The cancellation of Perry Mason in 1966 brought about a great many changes for this inveterate TV viewer. Burke’s Law, which had been transformed in its third season from murder mystery to spy thriller, was also cancelled. In fact, the whodunnit went into hibernation for several years after 1966, replaced by action series where private eyes led with their fists rather than the facts in order to catch bad guys. The popularity of James Bond in the movies had also had its effect: Mission: Impossible replaced Mason, and it was sensational. The Man from U.N.C.L.E. was halfway through its four-season NBC run, and soon every network would come up with their own takes on espionage and PI series, from Mannix to The Mod Squad. And if you felt like laughing, there was always Get Smart.
I watched them all, but I was also developing a new passion for science fiction. Lost in Space had a terrific first season, but then it switched from black and white to color – and to farce. That was okay, since Star Trek came along in 1966 and helped me grow up. The following year, producer Quinn Martin was looking for something to replace his long-running hit The Fugitive. What he wanted was another series about a man on the run, and he didn’t really care what sent him running! Martin noticed the huge culture of wonder and paranoia surrounding the frequent reports of U.F.O.s, as well as the success of many films of the 1950s and 60s about alien invasions. And that’s how we got . . .
“The Invaders – a Quinn Martin production!
“The Invaders, alien beings from a dying planet. Their destination: the Earth. Their purpose: to make it their world. David Vincent has seen them. For him, it began one lost night on a lonely country road, looking for a shortcut that he never found. It began with a closed deserted diner, and a man too long without sleep to continue his journey. It began with the landing of a craft from another galaxy. Now David Vincent knows that the Invaders are here, that they have taken human form. Somehow he must convince a disbelieving world that the nightmare has already begun.”
The Invaders packed many changes in itt two two seasons. It started as a paranoid thriller, much like the film Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Like Dr. Miles Bennell, David Vincent had a heck of a time convincing anyone that the aliens were real, and whenever he succeeded, the monsters would use their alien technology to make David’s new allies die “of natural causes.” Much of the suspense of that first season was trying to figure out which of the guest stars were monsters in human disguise. Fortunately, there were a couple of “tells” to look for: aliens would glow red when they weren’t feeling well, and a lot of them had deformed pinkies that stuck out like they were at a mad tea party.
As the list of believers and allies grew, the show’s paranoia factor decreased and it became more of a series about war and strategy . . . in short, it was a lot less fun. But I stuck it out to the end of the second season when the show was abruptly cancelled and we were left with a vague hope that things would turn out okay. Honestly, The Invaders probably wasn’t a very good show, but I can still remember the pilot, and actor Roy Thinnes waking up in his car to behold the landing of a spaceship. Those first episodes were creepy fun, and I was rooting for David Vincent to defeat the aliens – except, ironically, his success would have killed the series.
So why am I talking to you about The Invaders? Because as I have been making my way through the original teleplays of Perry Mason, I noted a most interesting fact: as I pinpointed actors to highlight and looked up their careers on IMDB, it turns out that a huge number who appeared on Perry Mason also guest-starred on The Invaders. Hell! even William Tallman – District Attorney Hamilton Burger himself – made one of his final appearances playing an alien on The Invaders! The list grew and grew until I simply had to split it into two parts; after all, Halloween is fast approaching and you deserve a super-sized fright fest for the occasion. So here are tidbits (the bloody bits, mind you!) about five actors who appeared in both series! (We’ll talk about five more of them on Halloween Day!)
SPECIAL SCI-FI BONUS: It seems that a LOT of these folks also appeared on the classic series The Outer Limits, as you will see . . . Cue the spooky space music!
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Although fans of shlocky horror series might best remember him as evil shop owner Lewis Vendredi on the Canadian show, Friday the 13th, the Series, R. G. Armstrong is one of our most prestigious entries today. Born in Alabama to a fundamentalist Christian farming family, Armstrong’s mother sent him to college to become a pastor. He ended up at the Actor’s Studio in New York! Armstrong really wanted to write rather than perform, and he did manage to write some plays and novels. But the stage beckoned, and he ended up in the original production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, playing the doctor but eventually stepping in as Big Daddy.
Armstrong exuded all the qualities needed for a good actor in Westerns. He became a favorite of director Sam Peckinpah, who often put the actor into the role of a slightly unhinged Bible thumper in films such as Ride the High Country, Major Dundee and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. On television, Armstrong appeared in nearly every major Western series, including Bonanza, Maverick, The Rifleman, Wagon Train, and Gunsmoke, to name a very few! But he also appeared in films and on series that might appeal more to fans of mystery and horror. He played Pruneface in Dick Tracy, the last surviving adult in the community of Children of the Corn, and a Satanic sheriff in Race with the Devil. He also appeared in episodes of Ellery Queen and McMillan and Wife.
Having already appeared in Quinn Martin’s hit series The Fugitive, it was only natural that Armstrong show up in The Invaders; in fact, appeared in two very different roles. In the Season One episode “Panic,” he played a rural father named Gus Flagg trying to protect his daughter from an alien struck with a disease that gives him a freezing touch. Flagg joins forces with David Vincent to bring down the alien, only to be frozen to death before the episode ends. Armstrong’s second appearance, during Season Two, is a noteworthy one: in “The Life-Seekers,” he portrays a police captain who leads a dragnet against an alien couple. The odd thing here is that the alien pair are actually dissenters amongst their race who oppose the invasion against Earth. Because of this, David Vincent ends up allying himself with the aliens and fighting the police chief’s efforts to take them down.
Armstrong appeared in two episodes of Perry Mason, including an adaptation of The Case of the Black-Eyed Blonde. We discussed “The Case of the Stand-in Sister” when we talked about fellow bucolic actor Parley Baer. That leaves “The Case of the Petulant Partner,” the twenty-fifth episode of Season Two, that premiered on April 25, 1959. Both the novels and the episodes have more than their fair share of storylines set in small Western mining towns outside of Los Angeles; this is one of the least interesting.
Harry Bright (Armstrong) and Chuck Clark (Will Wright, three episodes) have been buddies in this very small town. When a developer tried to buy up their land, another old coot, Salty Sims (Francis McDonald, also three eps) tried to trick the pair by salting his old mine and selling it to them so that Salty would have money for the development deal. That deal fell through, but the mine turned out to be loaded with ore, making both men rich. Harry still lived a simple life, but Chuck built an estate and found a beautiful young wife named Margaret (Nan Leslie, two eps), who arrived with her no-good brother Howard Roper (Myron Healey).
Harry is mad at Chuck for marrying Margaret, although I never quite figured out why. He probably thought Margaret had married Chuck for his money – and Margaret freely admits to doing so, in exchange for providing Chuck with companionship. It’s Howard who seems like a creep – the question arises as to whether he is even her brother! – but it’s Margaret who ends up getting murdered and Harry who is arrested for the crime.
Fortunately, he has consulted Mason about dissolving his partnership with Chuck so that Margaret couldn’t profit by it. That’s what brings Perry, Paul and Della to this place to stand before a judge (Jamie Forster, who judged four times on Perry Mason, always in these small towns) and figure out if one of the people above murdered Margaret, or if it was Harry’s friend Nell (Geraldine Wall, six episodes) or Chuck’s kindly nephew Bill (William Swan, two episodes), the one who stands quietly in the background, has no discernible motive and couldn’t possibly be the killer.
Yeah, right!
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Nellie Burt’s career goes back to the silent film era. Like so many of the actors we discuss here, she had one of those faces you would recognize, but she hasn’t even scored a biography on Wikipedia. One of her gifts was her ability to portray characters who could be morally good or bad; you really had to look deep into her eyes to realize her intentions. She appeared in a couple of episodes of The Outer Limits, including an unsettling one called “The Guests,” as one of a houseful of very strange people who don’t realize yet that the house they’re all trapped in is a living alien entity! She also made two charming appearances on Bewitched, once as a new maid for Samantha and the other time as a babysitter for Tabitha.
Burt appeared in a Season One episode of The Invaders called “Nightmare.” David Vincent travels to a small town when he hears about the strange, controlled behavior of swarms of locusts, and of a young woman’s belief that this behavior is not natural. It turns out that the aliens, who have taken leading positions in the town, are working on a device to weaponize insect life. Nellie Burt plays Lena Lapham, one of a pair of sisters, who are terrorized by the strange situation in their town. (FYI, the other sister is played by Irene Tedrow, whom we have seen in two episodes of Perry Mason.)
Like Tedrow, Burt appeared in two episodes. The first, “The Case of the Borrowed Baby,” premiered on April 14, 1962 as the twenty-sixth episode of Season Five. The first half of this episode is a sheer delight: it’s one of the only hours of Perry Mason that begins with our series characters and follows them for quite a while before the formulaic whodunnit begins.
Perry and Della are sneaking in a fancy dinner before they have to head back to the office for a couple hours of work hammering out a brief. Imagine their surprise when they find an intruder in the locked office – it’s a healthy, giggling baby boy. The cleaning woman, Holly Cosgrove (Burt), tells them that she has seen nobody all evening but that she heard a woman’s quick footsteps earlier that night. A written note tells Mason that the baby is named Leander and that he needs protection.
That’s when the story becomes a showcase for Barbara Hale. Della is all too happy to take care of the baby, and she just so happens to be housesitting for an absent friend. Della’s maternal instincts contrast nicely with the comical ignorance of Paul Drake, who helps get the baby settled and then goes off with Perry to find out all they can about him, based on a St. Christopher medal found in Leander’s bassinet. While they’re away, somebody tries to sneak into the house and take the baby, but they are no match for fierce mama Della Street!
From there, the story transforms into a typical episode. A young nurse named Ginny Talbot (Kaye Elhardt, three Perry Mason episodes) fell in love with one of her patients, Lawrence Kerrick. They were secretly married, but Kerrick’s cousin Jarvis Baker (Hugh Marlowe, whom we will discuss another day) learned about the marriage from the hospital’s manager, Dr. Hogarthy (our old six-episode friend, Gregory Morton) and had it annulled, ostensibly to protect their wealthy grandmother (Sara Taft) from a fortune hunter.
There are other suspects and plenty of candidates for victim, but ultimately, it’s Lester Menke, an unscrupulous hospital attendant, who is trying to profit from everyone off this baby’s existence and who is ultimately murdered. The killer is obvious, and Mason makes everyone happy in the end; he even agrees to defend the true culprit. Yes, this is one of the more heartwarming hours of the series, but it is made not only palatable but delightful by Barbara Hale’s no-nonsense turn as a surrogate mother! This isn’t the last we’ll see of Nellie Burt either, but for that we need to move on to our next Perry Mason/Invaders guest star . . .
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Linden Chiles had a perfectly respectable career, mostly on TV, but he never got the break to propel him to stardom. He appeared as a regular or recurring character on several series, the most notable of them probably being Banacek, where he played a rival to George Peppard’s insurance investigator. His other shows tended to gain some good attention and then get cancelled after one season; these included James at 15, East Side/West Side, and Convoy.
Since we’re focusing on the eerie and bizarre at this time of year, Chiles appeared in a more obscure episode of The Twilight Zone called “Four O’Clock,” starring Theodore Bikel and in hour of The Time Tunnel that centered around Pearl Harbor. He guest starred in many dramas and comedies, including My Favorite Martian and The Munsters. And, of course, he appeared – twice – on The Invaders. The first time he played David Vincent’s brother Bob, whose disdain for his brother’s claims takes a beating when he and his wife are kidnapped by the aliens and used for leverage so that David won’t spill the beans on their plans to suck up Earth’s atmosphere. David saves his family in the end, and now Bob can be counted as a Believer!
Chiles’ subsequent appearance in the second season is more noteworthy. Here a noted journalist is trying to stop the aliens from using the media to manipulate the public’s perceptions. When he is murdered, Chiles, as the man’s no-good nephew, inherits the paper and is threatened by the aliens to give in to their demands. David Vincent shows up and helps Chiles grow a pair and fight back against the invaders.
We have already discussed three of Chiles’ four appearances on Perry Mason: in each and every one of them, he played the defendant. In his third appearance, however, “The Case of the Surplus Suitor,” which debuted on February 28, 1963 as the nineteenth episode of Season Six, Chiles gets to play a different sort of role. This episode is more famous, however, for being the final one of four episodes where Raymond Burr’s absence due to surgery was covered by a big guest star; for many reasons, it’s arguably the best of the four.
The guest star in question is Walter Pidgeon, who plays attorney Sherman Hatfield. I love how much the series portrayed Los Angeles as a small town with a sprawl problem. We begin here in an office building where everyone seems to make use of each other’s services. Hatfield has done work for the company in the next-door office, Wilburn and McKinney, which manufactures electrical razzle-fragimagazzle systems and is seeking to expand to the international market. Two young men are seeking a European contract with the company, but rather than work with Gage McKinney (Hayden Rorke, three Perry Mason episodes), they have both sought out John Wilburn (Carl Benton Reid, four episodes), despite the fact that Wilburn has been out of the office for a year after suffering a heart attack.
To no viewer’s surprise, both Martin Potter (James Best, two eps) and Swiss national Alex Gaussner (German national John Siegfried) are also wooing Wilburn’s niece Hollis. A year earlier, Hollis’ father had died and left her his 15% share in Wilburn’s company. When John refused to acknowledge the shares, Hollis had sued him and won because she retained Perry Mason as her attorney.
That is the only smart thing she ever did because, as played by comic actress Joyce Bulifant (two eps), Hollis is the dumbest client ever to appear on the series – and that’s saying a lot. The fact that she plays the whole episode for laughs damages the seriousness of the whole situation but doesn’t ruin it – because this is a storyline that plays off of some traditional GAD tropes.
One night, John Wilburn receives a phone call from a man attempting to blackmail him over information that could have only come from Wilburn’s office safe. We know that only John, his partner McKinney, and Hollis have that combination; not even Wilburn’s loyal secretary/ex-lover Jean Crewe (Andrea King, four eps) knows it! Wilburn sets a trap for the blackmailer, determined to discover who in his life has betrayed him. For a moment, he suspects his niece of having slipped the information to one of her suitors, and they have a fight, which is overheard by devoted housekeeper Mrs. Abernathy (Nellie Burt is back, folks!).
The murder scene is fun: Mrs. Abernathy hears an argument coming from Wilburn’s study but can’t get through the locked door. She hears Wilburn shout out, “No . . . Hollis . . . help!” and when Hollis appears from a hallway and helps Mrs. Abernathy break down the door, they find Wilburn dead. All of this has been corroborated by accountant Vernon Elliot (Chiles), an earnest young man who does work for various clients in the building, including Wilburn and Sherman Hatfield. He calls Hatfield to tell him that he has just heard over the phone what Mrs. Abernathy heard through the door.
Because he’s Linden Chiles, and he’s good-looking and sweet – and because both of Hollis’ suitors seem to be self-serving jerks, it seems pretty clear that eventually Hollis will find herself in Vern’s helpful arms. But eagle-eyed viewers who remember the first scene will be aware that there’s some trickery afoot that is right out of the traditional mystery playbook and shouldn’t be too surprised by the episode’s “surprise” ending. It’s still a pretty good episode, despite that fact that Hollis’ stupidity grates on the nerves. Barbara Hale gets a showcase here, as she is forced to take the witness stand as a stand-in for her recovering boss (Burr makes his requisite cameo, looking almost all better), and Della has a wonderful exchange with D.A. Hamilton Burger:
- Burger: Well, Miss Street, having you here just as a witness for the prosecution is a rare experience for both of us.
- Della: I’ll try not to be hostile, Mr. Burger.
- Burger: Well, that’ll be a rare experience, too.
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Carl Held’s connection to The Invaders is admittedly minor – he played a character known only by his rank of “Lieutenant” on a Season Two episode. Sometimes billed as “Carl” and sometimes as “Christopher,” Held had an inconspicuous film career but garnered some interesting credits in both science fiction shows and soap operas – plus, he was rather more significant to the Perry Mason series than the usual guest star.
Held has a pivotal role as an astronaut in a fan favorite episode of The Outer Limits called “The Man Who Was Never Born,” a haunting story starring Martin Landau and Shirley Knight. Held’s character breaks the time barrier and discovers a future Earth in ruins, and a hideous humanoid (Landau) explaining what went wrong. Now it’s up to the two of them to go back in time and try to change history. As is often the way with really good time travel stories, things take a distinctly emotional turn. Held also appeared in a favorite episode of the original Star Trek, “The Return of the Archons,” as Lieutenant Lindstrom, who is part of the landing team exploring an Earth-like planet that has come under authoritarian control. (There’s no way this episode didn’t inspire the movie The Purge.) Evidently, his role was supposed to be much bigger, but his subplot was, you should excuse the expression, “absorbed into the body” of the larger story.
Held’s first appearance on Perry Mason was as an obnoxious suspect in Season Four’s “The Case of the Angry Dead Man,” which we discussed when we were talking about Frank Ferguson. (Gloria Talbott is also in this episode.) The producers must have liked what they saw because later that season, in Episode Twenty-Seven, they introduced the character of David Gideon in “The Case of the Grumbling Grandfather,” which premiered on May 27, 1961.
David’s grandfather, J. J. Gideon, is worried that his grandson, a law student, is becoming involved with Dorine Hopkins, the former secretary of David’s late uncle, who may have killed himself over mismanagement of the company’s funds. J. J. has every right to be worried because David is throwing his life away for this woman. And when Dorine’s low-life gambler husband turns up to blackmail her, David comes to the aid of his much older damsel-in-distress – and ends up on trial for the low-life’s murder.
This is pretty standard fare, although the choice of murderer at the end is better than expected. Frankly, I don’t think Held has much charisma here, so let’s take a look at the cast surrounding him. J. J. Gideon is played by the great Otto Kruger, who played both good guys and bad guys, (including Nazis and murderers) in AnotherThin Man, Alfred Hitchcock’s Saboteur, and the great noir Murder My Sweet, among others. He appeared in four Perry Mason episodes. Then there’s Patricia Barry playing Dorine: she appeared in three episodes and then went on to significant roles in a number of soap operas, playing a society matron in one of them who also happened to be a drug kingpin (or is it queenpin?) Then there’s Gavin MacLeod as the company finance guy: we know Gavin from nice guy roles on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and The Love Boat, but in early television he often played oily crooks and blackmailers, including in his three appearances on Perry Mason. Phil Arthur, who appeared on four episodes, plays a corrupt insurance investigator. And former glamor girl Frances Rafferty plays a distinctly unglamorous role as a secretary.
And since I found this episode a bit boring, I want to just mention a little mystery I came up with myself here: in the first season credits, as Perry Mason is handing a file to his colleagues and opponents to peruse, you can see members of the courtroom audience sitting and watching the proceedings. This includes a little old lady, who merely stares at Burger and Lt. Tragg as they look at the file. That old lady appears in the courtoom audience in this episode four seasons in. What’s more, she’s alone in the first courtroom scene, but in the final scenes, she’s sitting next to Frances Rafferty, and the implication is that she is Rafferty’s troublesome mother.
Okay, focus, Brad!
In some of his novels, Perry Mason worked with young law clerks; first came Frank Everly, and later Mason worked with Carl Jackson. Mostly, these guys sat in the law library and did research, but sometimes they became a bit more involved in a case. It makes sense that the series would give Mason a clerk, and in fact Carl Jackson makes an appearance in the second episode of the series, “The Case of the Sleepwalker’s Niece.” Halfway through the run of the show, the producers may have been looking for ways to lure a younger audience to give the series a try. In addition to more and more storylines involving the music industry, the idea of hiring a good-looking young man to the regular cast made sense.
And so at the start of Season Five, David Gideon began clerking for Perry Mason. Held appeared in the role in eight episodes that season, often tracking down leads in much the same way Paul Drake did. Let’s look at a typical hour that featured David: “The Case of the Meddling Medium” was the sixth episode of Season Five and debuted on October 21, 1961. Not the seasonal date, everyone? It’s appropriate – because this is the perfect mystery for Halloween. It’s also that rare thing in the Mason-verse: a genuine closed circle mystery!
We begin on a gloomy cliffside mansion during a storm. Sylvia Walker (beloved British actress Virginia Field back again) has hired a medium to conduct a séance in order to contact her late son Thomas. Princess Charlotte (Lea Marmer) does a terrific job of making contact with Tom’s spirit through the use of a glove – until Sylvia stops the séance and informs the fake psychic that she bought the glove that very afternoon!
We quickly learn that Charlotte had been in cahoots with Philip Paisley (James Carroll, three Perry Mason episodes), Sylvia’s conniving nephew. Now that she has been exposed as a phony, Philip decides to try a different tact, by faking a trance and practicing some automatic writing. The family is stunned by this display, but despite the fact that the members of the closed circle – Sylvia’s daughter Bonnie (Sonya Wilde, two episodes), Bonnie’s husband Michael Craig (Paul Smith, two eps), Arthur Younger, the family doctor (Kent Smith, whom we will discuss at greater length in Part II!!) and Helen Garden, Sylvia’s assistant (Mary La Roche, five episodes) – think Philip is faking, Sylvia buys his act hook, line, and sinker and moves him and his wife (Anna Lee Carroll, two episodes) into her late son’s suite, complete with a private elevator that had malfunctioned a year earlier, killing Tom.
The good news is that this episode, at least up to the unmasking, is full of eerie twists and leans heavily into the possibility that people may possess extrasensory perception, to the point that I don’t want to reveal the rest of the plot. The bad news is that, once again, the killer is so obvious that they might as well have a couple of ghosts floating above them, holding accusatory signs. And another thing: in the scenes where he appears, Carl Held stops the action cold! He lacks any serious chemistry with the rest of the cast, and it feels like everything he is asked to do would normally be assigned to Paul Drake. (I seriously wonder what William Hopper thought of the kid!) By the end of the season, it seemed clear that Held and David hadn’t jelled with the actors or the audience; I have a feeling everyone breathed a sigh of relief when David “left the firm.”
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Douglas Henderson was born in New Jersey in 1919. He was a stage actor until he got into film in his early 30’s. Honestly, his film career wasn’t very distinguished, but he did appear in one classic, playing Frank Sinatra’s military superior in The Manchurian Candidate. He had a much more prolific career on television, and unlike many of the actors we’ve looked at who appeared in single episodes of a variety of shows, Henderson made multiple appearances in some of my favorite TV dramas. He had a recurring role as a Colonel in ten episodes of The Wild Wild West and played multiple roles in such shows as Bonanza, Lassie, The Outer Limits, Mannix, The F.B.I. and Mission: Impossible. I’ll bet everyone my age could look at a picture of him and ask themselves, “Where have I seen that guy before?”
Henderson appeared in two episodes of The Invaders. In Season One’s “Quantity Unknown,” he plays the typical police lieutenant who doesn’t believe anything David Vincent tells him. He has a much more significant role in the Season Two episode, “The Captive.” Here, an alien has broken into a Soviet embassy in New York to steal some information. When he is captured and examined, the staff doctor realizes the man isn’t human and, remembering what she had heard about David Vincent, she sends for him. Meanwhile Henderson plays an alien leader who threatens to destroy the Embassy if David doesn’t help the alien escape. (Nice irony, huh?)
Henderson made six appearances on Perry Mason, where his Everyman appearance made it easy for him to slip into both the defendant’s role and the murderer’s spot. We’ve already looked at three of his episodes while talking about other actors, but let’s examine two more of Henderson’s appearances here, starting with “The Case of the Clumsy Clown.”Henderson plays the title role in this, the seventh episode of Season Four, which premiered on November 5, 1960.
Quite a few of these original Perry Mason tales involved past wrongs either coming to light in the present day or inspiring murderous impulses in the characters, and this episode is no exception. It begins with renowned clown Felix Heidemann (Henderson) returning to the circus tent one evening with his brand-new bride. Lisa Franklin (Chana Eden) is the circus acrobat; she is also drunk on champagne, and it makes her indiscreet when the pair come upon Jerry Franklin (Robert Clarke, two episodes), one of the co-owners of the circus, who happens to be in love with Lisa. He is also terrified of the big cats in their cages, and when Lisa stupidly opens a tiger’s cage, Jerry stands there frozen while the tiger mauls him horribly.
This, it turns out, is the past event, because in a rare instance of beginning with a flashback, we now move forward five years and discover that, Lisa, out of a sense of guilt, has married Jerry – effectively committing bigamy. Jerry is trying to buy out his obnoxious partner, Judd Curtis (Walter Sande) by collecting the buy-out money from Felix, Lisa, and the sharpshooting team of Joyce and Tony Gilbert (Margaret Hayes, four PM episodes and Willard Sage, three episodes – and he appeared in The Invaders!). Meanwhile, Curtis has collected money from back-up clown Tim Durant (Ken “Festus” Curtis), but he tries to blackmail Felix and Lisa with the knowledge that their marriage makes Jerry’s nuptials to Lisa invalid.
The murder, when it happens, occurs in plain sight during Felix’s act. The newspapers say the crime occurred in front of five thousand witnesses, but that’s the weakest circus ring I’ve ever seen on television. The whole set-up of the crime is very Golden Age, which makes the killer’s identity not hard to spot, especially if we want only the characters we care for to have a happy ending. It’s hard for me to wax too enthusiastically over this one, but I’ll fully admit that circuses have rarely interested me, and clowns don’t make me laugh.
Henderson shows up again in “The Case of the Poison Pen-Pal,” debuting on February 10, 1962 as the twentieth episode of Season Five. It’s another dull, convoluted tale of office chicanery from the past, with everyone convinced that the wrong person is responsible. Plus, it has not one, but two little girls in it, and I always get a little weirded out when Perry Mason interacts with children.
Henderson plays Peter Gregson, who is at odds with his overbearing Aunt Wilma (Kathryn Givney, three episodes) over a continued leak that seems to be overvaluing their company stock. Wilma thinks the person responsible is Peter’s ex-secretary, Karen Ross (Patricia Breslin, three eps), who Wilma had fired previously. But Peter learns that it’s his daughter Sandra who is responsible.
Here, we’re supposed to believe that two little girls decide to be pen-pals and regale each other with information about business mergers and the ways of the stock market; furthermore, we are expected to buy the idea that the whole outlook of a company’s stock changes when one man (Sandra’s pen-pal’s mother’s boyfriend!) reads the letters and buys short (or long, or whatever!) None of it makes much sense, but it leads to Wilma being attacked and Karen on trial for her murder.
The list of suspects is so dull that, frankly, I got sleepy during the trial – and this despite the fact that it takes place in my home town of San Francisco and that the D.A. is played by veteran Mercury Theatre player Everett Sloane, who struts and shouts and puts his thumbs in his vest pockets as if he was performing at the Scopes trial. Never mind, it all works out for Karen who gets whisked off to Vegas by Peter to get married while Perry Mason babysits Sandra on a cruise to Catalina.
Weird, right?
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We’ll return on Halloween Day to introduce five more spooky guest stars! See you then!
