The Case of the Tried and True Formula
...or how you can set your watch by a formulaic plot that still manages to surprise you
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Perry Mason, "The Case of the Capering Camera"
OB: January 16, 1964, 9:00 p.m. EST, CBS
I was two days old when this episode originally aired.
For years, as I covered criminal trials in Etowah County, Alabama, I was privileged to see a man named James Hedgspeth, the district attorney, deliver some very convincing, emotional opening statements and closing arguments. And in many of them he told what I call the "Perry Mason story." He told the jury how he grew up watching Perry Mason, sometimes even mentioning its Saturday night time slot. And he explained how it inspired a career in law, bringing him before them that day. You couldn't help but be touched by that story.
It's a testimony to the power of fine television that a series about a defense lawyer; in which constantly-losing district attorney Hamilton Burger is a supporting character, could inspire a man to someday become a real-life D.A. (with a much, much better track record than Burger's). And Mr. Hedgspeth wasn't the only one: during her Senate confirmation hearings, Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor mentioned that the show influenced her own decision to go into law.
But for decades, that was pretty much it for legal shows. They were almost always about defense attorneys. It seems the idea of a show centered around a prosecutor skipped several decades, between old time radio's Mr. District Attorney and TV's Law & Order and JAG. That allowed Perry, The Defenders, Arrest and Trial, Judd for the Defense and Owen Marshall, Counselor at Law to rule the courtrooms of the airwaves. (Perry Mason creator Erle Stanley Gardner himself once tried unsuccessfully to sell a pilot in 1955, called The D.A. It would've starred Wesley Hau, himself a future Mason regular.)
I have no idea why prosecutors got such short shrift on TV in the early going. Maybe executives felt the audience would be quicker to root for an underdog. Maybe no one had figured out how to make preparing a case for trial as fascinating as Jack Webb had done for standard police evidence-gathering on Dragnet. Maybe it was an outgrowth of the film noir era, which also gave us early TV shows like Mr. Lucky, Peter Gunn, and Darren McGavin's original version of Mike Hammer. Or perhaps the public's original TV view of a would-be "prosecutor"--Senator Joseph McCarthy in his televised early 1950s hearings--just left a really bad taste in everyone's mouths.
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Perry Mason and its title character were the brainchildren of writer Erle Stanley Gardner. Gardner was kicked out of law school after one term when his penchant for boxing interfered with his studies. So he taught himself and was admitted to the bar in 1911. But he was bored with the day to day activities of his practice, only getting excited about trials and trial strategies, so he started writing stories for pulp magazines. His most famous character, Perry Mason, began appearing first in short stories, then in entire pulp novels.
Perry also found his way to the big screen in the 1930s; in the 1940s, then he became the title character in a daytime soap on radio. CBS wanted that series to make the switch to television in the same five day a week format, but Gardner said no. He wanted the TV Mason to focus on prime time detective work and not soap plots. So CBS changed all the names of the characters, and adapted the radio show into a daytime drama known on TV as The Edge of Night.
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Gardner was never happy with the movies (especially; he considered them embarrassing) or the radio show, so he wanted, and got, creative control when CBS outbid NBC for the rights to show the highly successful defense attorney in prime time. That meant he had to approve every script and approved casting for series regulars.
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When the prime time Perry was being cast, it's said that Raymond Burr walked into the room, and Gardner declared, "That's him! That's the guy!" That would've been quite a surprise to the veteran actor, who had actually shown up to audition for the part of forlorn D.A. Hamilton Burger. Prior to his best known, Emmy-winning role, Burr had appeared frequently in radio, narrated and appeared in the first "Godzilla" movie, and played bad guys, most notably in Alfred Hitchcock's "Rear Window." Among the people he beat out: Fred MacMurray (talks apparently collapsed) and one of Perry Mason's other regulars, William Hopper.
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The memorably melodramatic opening theme music starts off with a few notes that suggest distant sirens. Then, the full orchestra joins in for some heavier music that suggests the full weight of the justice system bearing down on a defendant and his attorney, Perry Mason. The credits during the 1963-64 season actually rotate between three similar sets shot from different camera angles.
The TV Perry Mason locked quickly into a formula inspired by the novels: Perry would represent an almost hopeless-seeming, but innocent client in a murder trial, usually someone from the Mad Men upper or upper middle class. (The episodes I saw often had Perry almost falling ass-backwards into these cases, usually because he handled a will for someone or something like that.) The client is often a victim of circumstances, and sometimes a victim of their own embarrassing panic, bad behavior, bad decisions or abject stupidity. But the police are immovably convinced they have the right man/woman, and the "losingest" (yes, I know that's not a word) D.A. in the history of television or literature, acts really smug about how this case is going to turn out and poor ol' Perry can't do anything about it.
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I've never seen such a supremely confident perennial loser in all of TV history. Hamilton Burger's very name suggests Perry always "ground him up like..." that in the courtroom. Burger is the Barney Fife of serious drama. In his novels, Gardner modeled him after a D.A. he really, really didn't like. Having said all of that...it's obvious from their interactions the two really respect each other, and on some rare occasions, there's even admiration. When Burger was once accused of murder himself...naturally, he called Mason.
There's a quick, head-spinning montage near the end in which Perry questions all of the other possible suspects in the case, following a twisted path along the way, sometimes with no clean hands, that lead to the person who did it. This is key in how the same formula most weeks can still be fresh and still keep an audience from correctly guessing "whodunit." It also shows something of an influence from the film noir genre, which thrived on nothing appearing as it seemed and everyone having a secret. And at some point, his private investigator, Paul Drake, will pop into the courtroom to share some game-changing information with Perry, usually just before the big courtroom reveal.
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Ultimately, as much as the series prided itself on educating us in legal terms and giving us a guided tour of the pre-grand jury justice system, the formula relies on being resolved in a very unlikely way: Perry gets the true guilty party, who's always in the courtroom, to finally break down and sing, either on the stand or sometimes even yelling out from the gallery. (Or he meets them at the crime scene for one of those classic "I gathered you here today..." scenes.) Those witnesses very rarely invoke the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination for some reason (and anyone who watched the McCarthy hearings knew about the Fifth Amendment), but even more bizarrely, why are they in the room in the first place? I always believed they could be kept out while other witnesses were testifying, if one side invokes that rule. And as much as it appears it would make life easier for them at times, Mason and Burger always act like it never occurred to them.
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Also, these almost always happen in the evidence/preliminary hearings, and never in front of a jury. That means many of these cases never make it as far as the grand jury. It makes some of Perry's antics seem more reasonable, since a lot more questions can be raised in earlier hearings than in front of a jury. But it also makes Burger's constantly repeated line, "Your honor, I object! Mr. Mason is clearly on a fishing expedition!" almost pointless since he's usually allowed to be on one in a preliminary hearing. (Plus the main reason for all of this: CBS and Paisano Productions were able to save a little money by not hiring 12-14 or so extras, including alternate jurors.)
We don't really know much about Perry. We often hear of him buying drinks for ladies but even that's to get information for a client. It's implied his longtime secretary, Della Street, kind of has a thing for him and perhaps they have an affair between hearings and depositions. Then again probably not, when would they have the time? We do see them occasionally go dancing together, much like Ben Casey did with fellow doctor Maggie Graham. (Erle Stanley Gardner actually married his own legal secretary who was the basis for the Della Street character.) We know he loves a good steak. Otherwise, as far as we know, Perry's girlfriend is criminal law and his hobby is being always right about everything. This may have been an outgrowth of what was happening off the screen: Burr and the rest of the cast put in long days and very few off-days, not giving Burr the time he desired for some of his real-life interests like philanthropy and growing flowers.
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We actually get to know a lot more about Mason's preferred private investigator, Paul Drake, than we do about Perry; Paul loves food, loves the ladies, loves convertibles. And he's not big on museums; when Della once asked him what he knew about art, he replied, "I don't even know what I like!" Paul Drake may very well have the most fun part of the entire show, definitely the most dangerous. His posing as a naive "rock hound" looking for gold in one episode, just about cracked me up. William Hopper (son of famed Hollywood columnist Hedda Hopper) played Paul Drake. I wished Hopper had lived long enough to be in a 1970s cop or private eye show, I could just see him chasing after someone in a '73 Mercury Marquis. In addition to William Talman's portrayal of Burger, police Lt. Tragg was played by Ray Collins, who, like Burger, hated dealing with Mason and always seemed happier to beat Mason than to catch an actual, guilty suspect.
In addition to the most feared defense attorney and the most seemingly inept D. A. in television, we also got to meet every week, Mason's executive secretary, Della Street, played by the lovely Barbara Hale. She's the only other regular besides Burr to win an Emmy for the show.
The mostly reliable (at least by the writers) formula worked well for about five years; fans complained in season six that the scripts were starting to look tired, somewhat lame. So in season seven (1963-64, the year I was born), something happened--maybe new writers, positive network interference, some type of consultation, I don't know what--that improved the quality of the writing and dared the show to take new risks. The side effect was that the scripts began to get more complicated; Burr supposedly claimed he watched the final, edited prints of some episodes and still couldn't figure out the case or the motive.
The second episode of season seven, "The Case of the Deadly Verdict," actually shows Perry losing a case, one of only two instances involving a murder case (he also once lost a civil case). In fact, the show opens that way, with a jury delivering its verdict (that's well known character actor Olan Soule as the jury foreman; most remember him as Mayberry's choir director who had to deal with Barney Fife's really bad singing voice), and recommending the gas chamber for Perry's client (who lied her butt off to police to keep quiet about an affair that never even happened). Perry was able to sift through the million or so shattered pieces of his (really, really stupid) client's credibility to solve the case and get her off the hook, only after she refused to cooperate and the Supreme Court upheld the verdict.
The week I was born had Perry investigating "The Case of the Capering Camera," a surprising titillating episode about nude photographs, blackmail, and how they led to murder. It's fairly daring stuff for 1960s TV, and they don't just mention the incriminating photos in question; they're the center of the whole episode. (No, of course we don't actually see them, not even artfully obscured.) Jonathan Latimer wrote this episode and about 40 others, and also wrote the screenplay for one of my favorite film noirs, "The Big Clock."
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The story opens with a "high fashion" model, Judith Blair, posing for a set of photos in the Karl Kadar studios in Los Angeles. (High fashion models are probably what we would now call supermodels.) The man taking the photos isn't Karl, but his accented, low-rent cousin, Jacob. Right in the middle of the shoot, he'll find her suddenly pointing a gun at him--his own gun, in fact. She demands the negatives and says she's already paid out $5,000 in blackmail money. She claims he has them in a cabinet in the darkroom, but he swears he hasn't had them in months. Then a shot rings out; we know it's not from her gun because we see no smoke or gunfire coming out of the barrel. (If Burger or Mason could ever subpoena the audience, this would all be over within seconds.) She sees a sliding door open and curtains blowing from the wind; this is apparently where those shots were fired. She runs away and we have our first commercial break.
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Judith (played by Margo Moore, herself a former fashion model) tries to appear nonchalant as she leaves Karl Kadar's studio. She walks past a woman who's walking her dog, and the Scottie barks at her. As a man peeks from a nearby alley, Judith gets into her Corvette and drives away. Against the unusual beat of jazz-like music that the show used on rare occasions, the man gets into a Dodge sedan and follows her through the streets of L.A. She eventually loses him by turning into a driveway.
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Being a film noir fan, I am loving this so far. The scene in which Judith was followed, for instance, looks like it could've very well come from a noir if it weren't for the early 1960s cars. The city of Los Angeles, a character in so many of those films, appears to be putting in an unbilled cameo.
Meanwhile, Karl arrives and meets Irene, the lady with the Scotty, the studio. The two arrive, and find Jacob's lifeless body lying on the floor. No gasps, screams, "Dear God!" or anything like that. They just stare silently for a few seconds before Irene says, "Well Karl, I suppose this means you're in charge of the blackmail department now."
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Judith arrives home where her sister's in-laws are entertaining Perry Mason. It seems he's the family attorney, and the dad, Lewis (who's in line for an ambassadorship) had wanted him to take care of something...but whatever it was, he took care of it himself. We get to meet the family: Lewis, his wife Katherine, a retired model herself; and little sister Penny (Karyn Kupcinet) and her husband Norman. We'll find out she's in the pictures Judith was demanding; we'll also see Judith get a call from an answering service saying someone wanted her to know everything's been handled and she doesn't have to tell anyone anything.
Judith finally goes to see Perry at his office and tells him the whole story. She tells him she panicked; he asks if she fired it accidentally, she adamantly denies it.
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When Perry and investigator Paul Drake return to the crime scene, they have a chance to question a few people themselves, including Karl Kadar, and agency owner Harper Green. Perry and Paul are surprised to hear the police ruling so far: suicide. Apparently there's residue and powder burns on the corpse to back it up.
Perry talks with Paul and with Della about his ethical dilemma: does he go to the police with what he knows (and implicate his client) or does he protect her confidence and the let the police think whatever? Meanwhile, he asks Paul to find the negatives and to find out what's in the ballistics report.
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As we see Lt. Arthur Tragg (Ray Collins) and Lt.Andy Anderson (Wesley Lau) discuss the case, Tragg makes the call and finds out the ballistics indicate the gun was, indeed, used in a suicide. (The results come back in less than a day, one of those things that only happens on TV.) Tragg then tells Anderson to do something that sounds unconstitutional-ish: "...make Perry Mason your chief suspect." They also find the negatives of Judith's fashion shoot, including the one in which she's holding the gun.
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Sure enough, the police tail Mason to the point they find, and arrest, Judith Blair.
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We will come to find out, the sleazy Jacob would find models who needed money, offer them money for "calendar girl" photo shoots, then when the ladies would make more money on future jobs and/or get married, would start blackmailing them. We also get to the courtroom scenes: Mason gets the police to admit the time of death could've been any time between 7:10 and 7:50, and the photo of Judith holding the gun (taken by Jacob just before his death) doesn't prove it's the murder weapon. Eventually he'll get the cops and the D.A. to admit they originally felt the evidence pointed to a suicide, and that the gun they found was not registered (raising the possibility it's not even the murder weapon). Right about here is where Paul arrives to consult Mason with the new information, as he does in almost every show.
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Paul makes an appeal to Penny for any information that will help save her sister; she produces one of the blackmail letters. Paul also visits Irene, the lady with the Scottie, who turns out to be an actress, Irene Grey filming a movie in which she plays a nun. It turns out she also had photos taken and was blackmailed and is concerned about getting mixed up in all of this, especially since it would lead to a scandal ending her career (and even her current movie) before it began.
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Perry, having been given the key to the studio by Karl, goes back to look for a second pistol to corroborate a theory. Sure enough he finds it and it belonged to Karl. In the courtroom he gets Della and Paul to help him re-enact the gun switch. "Get on with your little play, we're all on pins and needles," history's losingest D.A. snappily tells Mason in court. Mason then grills several people in quick succession (a trademark of the show and a way to keep us guessing despite the formula). This leads us through a litany of suspects, likely and unlikely, until the moment the killer breaks down and sings on the stand...and it's Harper Green, the head of the agency, a man the police appeared to dismiss as a suspect early on and the show played down after that. It almost always happened that way, in fact. Oh, and he has the negatives.
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This show was a "last" for four of the actors involved. Elaine Stewart, who played Irene Grey, never acted in a role again after this episode. She was going through a divorce when it was filmed; on New Year's Eve 1964 she'd marry the love of her life, game show producer Merrill Heatter. In the 1970s she'd come out of retirement to hold up cards or roll dice on two of Heatter's game shows, Gambit and High Rollers, apparently so the couple could spend time together at work. Byron Palmer, a singer in the 1950s, also never acted again after this episode.
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The most shocking end is that of Karyn Kupcinet, who played Penny, found murdered in her home on Thanksgiving Day 1963, just six days after the Kennedy assassination. To this day, her murder remains unsolved. Obviously she didn't even live to see this episode after she filmed it.
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And this would be the last we'd see of Lt. Tragg. Ray Collins was a veteran actor who had been part of Orson Welles' Mercury Players; in "Citizen Kane" he played the machine boss who ended Kane's first marriage and political career in one fell swoop. Health issues forced Collins to switch from series regular to semi-regular after the 1959-60 season, with Wesley Hau's Lt. Anderson picking up the slack. The two work together here for the last time. Collins died in 1965.
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That had to be a blow to a close-knit cast, who also went to bat (especially Burr, as well as creator Erle Stanley Gardner) for William Talman. He had been fired from the show by CBS in 1960 following his arrest during a raid on a party where drugs were allegedly used. CBS invoked a "morals" clause in the contract. After Talman was exonerated of all wrong doing, Burr campaigned to get him rehired on the show, even appealing to individual CBS affiliates. It worked, and Burger was once again back on the show, objecting to fishing expeditions in December 1960.
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The cast, who put in long hours together for this show, became very close and even had a special rack with their coffee mugs hanging from it. When Talman was off the show, Burr refused to let the studio remove his belongings from the dressing room and to remove his mug from the rack. Talman and Hopper shared a dressing room for years and were said to have never had an unkind word with each other that wasn't in the script.
Over the years the show was not without its critics. The National Association of County and Prosecuting Attorneys complained that the show left real-life jurors with the impression that the D.A. was the villain, the defense attorney was the hero, and that they should expect last minute theatrics, tricks, stunts and tearful sudden confessions. Then the cast themselves became critics of the scripts, with Burr calling the following season, 1964-65, a "bad year." Burr later reflected that the show and its long hours and theft of his personal life, left him with a lot of regrets that he didn't get married and settle down.
The 1963-64 season was the year the show dropped out of the Neilsen Top 25, losing its case for the viewers against Jimmy Dean's ABC variety show, and Dr. Kildare and Hazel on NBC. The final season, 1965-66, saw the show moved to Sunday nights opposite Bonanza, where it got clobbered.
The show experimented with a lot of ideas during that season; one of them, "The Case of the Twice-Told Twist," was a modern day take on the Oliver Twist story, this time involving a car theft ring. (Ford Mustangs appeared to be the car of choice for this gang.) The episode was the only one in the series filmed in color, apparently an experiment to persuade the network to pick up the series for a tenth season. It also had a little more action and fast jazz-type music than normal for the series. And it had a courtroom which, as always, was painted in black, while and shades of gray to accomodate black and white photography. It can be a real headache to watch with all the flesh tones and red neckties, and was a visual trainwreck to actually try to watch without turning down the color on your TV set.
By then, CBS had already announced the ninth season would be its last. The finale, "The Case of the Final Fadeout," included scenes in which the show's actual crew appeared on camera, Dick Clark as the man confessing to being the killer, and Erle Stanley Gardner himself as the judge.
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The show would join Star Trek as one of the few hour-long shows to be a runaway hit in syndication, and is still a favorite on cable TV even now. Hopper and Talman would act rarely on camera again before their deaths; Burr sailed to Fiji, only to return in 1967 to a new show, Ironside, with a hectic schedule all its own.
But that doesn't mean this formula, that worked so well for the series, was done. Burr and Hale came back in 1985 for "Perry Mason Returns," the first in what turned out to be a highly successful series of TV movies for NBC. This time, Perry is a judge who leaves the bench to defend Della Street on a murder charge. This one was so successful it was the highest rated show of the week, and the second highest rated of the 1985-86 TV season. The same old formula has one tweak to accommodate a two hour running time: we know whodunit when we see the murder. But about halfway through the movie, we found out someone else put the person up to it. There were 26 of these TV movies in all, then four more after Burr's 1993 death, all of which included the phrase "A Perry Mason Mystery" in the title, and Barbara Hale still in the cast.
During this same era, this same formula was also dusted off for another lawyer show: Andy Griffith's Matlock, which included some of the same producers and writers. Its tweak was something Perry Mason chose not to do: character development. Southern-based attorney Ben Matlock was full of quirks and ticks, and we often saw him interact with the real world and had a decent idea what he did when he wasn't being an attorney. Matlock was a deeper character. Basically, unlike Perry Mason, Ben Matlock had a life.
And it still may not be over. After 80 years, Perry's return to the big screen is being plotted as I write this, with Iron Man himself, Robert Downey Jr. ready to take over the title role. It will be set in the 1930s, when the original movies and some of the original novels were set. It remains to be seen whether they'll stick to the tried and true TV formula or reinvent one for today's audiences.
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Still, the old black and white Perry Mason can look like something of a relic now, like old, dusty law books on a shelf, with all of the court rulings that have changed a lot of things since the show was on. In fact, it left the air just as the Miranda ruling came down from the Supreme Court, a ruling that had a profound effect, for instance, on the newly revamped version of Dragnet that returned in 1967. And it seemed quaint just two years later, amid assassinations, rioting, protests, and presidential candidate Richard Nixon's vows to fight for what he called "law and order," filled the airwaves. But still, the story structure remained very compelling in the reruns and still reaches in and grabs fans of legal TV.
Just as the Perry Mason movies and Matlock were making a big splash on 1980s TV, a new, upstart show, L. A. Law, premiered. It was prided itself on being everything Perry Mason was not: they told their stories in story arcs; murder wasn't the center of every episode; they had an ensemble cast, full of attorney characters who didn't always win cases; they clashed over the inner workings of the firm; the show followed them off the clock and to home; Susan Dey's character was even a prosecutor, and later a judge. One of the show's creators said at the time, if a story idea looked too Perry Mason they'd throw it out, but then said, "...but that doesn't mean we don't respect the hell out of its storytelling." By the 1980s the stories had changed drastically and so, sometimes, are the way they're told. But a compelling story is still a compelling story. And it all still resonates: I still have yet to hear from an attorney or prosecutor who ever told me, "Judd for the Defense made me want to be an attorney."
Availability: the entire series is available on DVD, and can be downloaded from Amazon.
Next time on this channel: Combat!
...or how you can set your watch by a formulaic plot that still manages to surprise you
Perry Mason, "The Case of the Capering Camera"
OB: January 16, 1964, 9:00 p.m. EST, CBS
I was two days old when this episode originally aired.
For years, as I covered criminal trials in Etowah County, Alabama, I was privileged to see a man named James Hedgspeth, the district attorney, deliver some very convincing, emotional opening statements and closing arguments. And in many of them he told what I call the "Perry Mason story." He told the jury how he grew up watching Perry Mason, sometimes even mentioning its Saturday night time slot. And he explained how it inspired a career in law, bringing him before them that day. You couldn't help but be touched by that story.
It's a testimony to the power of fine television that a series about a defense lawyer; in which constantly-losing district attorney Hamilton Burger is a supporting character, could inspire a man to someday become a real-life D.A. (with a much, much better track record than Burger's). And Mr. Hedgspeth wasn't the only one: during her Senate confirmation hearings, Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor mentioned that the show influenced her own decision to go into law.
But for decades, that was pretty much it for legal shows. They were almost always about defense attorneys. It seems the idea of a show centered around a prosecutor skipped several decades, between old time radio's Mr. District Attorney and TV's Law & Order and JAG. That allowed Perry, The Defenders, Arrest and Trial, Judd for the Defense and Owen Marshall, Counselor at Law to rule the courtrooms of the airwaves. (Perry Mason creator Erle Stanley Gardner himself once tried unsuccessfully to sell a pilot in 1955, called The D.A. It would've starred Wesley Hau, himself a future Mason regular.)
I have no idea why prosecutors got such short shrift on TV in the early going. Maybe executives felt the audience would be quicker to root for an underdog. Maybe no one had figured out how to make preparing a case for trial as fascinating as Jack Webb had done for standard police evidence-gathering on Dragnet. Maybe it was an outgrowth of the film noir era, which also gave us early TV shows like Mr. Lucky, Peter Gunn, and Darren McGavin's original version of Mike Hammer. Or perhaps the public's original TV view of a would-be "prosecutor"--Senator Joseph McCarthy in his televised early 1950s hearings--just left a really bad taste in everyone's mouths.
Perry Mason and its title character were the brainchildren of writer Erle Stanley Gardner. Gardner was kicked out of law school after one term when his penchant for boxing interfered with his studies. So he taught himself and was admitted to the bar in 1911. But he was bored with the day to day activities of his practice, only getting excited about trials and trial strategies, so he started writing stories for pulp magazines. His most famous character, Perry Mason, began appearing first in short stories, then in entire pulp novels.
Perry also found his way to the big screen in the 1930s; in the 1940s, then he became the title character in a daytime soap on radio. CBS wanted that series to make the switch to television in the same five day a week format, but Gardner said no. He wanted the TV Mason to focus on prime time detective work and not soap plots. So CBS changed all the names of the characters, and adapted the radio show into a daytime drama known on TV as The Edge of Night.
Gardner was never happy with the movies (especially; he considered them embarrassing) or the radio show, so he wanted, and got, creative control when CBS outbid NBC for the rights to show the highly successful defense attorney in prime time. That meant he had to approve every script and approved casting for series regulars.
When the prime time Perry was being cast, it's said that Raymond Burr walked into the room, and Gardner declared, "That's him! That's the guy!" That would've been quite a surprise to the veteran actor, who had actually shown up to audition for the part of forlorn D.A. Hamilton Burger. Prior to his best known, Emmy-winning role, Burr had appeared frequently in radio, narrated and appeared in the first "Godzilla" movie, and played bad guys, most notably in Alfred Hitchcock's "Rear Window." Among the people he beat out: Fred MacMurray (talks apparently collapsed) and one of Perry Mason's other regulars, William Hopper.
The memorably melodramatic opening theme music starts off with a few notes that suggest distant sirens. Then, the full orchestra joins in for some heavier music that suggests the full weight of the justice system bearing down on a defendant and his attorney, Perry Mason. The credits during the 1963-64 season actually rotate between three similar sets shot from different camera angles.
The TV Perry Mason locked quickly into a formula inspired by the novels: Perry would represent an almost hopeless-seeming, but innocent client in a murder trial, usually someone from the Mad Men upper or upper middle class. (The episodes I saw often had Perry almost falling ass-backwards into these cases, usually because he handled a will for someone or something like that.) The client is often a victim of circumstances, and sometimes a victim of their own embarrassing panic, bad behavior, bad decisions or abject stupidity. But the police are immovably convinced they have the right man/woman, and the "losingest" (yes, I know that's not a word) D.A. in the history of television or literature, acts really smug about how this case is going to turn out and poor ol' Perry can't do anything about it.
I've never seen such a supremely confident perennial loser in all of TV history. Hamilton Burger's very name suggests Perry always "ground him up like..." that in the courtroom. Burger is the Barney Fife of serious drama. In his novels, Gardner modeled him after a D.A. he really, really didn't like. Having said all of that...it's obvious from their interactions the two really respect each other, and on some rare occasions, there's even admiration. When Burger was once accused of murder himself...naturally, he called Mason.
There's a quick, head-spinning montage near the end in which Perry questions all of the other possible suspects in the case, following a twisted path along the way, sometimes with no clean hands, that lead to the person who did it. This is key in how the same formula most weeks can still be fresh and still keep an audience from correctly guessing "whodunit." It also shows something of an influence from the film noir genre, which thrived on nothing appearing as it seemed and everyone having a secret. And at some point, his private investigator, Paul Drake, will pop into the courtroom to share some game-changing information with Perry, usually just before the big courtroom reveal.
Ultimately, as much as the series prided itself on educating us in legal terms and giving us a guided tour of the pre-grand jury justice system, the formula relies on being resolved in a very unlikely way: Perry gets the true guilty party, who's always in the courtroom, to finally break down and sing, either on the stand or sometimes even yelling out from the gallery. (Or he meets them at the crime scene for one of those classic "I gathered you here today..." scenes.) Those witnesses very rarely invoke the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination for some reason (and anyone who watched the McCarthy hearings knew about the Fifth Amendment), but even more bizarrely, why are they in the room in the first place? I always believed they could be kept out while other witnesses were testifying, if one side invokes that rule. And as much as it appears it would make life easier for them at times, Mason and Burger always act like it never occurred to them.
Also, these almost always happen in the evidence/preliminary hearings, and never in front of a jury. That means many of these cases never make it as far as the grand jury. It makes some of Perry's antics seem more reasonable, since a lot more questions can be raised in earlier hearings than in front of a jury. But it also makes Burger's constantly repeated line, "Your honor, I object! Mr. Mason is clearly on a fishing expedition!" almost pointless since he's usually allowed to be on one in a preliminary hearing. (Plus the main reason for all of this: CBS and Paisano Productions were able to save a little money by not hiring 12-14 or so extras, including alternate jurors.)
We don't really know much about Perry. We often hear of him buying drinks for ladies but even that's to get information for a client. It's implied his longtime secretary, Della Street, kind of has a thing for him and perhaps they have an affair between hearings and depositions. Then again probably not, when would they have the time? We do see them occasionally go dancing together, much like Ben Casey did with fellow doctor Maggie Graham. (Erle Stanley Gardner actually married his own legal secretary who was the basis for the Della Street character.) We know he loves a good steak. Otherwise, as far as we know, Perry's girlfriend is criminal law and his hobby is being always right about everything. This may have been an outgrowth of what was happening off the screen: Burr and the rest of the cast put in long days and very few off-days, not giving Burr the time he desired for some of his real-life interests like philanthropy and growing flowers.
We actually get to know a lot more about Mason's preferred private investigator, Paul Drake, than we do about Perry; Paul loves food, loves the ladies, loves convertibles. And he's not big on museums; when Della once asked him what he knew about art, he replied, "I don't even know what I like!" Paul Drake may very well have the most fun part of the entire show, definitely the most dangerous. His posing as a naive "rock hound" looking for gold in one episode, just about cracked me up. William Hopper (son of famed Hollywood columnist Hedda Hopper) played Paul Drake. I wished Hopper had lived long enough to be in a 1970s cop or private eye show, I could just see him chasing after someone in a '73 Mercury Marquis. In addition to William Talman's portrayal of Burger, police Lt. Tragg was played by Ray Collins, who, like Burger, hated dealing with Mason and always seemed happier to beat Mason than to catch an actual, guilty suspect.
In addition to the most feared defense attorney and the most seemingly inept D. A. in television, we also got to meet every week, Mason's executive secretary, Della Street, played by the lovely Barbara Hale. She's the only other regular besides Burr to win an Emmy for the show.
The mostly reliable (at least by the writers) formula worked well for about five years; fans complained in season six that the scripts were starting to look tired, somewhat lame. So in season seven (1963-64, the year I was born), something happened--maybe new writers, positive network interference, some type of consultation, I don't know what--that improved the quality of the writing and dared the show to take new risks. The side effect was that the scripts began to get more complicated; Burr supposedly claimed he watched the final, edited prints of some episodes and still couldn't figure out the case or the motive.
The second episode of season seven, "The Case of the Deadly Verdict," actually shows Perry losing a case, one of only two instances involving a murder case (he also once lost a civil case). In fact, the show opens that way, with a jury delivering its verdict (that's well known character actor Olan Soule as the jury foreman; most remember him as Mayberry's choir director who had to deal with Barney Fife's really bad singing voice), and recommending the gas chamber for Perry's client (who lied her butt off to police to keep quiet about an affair that never even happened). Perry was able to sift through the million or so shattered pieces of his (really, really stupid) client's credibility to solve the case and get her off the hook, only after she refused to cooperate and the Supreme Court upheld the verdict.
The week I was born had Perry investigating "The Case of the Capering Camera," a surprising titillating episode about nude photographs, blackmail, and how they led to murder. It's fairly daring stuff for 1960s TV, and they don't just mention the incriminating photos in question; they're the center of the whole episode. (No, of course we don't actually see them, not even artfully obscured.) Jonathan Latimer wrote this episode and about 40 others, and also wrote the screenplay for one of my favorite film noirs, "The Big Clock."
The story opens with a "high fashion" model, Judith Blair, posing for a set of photos in the Karl Kadar studios in Los Angeles. (High fashion models are probably what we would now call supermodels.) The man taking the photos isn't Karl, but his accented, low-rent cousin, Jacob. Right in the middle of the shoot, he'll find her suddenly pointing a gun at him--his own gun, in fact. She demands the negatives and says she's already paid out $5,000 in blackmail money. She claims he has them in a cabinet in the darkroom, but he swears he hasn't had them in months. Then a shot rings out; we know it's not from her gun because we see no smoke or gunfire coming out of the barrel. (If Burger or Mason could ever subpoena the audience, this would all be over within seconds.) She sees a sliding door open and curtains blowing from the wind; this is apparently where those shots were fired. She runs away and we have our first commercial break.
Judith (played by Margo Moore, herself a former fashion model) tries to appear nonchalant as she leaves Karl Kadar's studio. She walks past a woman who's walking her dog, and the Scottie barks at her. As a man peeks from a nearby alley, Judith gets into her Corvette and drives away. Against the unusual beat of jazz-like music that the show used on rare occasions, the man gets into a Dodge sedan and follows her through the streets of L.A. She eventually loses him by turning into a driveway.
Being a film noir fan, I am loving this so far. The scene in which Judith was followed, for instance, looks like it could've very well come from a noir if it weren't for the early 1960s cars. The city of Los Angeles, a character in so many of those films, appears to be putting in an unbilled cameo.
Meanwhile, Karl arrives and meets Irene, the lady with the Scotty, the studio. The two arrive, and find Jacob's lifeless body lying on the floor. No gasps, screams, "Dear God!" or anything like that. They just stare silently for a few seconds before Irene says, "Well Karl, I suppose this means you're in charge of the blackmail department now."
Judith arrives home where her sister's in-laws are entertaining Perry Mason. It seems he's the family attorney, and the dad, Lewis (who's in line for an ambassadorship) had wanted him to take care of something...but whatever it was, he took care of it himself. We get to meet the family: Lewis, his wife Katherine, a retired model herself; and little sister Penny (Karyn Kupcinet) and her husband Norman. We'll find out she's in the pictures Judith was demanding; we'll also see Judith get a call from an answering service saying someone wanted her to know everything's been handled and she doesn't have to tell anyone anything.
Judith finally goes to see Perry at his office and tells him the whole story. She tells him she panicked; he asks if she fired it accidentally, she adamantly denies it.
When Perry and investigator Paul Drake return to the crime scene, they have a chance to question a few people themselves, including Karl Kadar, and agency owner Harper Green. Perry and Paul are surprised to hear the police ruling so far: suicide. Apparently there's residue and powder burns on the corpse to back it up.
Perry talks with Paul and with Della about his ethical dilemma: does he go to the police with what he knows (and implicate his client) or does he protect her confidence and the let the police think whatever? Meanwhile, he asks Paul to find the negatives and to find out what's in the ballistics report.
As we see Lt. Arthur Tragg (Ray Collins) and Lt.Andy Anderson (Wesley Lau) discuss the case, Tragg makes the call and finds out the ballistics indicate the gun was, indeed, used in a suicide. (The results come back in less than a day, one of those things that only happens on TV.) Tragg then tells Anderson to do something that sounds unconstitutional-ish: "...make Perry Mason your chief suspect." They also find the negatives of Judith's fashion shoot, including the one in which she's holding the gun.
Sure enough, the police tail Mason to the point they find, and arrest, Judith Blair.
We will come to find out, the sleazy Jacob would find models who needed money, offer them money for "calendar girl" photo shoots, then when the ladies would make more money on future jobs and/or get married, would start blackmailing them. We also get to the courtroom scenes: Mason gets the police to admit the time of death could've been any time between 7:10 and 7:50, and the photo of Judith holding the gun (taken by Jacob just before his death) doesn't prove it's the murder weapon. Eventually he'll get the cops and the D.A. to admit they originally felt the evidence pointed to a suicide, and that the gun they found was not registered (raising the possibility it's not even the murder weapon). Right about here is where Paul arrives to consult Mason with the new information, as he does in almost every show.
Paul makes an appeal to Penny for any information that will help save her sister; she produces one of the blackmail letters. Paul also visits Irene, the lady with the Scottie, who turns out to be an actress, Irene Grey filming a movie in which she plays a nun. It turns out she also had photos taken and was blackmailed and is concerned about getting mixed up in all of this, especially since it would lead to a scandal ending her career (and even her current movie) before it began.
Perry, having been given the key to the studio by Karl, goes back to look for a second pistol to corroborate a theory. Sure enough he finds it and it belonged to Karl. In the courtroom he gets Della and Paul to help him re-enact the gun switch. "Get on with your little play, we're all on pins and needles," history's losingest D.A. snappily tells Mason in court. Mason then grills several people in quick succession (a trademark of the show and a way to keep us guessing despite the formula). This leads us through a litany of suspects, likely and unlikely, until the moment the killer breaks down and sings on the stand...and it's Harper Green, the head of the agency, a man the police appeared to dismiss as a suspect early on and the show played down after that. It almost always happened that way, in fact. Oh, and he has the negatives.
This show was a "last" for four of the actors involved. Elaine Stewart, who played Irene Grey, never acted in a role again after this episode. She was going through a divorce when it was filmed; on New Year's Eve 1964 she'd marry the love of her life, game show producer Merrill Heatter. In the 1970s she'd come out of retirement to hold up cards or roll dice on two of Heatter's game shows, Gambit and High Rollers, apparently so the couple could spend time together at work. Byron Palmer, a singer in the 1950s, also never acted again after this episode.
The most shocking end is that of Karyn Kupcinet, who played Penny, found murdered in her home on Thanksgiving Day 1963, just six days after the Kennedy assassination. To this day, her murder remains unsolved. Obviously she didn't even live to see this episode after she filmed it.
And this would be the last we'd see of Lt. Tragg. Ray Collins was a veteran actor who had been part of Orson Welles' Mercury Players; in "Citizen Kane" he played the machine boss who ended Kane's first marriage and political career in one fell swoop. Health issues forced Collins to switch from series regular to semi-regular after the 1959-60 season, with Wesley Hau's Lt. Anderson picking up the slack. The two work together here for the last time. Collins died in 1965.
That had to be a blow to a close-knit cast, who also went to bat (especially Burr, as well as creator Erle Stanley Gardner) for William Talman. He had been fired from the show by CBS in 1960 following his arrest during a raid on a party where drugs were allegedly used. CBS invoked a "morals" clause in the contract. After Talman was exonerated of all wrong doing, Burr campaigned to get him rehired on the show, even appealing to individual CBS affiliates. It worked, and Burger was once again back on the show, objecting to fishing expeditions in December 1960.
The cast, who put in long hours together for this show, became very close and even had a special rack with their coffee mugs hanging from it. When Talman was off the show, Burr refused to let the studio remove his belongings from the dressing room and to remove his mug from the rack. Talman and Hopper shared a dressing room for years and were said to have never had an unkind word with each other that wasn't in the script.
Over the years the show was not without its critics. The National Association of County and Prosecuting Attorneys complained that the show left real-life jurors with the impression that the D.A. was the villain, the defense attorney was the hero, and that they should expect last minute theatrics, tricks, stunts and tearful sudden confessions. Then the cast themselves became critics of the scripts, with Burr calling the following season, 1964-65, a "bad year." Burr later reflected that the show and its long hours and theft of his personal life, left him with a lot of regrets that he didn't get married and settle down.
The 1963-64 season was the year the show dropped out of the Neilsen Top 25, losing its case for the viewers against Jimmy Dean's ABC variety show, and Dr. Kildare and Hazel on NBC. The final season, 1965-66, saw the show moved to Sunday nights opposite Bonanza, where it got clobbered.
The show experimented with a lot of ideas during that season; one of them, "The Case of the Twice-Told Twist," was a modern day take on the Oliver Twist story, this time involving a car theft ring. (Ford Mustangs appeared to be the car of choice for this gang.) The episode was the only one in the series filmed in color, apparently an experiment to persuade the network to pick up the series for a tenth season. It also had a little more action and fast jazz-type music than normal for the series. And it had a courtroom which, as always, was painted in black, while and shades of gray to accomodate black and white photography. It can be a real headache to watch with all the flesh tones and red neckties, and was a visual trainwreck to actually try to watch without turning down the color on your TV set.
By then, CBS had already announced the ninth season would be its last. The finale, "The Case of the Final Fadeout," included scenes in which the show's actual crew appeared on camera, Dick Clark as the man confessing to being the killer, and Erle Stanley Gardner himself as the judge.
The show would join Star Trek as one of the few hour-long shows to be a runaway hit in syndication, and is still a favorite on cable TV even now. Hopper and Talman would act rarely on camera again before their deaths; Burr sailed to Fiji, only to return in 1967 to a new show, Ironside, with a hectic schedule all its own.
But that doesn't mean this formula, that worked so well for the series, was done. Burr and Hale came back in 1985 for "Perry Mason Returns," the first in what turned out to be a highly successful series of TV movies for NBC. This time, Perry is a judge who leaves the bench to defend Della Street on a murder charge. This one was so successful it was the highest rated show of the week, and the second highest rated of the 1985-86 TV season. The same old formula has one tweak to accommodate a two hour running time: we know whodunit when we see the murder. But about halfway through the movie, we found out someone else put the person up to it. There were 26 of these TV movies in all, then four more after Burr's 1993 death, all of which included the phrase "A Perry Mason Mystery" in the title, and Barbara Hale still in the cast.
During this same era, this same formula was also dusted off for another lawyer show: Andy Griffith's Matlock, which included some of the same producers and writers. Its tweak was something Perry Mason chose not to do: character development. Southern-based attorney Ben Matlock was full of quirks and ticks, and we often saw him interact with the real world and had a decent idea what he did when he wasn't being an attorney. Matlock was a deeper character. Basically, unlike Perry Mason, Ben Matlock had a life.
And it still may not be over. After 80 years, Perry's return to the big screen is being plotted as I write this, with Iron Man himself, Robert Downey Jr. ready to take over the title role. It will be set in the 1930s, when the original movies and some of the original novels were set. It remains to be seen whether they'll stick to the tried and true TV formula or reinvent one for today's audiences.
Still, the old black and white Perry Mason can look like something of a relic now, like old, dusty law books on a shelf, with all of the court rulings that have changed a lot of things since the show was on. In fact, it left the air just as the Miranda ruling came down from the Supreme Court, a ruling that had a profound effect, for instance, on the newly revamped version of Dragnet that returned in 1967. And it seemed quaint just two years later, amid assassinations, rioting, protests, and presidential candidate Richard Nixon's vows to fight for what he called "law and order," filled the airwaves. But still, the story structure remained very compelling in the reruns and still reaches in and grabs fans of legal TV.
Just as the Perry Mason movies and Matlock were making a big splash on 1980s TV, a new, upstart show, L. A. Law, premiered. It was prided itself on being everything Perry Mason was not: they told their stories in story arcs; murder wasn't the center of every episode; they had an ensemble cast, full of attorney characters who didn't always win cases; they clashed over the inner workings of the firm; the show followed them off the clock and to home; Susan Dey's character was even a prosecutor, and later a judge. One of the show's creators said at the time, if a story idea looked too Perry Mason they'd throw it out, but then said, "...but that doesn't mean we don't respect the hell out of its storytelling." By the 1980s the stories had changed drastically and so, sometimes, are the way they're told. But a compelling story is still a compelling story. And it all still resonates: I still have yet to hear from an attorney or prosecutor who ever told me, "Judd for the Defense made me want to be an attorney."
Availability: the entire series is available on DVD, and can be downloaded from Amazon.
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