A Time Capsule that’s just been sitting there waiting
(1957-1966)
You’re going to think this is as bad as being directed to the Hallmark Channel, the Lifetime Movie Network, or reruns of Fantasy Island. It isn’t.
Yes, we found it because we’re old and remember when we watched it with grandparents or at home on Blaxk and white TVs. But this is one of those rare cases where the experience of seeing it again is better than the clichéed memory. There’s a lot more to watch than the one true plot of Perry identifying the murderer on the stand against all odds and confounding D.A. Hamilton Burger and Lieutenant Tragg yet again.
You realize almost immediately that you’re visiting a skillfully produced presentation of a completely different, bygone world that makes every episode fun to watch. The first two or three years will do. Unbelievably, they made 30 a year from 1957 to 1960. Each episode is 52 minutes long, which means advertising was confined to about 7+ minutes, compared to the 12-14 minutes per hour of ads on network shows now.
With the benefit of hindsight, the set design and props seem as if they were consciously designed as perfect evocations of a specific time and place, the city and lifestyle of Los Angeles at the apogee of American confidence and style. Long shots of the city are gorgeous, gleaming white and unobtrusively prosperous looking. Perry Mason’s office is large, modernistic, and decorated with only a few touches of vanity, including a bust of Voltaire on which Mason hangs his hat when he enters. No lavish furniture or cocktail appurtenances. Just a desk, chairs, and enough floor space for troubled clients to emote in and Tragg to stride menacingly across when he swoops in for the arrest. Perry Mason’s eminence is just a given, not a function of flash or personal affectations.
The lack of ostentation doesn’t mean there’s nothing to look at. I naturally fixated on the cars, my wife on the clothes. There are elements of the past that persist into the present, notably the popularity of Chrysler models as police cars. Which is a great starting point for the significance of this time period as a productive and important revisiting of an iconic and frequently overlooked time in American life.
I was so fascinated by seeing cars I remembered from my own youth, looking new and dramatically different from today’s kidney bean shaped clones, that I spent a lot of time gathering pics to show you. It was fun but was it worthwhile as a point of reentry to 1957? For some reason I kept flashing on the John Carpenter movie Christine, a Plymouth horror story that has nothing to do with Perry Mason. Or does it?
In my usual effect-cause-reversal in life experience, I was watching some Canadian cop series from the 2000s on the Pluto service when the software spazzed at an ad break and dumped me into Pluto’s default online movie of the moment. Christine. Wouldn’t you know it? Must be some reason for it. I stayed. Within a couple minutes, the most memorable scene of the whole flick began.
The “Show me” scene, bringing the maligned Fifties back to life. Aimed specifically at me.
A destroyed 1957 Plymouth forces itself violently itself back from the dead to embark on a mysterious mission of vengeance. Against what? Christine was made in 1983. The thuggish antagonists to Christine’s owner had a vintage Detroit muscle car of their own, a 1966 Camaro that the supernatural Plymouth hunted down and annihilated with its occupants in an incredibly relentless and fiery execution. After which Christine remade herself again. I was struck by the coincidence of dates. The 1957 and 1966 model years. Corresponding to the exact span of the original Perry Mason show. 10 years of not just one popular television series, but a period of tremendous change and explosive turmoil in American life. 10 years perhaps that represent the ‘Before’ of the nation we have come to be since. What was so different about the Perry Mason years? A lot that would soon be changing dramatically.
Black and white television for one thing. NBC had dipped a toe in color broadcasting by 1957 (when the hydrogen bomb had been in the U.S. arsenal for four years already), but CBS was the last of the networks to make the transition. I believe the best series of that era was another lawyer show, The Defenders, also in black and white and still the best written legal series I have ever seen, conspicuously not yet one of the free offerings of the streaming services. The writing was generally better then, and for all its dramatic license with the law and courtroom procedure, Perry Mason is also written at a level far above today’s drama series. The dialogue is spare, witty, and very subtly tongue in cheek in the interactions of the regulars. The black and white is used as an esthetic tool to enhance the viewing experience, providing the clean narrative look that was always the advantage over color in the movies, long after B&W had become an option rather than a necessity. Gone With the Wind was a gorgeous color fantasy in 1939; fifteen years later Elia Kazan chose to make On the Waterfront, one of the greatest movies of all time, in nonfiction black and white. (In fact, the closest I have ever seen to a convincing 3D movie was Charles Laughton’s 1955 masterpiece Night of the Hunter, of which I saw a restored print in a real movie theater. Spellbinding cinematography.) Perry Mason producers used monochrome to help cover over the license they continually took with the law and enhance the stark contrasts depicted in the plots. Good and bad, guilt and innocence, win and lose, no shades of gray. All in on the black vs white palette for the principal characters. It worked. Where the cars had an important supporting role to play.
All of this was still in the future as Perry Mason made a fool of his perpetual victim DA Hamilton Burger. Before taking the second look I’m sharing with you now, that was my whole memory of the show I watched as a kid with my grandfather, who liked Perry Mason almost as much as he liked Grouch’s You Bet Your Life. In my memory it all happened in that Spartan courtroom, with Perry hiding his time until in the final act he hired in and hammered a witness with brutal (never shouted) questions that ended with tearful confessions of murder. And, of course, the crushed chagrin of Hamilton Burger shocked by yet another last-second defeat.
But my memory was incorrect. The plots are a good deal more intricate and various than an unchanging final courtroom scene. Often, Perry is the one who discovers the body of the victim. He encounters his share of unpleasant surprises from clients, damning physical evidence, mistakes in court, and some desperate last-minute brainstorming. The identification of the killer does not always occur in court. He is not infallible. It’s just that he, and Justice, always win in the end.
What else remains the same from episode to episode? Some very good things. Chief among these is the absence of personal soap opera subplots among the principals. We are never bored with intimate details of the private lives of Perry, Della, Paul, Tragg, and Burger. Their conversations are always on point, well written with humorous asides, and as efficiently paced as the plot. We know just enough to like them and entertain our own suspicions about the relationship between Perry and his Secretary, Paul Drake’s probably quite successful love life, and Tragg’s secret enjoyment of Burger’s eternal discomfiture.
Most notable about the cast is Raymond Burr. He is Perry Mason. Always a gentleman, always direct, he is always truthful too, though careful with it, and he does not complain or abuse judges, prosecutors, employees, or clients. He can be hard on witnesses and liars. He does not waste words. Everyone seems to know not to lay hands on Perry Mason. He is never afraid. It is completely his show and he is calmly aware of that fact. He’s the hero in a dark suit and white shirt. Why it’s so great that all the supporting members of the cast play exactly the parts so well written for them without scene-stealing tricks. Della can steal scenes without trying though.
As a general rule, the Perry Mason show is marked by the absence of overacting, except for necessary dramatic purposes by frightened clients and Hamilton Burger when he has been frustrated for the umpteenth time. Even Lieutenant Tragg turns in a masterfully nuanced performance, different in manner with Mason than he is in his public role as ruthless minion of the law. Ray Collins, the actor who played Tragg was 75 when the series started. My wife couldn’t believe it when I told her. He does look old but he’s as spry as can be and alert as a hawk. And history gives us a different perspective on Hamilton Burger as well, played by William Talman. In a show whose actors and actresses seemed to have lived consistently into their mid- and late-eighties, the exceptions are the two William, Hopper and Talman, who both died in their early fifties. Talman famously fought a long battle with lung cancer and made a courageous television spot toward the end to warn everyone away from the cigarettes that were killing him. There are signs of this even fairly early in the series, when scenes have to be written around Burger’s gimpy leg, his laryngitis, with episode stretches of assistant DAs filling in for an other occupied Disreict Attorney. He did a great job as Hamilton Burger. He was by no means a fool in person. We never even got to see what kind of car he drove. Talk about getting no respect.
I know I’ve dwelt a lot on cars. Sorry. I’m still part motorhead. But I’m just as impressed by the men’t tailoring as their Detroit iron. Mason and his semi-exclusive private detective Paul Drake are always faultlessly attired. Like everyone else, I had gradually come to think of the late Fifties as an era of baggy suits, ridiculously skinny ties, and squashy looking hats. Not here. Raymond Burr used to joke about being surprised at getting the Perry Mason role because he was “already fat and forty” at the time. I have never seen better cut suits on a big man than Burr’s in this show. The only thing you notice about them is that they’re just right in every way without making him look like a dandy. Paul Drake gets the dandy treatment, but I’m hard put to think when I’ve seen that better done either. Even the hats are crisp and cool. Some of the men’s suiting fabrics are clearly impeccable, even in black and white.
When the eye for clothing turns to the women, things get more serious because you start to realize the scale of the differences between then and now. Nothing too revealing, not even with women of compromised reputations. The fashion archetype was ladylike. Tasteful, unostentatious jewelry. Lovely hats (with a few deliberate exceptions). We were probably either or ten episodes in before I saw Della Street in an outfit I thought didn’t quite suit her. Just a quibble. She wears skirts and sweaters, suits, dresses, and it’s a pleasure to watch her walk, trailing a subtle attraction behind her. The exception noticeable on a lot of the women (not Della) is the bullet bra, that is, an artificial pointiness underneath tailored tops. These ladies are not sexless or unaware of the power they hold and exert in even the tiniest gestures.
Why make a fuss about this? Because it forces you to realize they knew how to do things we don’t give the Fifties and early Sixties much credit for. Attention to detail. Elegant efficiency with a touch of class. Not just a bunch of boring drones chained to primitive TV sets and over-the top writers like Desi Arnaz and Milton Berle. I actually don’t recall anyone watching or even owning a TV on this show. That’s not how everyone spent their time. Books make frequent appearances. Fine art too.
What’s missing? There are black and Asian characters, but not many. Non shortage of Hispanic names but no plots involving their race. Because of this, I looked up the racial breakdown of the population of Los Angeles in the relevant timeframe. The only categories listed then were ‘white’ and ‘non-white’, which grouping included both Asians and Hispanics ‘with African Features’ in addition to blacks. (All other Hispanics were considered white until 1970.) Which in 1957 and 1958 was recorded as 8 percent. What a difference the urban migrations set in motion by LBJ's Great Society have made in the last 60 years. The Hollywood actor population of ‘nonwhites’ may not even have been as high as 8 percent. I can’t confirm that one way or the other.
What I can confirm is that politics does not figure in the plots of these shows, which is an enormous relief and one of the reasons I sought it out. I don’t know what I was expecting. Maybe something like another show we followed for a while for the same kind of escape, Murder She Wrote. In fact MSW was more like an opposite of Perry Mason. A relatively recent show trying to recapture some of the innocence of 1950s and 1960s TV fare. We wound up watching a season of two, amazed by the old names pulled out of retirement to put a familiar if agèd face on the nostalgia theme. Trying to guess where we knew that wizened face from was part of the fun. The writing was plodding, the plotting full of holes, and the whole held together only by the star quality and easy command of Angela Lansbury.
The opposite. Trying to identify the faces of Perry Mason cast members whom we knew mostly when they got older and more successful. Too many to list here. A surefire sign of good producers and directors — they pick talent before they become famous. Rare exceptions here, of course. Two episodes, for example, with Fay Wray as early murder victim. Otherwise comparisons favor a Perry Mason quite a lot. Better writing, better regulars, better plots, and fsr better pacing and suspense.
That’s it for the Time Capsule promotion. How to end it? Back to Christine and her great revenge on the 1966 Camaro in 1983. (Binus musical appearance by The Rolling Stones.)
Enjoy and thanks for reading…
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