I’ve always wondered who had the better winning percentage: Perry Mason or Meadowlark Lemon?
Yeah, Mason was always hiding clients, instructing them to evade the law (if not outright break it), etc. This goes on in the books as well.
My father LOVED the Perry Mason shows and books. Like many others, I was first exposed to the shows, and then I found and read the books. Despite the flaws, I enjoyed both shows and books.
I watched it in college (Late 80’s) all the time, as it came on at 1am or something. In fact, I had watched it so much that by the time I saw Rear Window for the first time I shouted “It’s Perry Mason!”
I remember one episode where Mason had Della get a $1000 bill from the bank and offer some farmer it for some reason, just so he could see where the farmer hid his vaulable stuff. (IIRC the evidence Perry was looking for was also hidden by the farmer).
Remember, a lot more people used cash exclusively or almost exclusively. I’m not sure that there were ANY chain banks as we know them…that is, a bank might have a branch office or two in the same city as the main bank, but banks wouldn’t have branches in other states. They might not have branches in another county, just in neighboring cities.
Enjoyed the show. In retrospect it was amusing how many shows ended with a witness box confession variant of “I did it and I’m glad I did!”
As a side note it was interesting that Burr was apparently a huge queen in real life and I never got so much as blip on my gaydar. He played straight very convincingly.
Even so, just think of the Law And Order franchise comprising several distinct series. Though it plays on the opposite team from Perry Mason, as it were, it works through the procedural steps in much the same way as Perry Mason. A major reason for that may be that the audience for that type of show wants to see all the details. A few other TV drama series, mainly ones focusing on other aspects of criminal justice, like police procedure and forensics, seem similar in that respect. Here I’m thinking of shows like Bones and Rizzoli & Isles. Although both these shows feature an element of humor based on the main characters’ personalities and mutual relations, the overall pacing seems similar to those of the 1950s.
To respond to the question, I’ve only seen a very few episodes of Perry Mason, but I thought they were great. Big Dragnet fan, too, of both the radio and TV versions.
I used to watch reruns in the mid 1970s with my father. He wasn’t much of a TV watcher but “Mason” was an exception. He used to yell out things during the courtroom sequences such as “Burger’s winning now”, “You’re all wet, burger” and then when the judge ruled in favor of Mason on an objection, it was “A Ha, the tide is turning, Mason will wipe the floor with Burger”. And then as the
5 minutes before the hour, it was “almost time, is this guy going to confess…Yes, he did it! Five minutes left in the show!”.
back then I thought it was hard to identify the male characters because virtually everyone had a short hair/crew cut, wore a suit and tie and it was in black and white.
Nowadays it is handy to have imdb and find out what these actors/actresses did in their careers. I remember watching one a few months ago and thinking one of the woman was very beautiful. Who was she? Joanna Moore, mother of Tatum O’Neal, proving beauty every now and then skips a generation.
Trivia facts I remember Barbara Hale saying when she hosted a Perry Mason marathon years ago. Raymond Burr originally auditioned for Hamilton Burger (his career had been playing heavies in movies like “Rear Window” and “The Adventures of Don Juan”). Mason author Earl Stanley Gardner (who made sure he had a lot of control since he didn’t like earlier movie and radio versions, said “That’s Perry Mason!”. To make sure he got the role, Mason had himself locked in a hotel room to lose weight.
Some people have mentioned William Hopper being the son of gossip columnist Hedda Hopper. His father, DeWolf Hopper, was a vaudevillian who made the poem “Casey at the Bat” popular by reciting it a whole lot of times in an overwrought manner (at least as surviving clips show). William didn’t want his mother pulling strings for him to have an acting career and avoided the film business for years after WWII.
Loved this show, and the books when I was a kid. Burr worked himself half to death on the show. It was incredibly popular, and they wanted to kick out one hour dramas every week. The first season had 39 episodes produced and aired in a nine month period. His later series of TV movies were very successful, a product of continuing good will from the original series.
Despite the success of Perry Mason, and later Ironside, Burr’s greatest role was, of course, as a reporter named after a future comedian, actor, and banjo player in the Americanized version of the original Godzilla.
There was a thread a few months ago about “who do you suspect as gay in Hollywood” and a couple of us mentioned some lines in “Perry Mason” scripts. One of them was
Della Street (entering Perry’s office" “There’s a young man and woman to see you”.
Perry Mason “Tell them I’m busy”
Della (cooing) “She is very pretty”
Mason “Did you happen to notice what the man looked like? (giving in). Alright, send them in”.
Now that I think of it, I wonder if having Hedda Hopper’s son in the cast helped shield Raymond Burr. She couldn’t well expose him as gay if it would end the show and her son’s job. Of course Hedda’s bitter enemy and fellow dingbat Louella Parsons could but may even putting Hedda’s kid on the unemployment line was something that Louella’s few scruples couldn’t abide.
My ex-wife loved the show, and I watched a bunch with her. Thought they were great.
I noticed that the first-season eps seemed much more authentic, courtroom-procedure-wise. She said it was because those were based more closely on actual plots from the books. As time went on, the scriptwriters went off on their own and started writing stuff that would have called for an immediate objection from any decent lawyer.
Also, she loved to refer to the DA as “Ham Burger.”
NOW I know where the lawyer who represented Kramer in the “coffee scalding” case got his lines! (“Outrageous, fallacious, salacious!”)
Just how many stars did she EVER out?
And so did a lot of people. And it wasn’t coincidence. Erle Stanley Gardner created the name withe exactly that in mind, so that Perry Mason would grind the prosecutor into “hamburger.”
He was always depicted as highly competent and trustworthy in the books, though his appearance heralded exposition and jokes about the soggy hamburgers he finds himself having to eat on stakeouts.
DENNY CRANE!
…I’m just sayin…
Apparently she spread rumours about Michael Wilding (who?) and Stewart Granger. Wilding won a lawsuit. Also she wanted to expose Cary Grant and Randolph Scott but Grant was too big
Hope this doesn’t spoil it for too many people, but it’s said that the real murderer is always the person who’s on the stand twenty-five minutes into the show. What’s that work out to when the commercials are omitted?
As the courtroom scenes almost always start at about the halfway point in the show, I don’t see how that could be the case.
Right after the halfway point… :rolleyes:
Today, an hour-long show is 40 minutes of show, 20 minutes of commercials/station breaks/etc. Assuming the same was true in the 50’s (a shaky assumption), “25 minutes in” is going to be about 18 minutes of “show-time”.
Having not watched PM since the 70’s, I have no idea if your spoiler is correct.