I’ve been watching reruns on cable of the late raymond Burr as “Perry Mason”. I am addicted to the show! The plots were well done, and the shows really hold my interest!
Was Raymond Burr actually a lawyer? And, how many of the cast 9if any) are still alive?
The guy who played Perry’s friend (the private detective)-what was his name?
Burr wasn’t a lawyer.
The private dick was “Paul Drake.”
About the only one who is still alive is Barbara “Della Street” Hale, who is the mother of William “Greatest American Hero and Blood-Soaked Prom King” Katt.
Lt. Tragg (don’t recall the actor, and don’t feel like looking it up) was very ill the last season or so, and died soon after the series ended (or maybe even the last season).
Hamilton Burger died of cancer shortly after the show ended.
Paul Drake died just a few years after the end of the show.
One thing that just bugged me about the show–even knowing that "It’s just a TV show–is Hamilton Burger. Week in and week out he’s trying to nail the wrong person. Every MFing time. You’d wonder how he was able to keep his job if he could be so wrong and never get anything right.
Paul Drake was played by William Hopper (son of Hedda Hopper)
and Raymond Burr was in maybe 25 movies in small parts until he was Lars Thorwald in Rear Window (1954).
My favorite Raymond Burr portrayal is still his inserted scenes in the American version of the original **Godzilla[/b}. For those of you who haven’t seen it, the American distributors litterally filmed Burr standing amid a bunch of Asian extras and then inserted those scenes into the original Japanese version hoping to get more Americans to watch the film.
But getting back to the OP, while Burr was not a lawyer, the author of the books (and many of the screen plays of the original books) Erle Stanley Gardner was indeed an attorney. And in the final show of the original series, Gardner played the judge in the court portion.
I remember reading an article in the late '60s that judges were getting upset because too many attorneys were coming out of law schools and being theatrical like Perry Mason instead of being staid and controlled as (apparently) they had been in the past.
TV
The books were a lot better. Gardner had, er, faults as a writer, but he had some interesting plots. He could make an entire novel revolve around a technical point of law. In the show, Perry Mason solves the case by getting the murderer to confess on the witness stand. In the books he solves the case quite often before it got to the grand jury. On television, the truth sets Perry’s client free. In the books, only Perry and the reader ever find out the whole truth, because the stories are structured so that even though the client is innocent, the truth tends to incriminate her. Perry’s job is not to reveal the truth in a triumphant climax, but to manipulate the revealation of the truth so that he is in control of who knows what, when they know it and how they find out, and thus what conclusions they draw from it. The TV show is hard to take seriously after you’ve read the books.
My favorite episode was the one where Burr shot Hamilton.
And anyone ever notice that Paul Drake had a phone in his convertible? I kid you not, he had some kind of cell phone/radio deal he could call Perry with.
Joe Mannix also had a phone, and I’d be willing to bet Amos Burke had one, too.
One other “regular” from the series is still alive. After Ray (Lt. Tragg) Collins died, the series needed a new police detective, and the job went to Richard Anderson, who played Lieutenant Drumm.
Some people may remember Anderson better as Oscar Goldman, the boss of “The $6 Million Man.”
Zen101 wrote:
In the 50’s a company called Mobile Telephone Service provided phone access over radio. It required a tranceiver that took up half the trunk (well, maybe not half of a 50’s trunk). You had to radio the operator with the number to be connected to a phone line, and communication was only one way. You held down the button while you talked, and let it go while you listened.
Years later, somebody developed a mobile phone no bigger than a milk carton, and standing in line at the bank was never the same again.
I don’t want to get all picky on you, but that’s still two-way communication. It’s just not full duplex, where both can talk at the same time. Whether it’s called half duplex or singlex I can’t recall.
To be fair to the guy…Lars Thorwald WAS a small part, though he was central to the plot. He’s only in one scene where you’re not seeing him across a courtyard and through two panes of glass.
Burr had a big fat juicy part earlier on – MacDonald, the sleazy, scary private eye – in the brilliant 1948 film noir Pitfall, starring Dick Powell and Lizabeth Scott.
Half-duplex is perfectly descriptive of push-to-talk radio communication. Simplex is exclusively one-way, like a television or commercial radio signal.
I was always put off by the shoddiness of the prosecution’s case, including not even checking the eyewitness accounts.
Perry, to prosecution witness: It’s your testimony that you saw my client driving away from the victim’s home on the night of the murder?
Witness: Uh, yeah.
Perry: Then how do you explain the gas station attendant who fueled up your car at a station in Bakersfield, fifty miles away!
Oy.
KneadToKnow wrote:
D’oh. I knew that, or at least I knew that radios that operated on that basis were called two-way radios.
Ukulele Ike wrote:
You might also want to check out William “Hamilton Berger” Tallman in the 1953 noir Hitch-Hiker, directed by Ida Lupino herself. He’s creeeeepy.
IIRC, Willaim Talman is buried in Forest Lawn cemetery. His gravestone notest that he played Hamilton Burger. This is a common pratice on the gravestones of obscure actors there.
Ray Collins (Lt. Tragg) lives in my memory best as George’s uncle in “The Magnificent Ambersons,” who delivers that bittersweet farewell at the train station; as good an old man’s reminiscence as Everett Sloane’s recalling the girl on the ferry in “Citizen Caine.”
You’re forgetting a big part Burr had in A Place in the Sun* (1951), as the grim district attorney who convicts Montgomery Clift of murder. His melodramatic courtroom summation, complete with oar smashing, is the climax of the movie.
Burr, of course, was also in “Ironside.”
And now for your daily bit of trivia: Who shot Ironside?
Wasn’t it the older woman who was having an affair with the young guy who had spent some time in juvenile detention? She shot the young guy and left a fake suicide note, and ended up jumping into the lake on fire when Ironside figured it out.
I have no idea what her name was…
Hence Burger’s name: it’s obviously derived from “Ham Burger,” which is what Mason made him into each week.