-In Sister and a venerable sea captain in TCOT Wrongful Writ. Ubiquitous character actor Regis Toomey, a priest in this movie, was in TCOT Loquacious Liar and TCOT 12th Wildcat.

The Ides of Exploitation: Mystic Circle Murder

Note: Everybody’s a critic. I’m informed that I’ve bestowed “almost Dostoevskian moral gravity” upon a cheap exposé picture. Guilty as charged. Give me a 68-minute Poverty Row programmer and before the second reel I’ve discovered alienation, sexual politics, class warfare, psychic trauma, and the collapse of Western civilization. Perhaps occasionally I should just let the guy in the turban be a crook. OTOH, just wait until you see posts for Stoic Week 2026.

Mystic Circle Murder aka Religious Racketeers  aka Madame Houdini Speaks
1938 / 1:08 minutes
Tagline: “Thrilling Chilling Exposé of the Fake Medium Racket!”

In the dim corridors of human grief, where memory clings like burrs to the soul, there are phonies who prey upon the broken. This exploitation film, brief and strange, does not seek entertainment for the masses. It is a warning, a document of moral decay, and a tribute to the lonely struggle of Beatrice Houdini, widow of the great illusionist, who devoted her life to exposing the lies of spiritualist charlatans.

She appears early in the film, not as a character, but as a conscience. Her voice is clear, her purpose unwavering: to protect the grieving from those who would exploit their sorrow.

The story centers on a wealthy steel heiress, Helene LeBerthron, whose guilt over her mother’s death makes her vulnerable. She is young, pale, blue-eyed, and fragile - an image of innocence that invites corruption. Her hope is not strength but weakness, and the audience, helpless, watches her drift toward deception. We movie-goers whisper, “Girl, listen to your skeptical boyfriend.”

The medium, La Gagge, is no mystic. He is a technician of illusion, a manipulator of grief. He explains to his accomplice - who smokes constantly, as if to remind us that death is always near - that belief must be coaxed, not forced. The machinery of deceit is literal: wires, soundboards, Orientalist props. But the machinery of psychological manipulation is more insidious. The medium isolates the mark, surrounds her with unfamiliar sights and sounds, and replaces her beliefs with ritual and mumbo-jumbo. He uses loneliness as a tool, and sexual attraction as bait.

This is not a tale of ghosts. It is a tale of how easily the human mind, weakened by loss guilt and shame, can be bent. The film shows how repetition, isolation, and suggestion can break down reason. It is not unlike the methods used in darker institutions - prisons, institutions, cults - where obedience is extracted not by force, but by erosion of the self.

The actors do what they can. They are not great, but they are honest. The dialogue is sometimes clumsy, serving exposition more than character. Yet the film moves quickly, and dignity is preserved. It is not art, but it is truth.

This film is for those who study belief, who ask why people cling to illusions, and how grief can become a weapon. It is not comforting. It is not popular. But it is necessary. In a world where deception is often rewarded, it reminds us that truth must be defended - even when it is unwelcome, even when it is ignored.

 

 

Perry Mason 176: Donkeys, District Attorneys, and the Price of Respectability

Note: Erle Stanley Gardner’s background gave him two ways of looking at small-town life. Because he grew up in mining towns, he saw how power often came from money, reputation, and social position rather than from official authority. Later, as a lawyer, he saw how these local power structures could affect the courts, especially when an outsider was accused of a crime. These ideas appear in several Perry Mason novels: powerful local groups protect themselves, outsiders are treated with suspicion, and justice often requires someone from outside the community to step in.

Donkeys, District Attorneys, and the Price of Respectability: Crime in the Small-Town Middle Class

In these three non-Mason novels, Gardner explores the connection between law, reputation, and money in small towns and rural communities. Everyone knows everyone else, and people are very aware of what their neighbors think of them. Most characters are neither rich nor poor. They belong to the lower middle or middle class, and their social position can easily be lost. Because of this, justice is affected by gossip, reputation, fear, and the desire to protect one’s place in the community. Gardner is especially interested in people whose small amount of money and social standing makes them determined to appear respectable.

In The Case of the Backward Mule (1946), Gardner sets the story in a farming community where property means more than simply owning something. The mule is somewhat comic, but the argument over it becomes very serious. Ownership represents independence, respectability, and a person’s standing in the community. The farmers and property owners are not wealthy, but they have enough to lose. A dispute that might seem unimportant to an outsider therefore becomes very important because it threatens both their livelihoods and their reputations.

The Doug Selby novels explore the same problem from another angle. In The D.A. Calls It Murder (1937), reputation is almost a form of money. Shopkeepers, clerks, secretaries, and other working people fear scandal because gossip can destroy a person’s standing even before the truth is known. Selby may be the district attorney, but even he has to deal with local pressures. Justice becomes difficult because people who claim to respect the law are also frightened of scandal and worried about protecting themselves.

The D.A. Breaks an Egg (1949) shows how fragile this social order can be. The Lennox family wants to appear decent and law-abiding, but their position is insecure. They are not wealthy enough to feel safe, and they fear falling into poverty or disgrace. This is an important Gardner theme: people sometimes break rules not because they are naturally dishonest, but because they are afraid of losing their family, income, or reputation. Their questionable choices are defensive rather than predatory. They bend the rules because they fear ruin, not because they want power over others.

Taken together, these novels suggest that small-town justice is not as simple or innocent as it may appear. It is shaped by property, money, gossip, reputation, and the fear of losing social status. Gardner is less interested in obvious villains than in the everyday compromises of ordinary people. Respectability protects them, but it also traps them. The truth matters, but so does the price people may have to pay for admitting it.