I’ve been watching a lot of Perry Mason on one of those old TV stations. I think he pretty much always wins. Usually cuz the cops didn’t do a good job finding the real killer.
While I am sure there were isolated movies or Tv show episodes that might show the legal system in a poor light, generally the police were portrayed as hard working honest investigators.
On Alfred Hitchcock Presents, even when it seemed like the bad guy got away with it, Hitchcock would come on for his epilogue and inform the viewer that the cops eventually caught him and sent him to jail. Kinda a “crime doesn’t pay” rule Hollywood had.
Perry Mason always did represent innocent people. Still seems odd though that the cops were often portrayed as jerks who couldn’t solve anything and would always charge the wrong person.
Noble defense attorney shows are common these days but Perry Mason seems unique to me for the era. And it was a popular show.
The police aren’t incompetent; it’s just that the evidence clearly points toward Perry’s client. It’s just that there is an alternate explanation that fits even better.
But it goes back almost to the beginning of detective stories. Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” had the cops doing an extensive search without finding what they were looking for, and Dupin finds it easily.
Most classic private detective stores have the detective finding things the police overlooked. You can see it in “The Thin Man” for example. If the cops can solve the crime, the detective would be out of a job.
Erle Stanley Gardner worked very hard on clearing wrongly convicted people - a project called The Court of Last Resort - this real work was dramatized on a 1950s TV seriea of the same name, which talked about real cases where police and prosecutors were corrupt and/or incompetent (The Court of Last Resort - Wikipedia)
Likewise, Lestrade in the Sherlock Holmes stories is shown to be a competent enough investigator, but too conventional in his thinking for the sort of cases that Holmes worked.
To clarify, my question was in regard to the uniqueness of Perry Mason for the era. Edgar Allen Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle weren’t active 1957-1966 and subject to Hollywood rules.
“The court of last resort” seems more like a more valid reply.
Los Angeles, where Gardner and Mason were based, was notorious even among other large cities for the utter corruption and brutality of their police force. Given that their competition included Chicago and New York, that’s quite the feat.
As said above, most amateur detectives in mid-century detective novels couldn’t exist if police forces were competent, although nobody in the real world could ever solve most puzzle murder mysteries. Some worked with the police, mostly there to gather facts through their superior numbers, and then astounded them with their feats of deductive genius. Then they’d hand the least-likely suspect over to the police and the courts, who would usually have to throw out the case because no prosecutor could get a real jury to sit through fifty pages of insights that read like a conspiracy theory manifesto.
The hardboiled crowd of private detectives tended to hate the police as much as the police hated PIs. Cops beat them senseless regularly - I read one in which the hero was tortured unconscious twice inside a police station - and assumed that justice was impossible within the system.
Some noir movies after WWII captured this attitude, but television shows couldn’t show anything like that. Police had to be heroes. PIs existed but either palled with the cops or simply worked around them. Mason was an outlier, but the show didn’t show that cops were evil. For dramatic reasons, they were always wrong but Mason worked entirely within the system and depended on honest, unbiased judges for his side to prevail. That’s the complete opposite of the earlier system-is-corrupt crowd.
AFAIK Perry Mason never simply got a “not guilty” verdict; he actively proved that someone else did the crime. Needless to say that doesn’t happen in 99+% of trials. Mason got a pass because he was a genius enough to present the police and prosecutors with a replacement case. As said upthread the authorities weren’t incompetent, just that the prima facie evidence pointed to an innocent.
I always thought it was odd that Perry Mason practiced law in the same place where Joe Friday enforced it. Yet the shows couldn’t be more different.
I do think the show did much to make criminal defense attorneys positive figures in the media - something that helped influence public perception of high-profile trials.
Speaking of the TV show, most of Perry’s “trials” in the original show are pre-trial hearings. IIRC, it was done to avoid having to pay 12 actors to play in a trial recreation. Of course, that showed how good Perry Mason was, most of his cases never reached the trial stage!
Just missing your era is “The Bold Ones: The Lawyers”, which ran 1968–1972, ed which featured the lawyers defending/investigating clients whom the police had arrested as the obvious culprits. While it started only two years after Perry Mason ended, 1968 is culturally a very different year from 1966, so I don’t think it counts,… But close!
As has been mentioned, one solid reason for the trope ‘Perry Mason solves the case the police could not’ is the elevation of the hero–in this case a defense attorney basically acting as a private detective–to the status of being the Smartest Guy. People traditionally enjoy stories about the Smartest Guy showing up others.
But another reason for this PM trope’s popularity–from the 1930s, as mentioned above, to the TV show’s fifties and sixties–is that there was an assumption that audiences prefer to identify with a good guy helping other good people. Until Law & Order made prosecutors popular, there were few show premised on the idea that the prosecutor is the Good Guy.
It’s not so much that the PM premise is left-wing or is based on the idea of ‘cops, and the policing system in general, often fail’–which would be a subversive concept. The Perry Mason purveyors were not going for subversion. They were going for that combo of the popular themes ‘smartest guy figures it out’ and ‘good guy helps good people.’
There were some that were very successful, probably led by Mr. District Attorney which ran on radio for a decade, spawned three movies, and moved over to television in the 1950s.
Tons of comic books in the 30s and 40s used crusading district attorneys as heroes, probably pinging off of pulp stories that featured them.
And ironically, another top series were the books starring crusading D.A. Doug Selby, which happened to be written by Erle Stanley Gardner.
And you’re saying that any of those reached the level of popularity and enshrinement in pop-culture of Perry Mason?
Obviously they did not.
Also, your reply seemed to be to someone saying ‘there were no shows premised on the idea that the prosecutor is the Good Guy.’ Again, obviously, I hadn’t posted that.