Happy Halloween, my ghoulish friends! All month we’ve been looking at actors who included devilry (sometimes of the literal kind) on their screen resumes, often popping up The Outer Limits and/or The Twilight Zone and later on in Quinn Martin’s alien invasion series The Invaders . . . and who still found time to be accused of murder or be suspected of murder or even commit murder on Perry Mason.
Perhaps the greatest stunt casting on The Invaders was that of Michael Rennie, as a sort of evil inverse to his alien emissary Klaatu in the classic sci-fi film, The Day the Earth Stood Still. As you may remember, Rennie also managed to stop by and practice a little law on Perry Mason when Raymond Burr took sick. Today, we’re wrapping up our horror coverage with a look at five more guest stars on the legal series who crossed genres, four of them on The Outer Limits, (one of whom also appeared on The Twilight Zone) and all of them on The Invaders.
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Philadelphia-born Tom Lowell made his acting debut on a moving episode of The Twilight Zone called “The Changing of the Guard,” which concerned an elderly professor (Donald Pleasance) who comes to believe his whole career has been a sham until he is visited by the ghosts of several of his students (including Lowell) who tell him that they contributed to society in important ways before they died because of the lessons he taught them. Blessed with a baby face, Lowell played boyish characters in many projects, including a shocking turn in The Manchurian Candidate and as featured characters in the Disney films That Darn Cat! and The Gnome-Mobile.
Most of Lowell’s work was done on TV. His turn on The Invaders is memorable: in a Season One episode called “Dark Outpost,” he plays an archaeology student who, along with his professor and team are kidnapped by the aliens posing as military man in a desert outpost where they tend to sick and dying members of their race. David Vincent has also turned up to try and expose the base and save the students. At the climax, Lowell and another student step forward to confuse the aliens and stop them from identifying Vincent.
Lowell also appeared as a troubled teen in two episodes of Perry Mason, including “The Case of the Lurid Letter,”which premiered on December 6, 1962 as the tenth episode of Season Six. As I’ve alluded, by this time the series was continually trying to find stories and characters that would appeal to younger viewers, with mixed results. There was something so inherently wholesome about Perry Mason that the presence of motorcycled wannabe Brandos or Deans seemed anachronistic to the general purpose of the show.
Still, combining a whodunnit with a story of an individual facing down a mob had worked on the show before. Here we’re in Placer City, a beautiful country town with lakes everywhere. Jane Wardman (Mona Freeman, three episodes) is a widow living with her son in town and teaching at the local high school. She had taken a special interest in helping a troubled student who had died on his motorcycle a month earlier. Now an anonymous letter has surfaced saying that Jane had had inappropriate relations with both her late student and with a bully in her senior class named Pat Mangan (John Durren, who was 26 when he made this episode – and looked 35). And now at least three other boys, including Bobby Slater (Lowell), have claimed their teacher came on to them.
In order for this episode to proceed, everyone in the town has to behave like a hyena, and they do: the school board believes the anonymous letter and these boys, who all drive motorcycles and act like cretins. The local bartender appears to be selling liquor to the boys, and everyone in town seems to be in on that racket – including several people whose involvement is not mentioned until the very end of th episode. The town doctor is pissed off that the widow Wardman won’t return his affections. The town’s ladies, led by Bobby’s mother, Cornelia Slater (Ann Doran, who after three episodes should know better!) want to ride the teacher out of town on a rail. Even the town judge (Edgar Buchanan, of Petticoat Junction fame) is a fool.
But Jane’s Boy Scout son, Terry (Mark Murray) tells her that Dad would have stayed and fought. And fortunately, a famous L.A. attorney is fishing down the road and loves to help the underdog. Ultimately, I guess it’s fun to watch Perry and Paul Drake make mincemeat out of these yokels, but it’s too easy. And the murder finally comes three quarters of the way through the episode, leaving Mason in charge to reveal tons of information about these townspeople for the first time, making this a completely unfair murder mystery.
In the end, the townspeople come over to Jane’s to say they’re sorry and beg her to stay in town. I only wish she had listened to Paul Drake’s muttered response to Perry; instead, she caves in like a marshmallow over a campfire. Mrs. Wardman and the stupid town deserve each other!
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I have read about so many of these character actors getting their start in theatre, but I already knew this about BarBara Luna. As a kid, I wore out my parents’ original cast album of South Pacific, which opens with Luna, as Ngana, singing “Dites Moi?” What I didn’t know was that Luna and I share some heritage: her mother was a nice Jewish girl from Budapest, Hungary (my grandfather was born there). Luna’s father hailed from the Philippines, and she became much sought after for ethnic roles.
Luna’s early career was in musical theatre: she followed South Pacific with a role in The King and I and even after she became a film and TV actress, she would return to the stage, playing Anita in West Side Story and Diana in A Chorus Line. She played an abused flamenco dancer in Ship of Fools (1965) and an evil prisoner in the 1982 cult film The Concrete Jungle. Mostly, Luna appeared on television; Wikipedia credits her as appearing in five hundred different series. One of the most famous was a classic episode of Star Trek: in “Mirror, Mirror, she plays a crew member of the Enterprise who, in a savage alternate universe, is Captain Kirk’s lover, who assassinates his enemies.
Luna appeared in The Outer Limits in the previously mentioned episode, “It Crawled Out of the Woodwork.” While she had a fairly uninteresting role as the girlfriend of one of the victims, Luna played a more significant part in The Invaders: in the Season One episode “Storm,” David Vincent is investigating a plot by the aliens to control the weather. When he is wounded, David seeks shelter with a local priest (Joseph Campanella) whose housekeeper Lisa (Luna) tends to David’s wounds. But Lisa is an alien who feeds David mind-altering drugs and almost convinces the priest that Vincent is insane.
Twenty-year-old Luna made one appearance in the second season of Perry Mason: Episode Four, “The Case of the Sardonic Sergeant,” premiered on October 11, 1958. It’s a nice twisty story set on a military base, Camp Grace, but reaching back to a crime that occurred on the island of Corregidor, where U.S. troops fought to liberate the Philippines from Japan. The cast is chock-full of actors who would become familiar faces on the show, starting with John Archer, who appeared in five episodes and who here plays Major Frank Lessing, one of the chief finance officers at the camp. Years ago, when he was part of the command at Corregidor, he was asked to burn ten million dollars in American currency. Somehow, a half million dollars was stolen, and Frank feels responsible. Knowing that the camp security is closing in on the fact that this money is being disseminated through the camp to the public, the Major consults Perry Mason and asks for his representation when Frank confesses to his part in this past crime.
Before Mason arrives at camp, Lessing’s wife Helen (Lori March, five episodes) comes to his office to find the Major sitting at his desk dead from a gunshot wound, a suicide note in his hand. Helen burns the note and rearranges the office to look like there’s been a struggle, then calls the camp police and reports her husband’s death as a murder. But when the police arrest Lessing’s loyal assistant, Sergeant Joseph Dexter (Paul Picerni, three eps), Helen first hires Mason to defend him and then breaks down and tells how she covered up her husband’s suicide.
Except, of course, it wasn’t suicide. So who killed the Major? Was it his civilian brother-in-law (Wendell Holmes, three eps)? His assistant finance clerk (Robert Armstrong, who co-starred with Fay Wray in King Kong and made four PM episodes)? Was it the clerk’s side piece, a gorgeous spitfire from the Philippines named Rikki Stevens (Luna)? Luna only has a few scenes, but the subplot around her relationship with Armstrong turns out to be one of the best things about this hour. Or was it one of the lovable drunken soldiers who keep showing up on the scene (Kevin Hagen, three episodes, and Harry Jackson, seven episodes)?
The killer turns out to be played by an actor who had plenty of experiences confessing on Perry Mason. Also in this one, in the small part of a bartender, is George E. Stone. We’re going to talk much more about Mr. Stone one of these days.
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What can I tell you? Milton Selzer is one of my favorites of all the character actors we’re going to discuss. His career arc is similar to over so many whom we’ve already talked about: born in New England, served in World War II, did summer stock and made his way to Broadway, where he performed the classics and appeared in the original productions of The Visit and Tiger at the Gates. He went on to direct theatre as well, in between a prolific film and TV career.
Selzer was great at playing multilayered bad guys, but he could also project wisdom and played a lot of doctors and judges and grandfathers. He could also do comedy and had a recurring role on Get Smart as Professor Parker, head of the CONTROL lab, who invented crazy devices for spy Maxwell Smart’s use. He acted side by side with fellow Perry Mason guest star Virginia Gregg (Psycho) in “The Masks,” the creepiest Twilight Zone of them all. He took out Archie Bunker’s gall bladder. He shined on five episodes each of The F.B.I. and Mission: Impossible and six episodes of Hawaii Five-O. He played a judge on Doogie Howser, M.D. and the same on multiple episodes of L.A. Law.
Selzer appeared on two episodes of Perry Mason, once as the murder victim and once as the defendant. First up is “The Case of the Decadent Dean,” the fifth episode of Season Seven, which premiered on October 24, 1963. Dr. Aaron Stuart (Selzer) runs a prestigious prep school that is sorely in need of funds in order to survive. Stuart has applied for a large endowment, but this is jeopardized by a series of incidents which have left the headmaster blindsided. (Geraldine Wall has an uncredited cameo as a parent who complains that the book Stuart is teaching, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, is smut!)
Stuart’s wife Marian (Joan Tetzel) is a recovered alcoholic who is helping her husband out in the office. But as the pressures mount for her husband, Marian begins to feel them, too, and when Assistant Dean Tobin Wade (H. M. Wynant, whom we will discuss at a later date) shows up saying that Aaron has fired him and cares only about the school and is cancelling plans to celebrate his wedding anniversary, Marian picks up the bottle that Wade is dangling before her and breaks her year-long sobriety.
It’s been clear from the start that Tobin Wade is a bad guy – so bad that Aaron Stuart is arrested twice for murdering Wade two times! This is the best twist in the episode, as the suspect list is miniscule and the murderer (who also played a murderer in a Thin Man movie) is quite obvious. But Selzer and Tetzel do a great job of running us through an emotional wringer – plus we get to see a motion picture in court depicting Perry Mason murdering Paul Drake!
The following year, Selzer showed up in the seventh episode of Season Eight, “The Case of the Bullied Bowler,” debuting on November 5, 1964. In our examination of original teleplays, we have covered the four Season Six episodes that star Raymond Burr missed due to intestinal surgery. Burr had surgery again during the eighth season and missed two more cases; this is the first of them and features Perry’s attorney friend Joe Kelly (Mike Connors). Connors earned his fame three years later playing Joe Mannix on what was one of my favorite crime shows of the era. During its first season, Mannix worked for a high-tech company run by Joseph Campanella, but producer Lucille Ball looked at the show and said it would be better off if Mannix lost the corporation and set up his own shingle. And the show was a big success for eight seasons, getting cancelled by CBS only because of a rights dispute with Paramount (sound familiar??).
Connors fits in to the Perry Mason format better than some of his more famous predecessors. For one thing, he somewhat resembles Raymond Burr, but mostly the writers gave him a storyline that allowed Kelly to interact plenty with Barbara Hale and William Hopper. The first half of this episode, in fact, feels like a better than usual typical episode: in the town of Tesoro, the Jaris brothers, Alan and Bill, have opened a bowling alley that is popular with everyone in town – except for Bonnie Mae Wilmet (Anne Seymour, two episodes), the most powerful figure in town due to the fact that her father created Tesoro and the oil refinery that provides the main source of jobs. Mrs. Wilmet insists to everyone – to the mayor (Maurice Mansen, five episodes), to her companion Rose (Jeff Donnell, two episodes), and to her assistant Jack (Charles H. Gray) – that the bowling alley is a cesspool of sin!! Well, really!
When Dr. Max Taylor (Selzer), the head of the Department of Health, discovers an epidemic of amoebic dysentery brewing in the town, Mrs. Wilmet sends for him and insists that he find a way to link up the problem with the bowling alley in order to shut it down. The alley is shut down temporarily due to the fact that several of the sick people had eaten there, but the Doctor continues to investigate and informs his assistant, Linda Terry (Patricia George), that he has found the true source of the contagion. Unfortunately, he is found stabbed to death in his office, with Alan Jaris standing over his body.
Fortunately, Alan’s old war buddy is detective Paul Drake, an avid if bumbling bowler himself, and although Perry Mason is on a vacation in Europe, Paul introduces Alan to his old friend from San Francisco, Joe Kelly, who is on vacation with his wife. And that’s where we find ourselves at the halfway point – a victim who for once hasn’t spent the first fifteen minutes being awful but is killed because he knows too much, and a large cast of suspects who all seem awful (who thinks bowling alleys are houses of ill repute???), with nobody standing head and shoulders above the others as “most likely suspect.”
Unfortunately, it all falls short in the end, due to writer Samuel Newman’s need to jam another hour’s worth of complications and past crimes into the trial. Hamilton Burger can barely get a word in when Joe Kelly takes over and forces one witness after another to drown the court in new exposition before a killer is randomly exposed. The most outrageous thing is that the “Duchess” is allowed to do a complete personality makeover in order to accommodate a soppy ending. Mike Connors is charming, and Milton Selzer is terrific while he’s alive, but this one is ultimately disappointing.
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When I started this Invaders business, I hadn’t placed Kent Smith on my list – and yet of all the actors who guest-starred on both shows, he is probably the most important Invaders guest star of them all, not only appearing in thirteen episodes but arguably being responsible for the series’ demise! In terms of career, he is also probably the most notable actor on this list! He was born in New York City and was educated at Harvard, where he helped found the Harvard University Players. He had a long stage career, including Broadway credits like The Best Man, Ah, Wilderness, and Saint Joan.
My fellow mystery fans will be thrilled to know that Smith’s film debut was in the 1936 Philo Vance mystery, The Garden Murder Case. Sadly, it’s not a good film, but Smith went on to appear in some great ones, including both Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People and Robert Wise’s sequel, The Curse of the Cat People, The Spiral Staircase (which is a great mystery film!), the TV thriller How Awful About Allan, and one of my favorite movies, The Trouble with Angels.
Like many of the other actors here, Smith appeared on The Outer Limits, displaying his versatility in two Season One episodes. In “It Crawled Out of the Woodwork,” he is the consummate evil mad scientist, while in “The Children of Spider County,” he is a benevolent alien come to rescue the five sons he sired on a previous visit to help repopulate his planet. No doubt his experiences here helped him in The Invaders. In Season 1, Smith played a NASA official named Stan Arthur in the episode “Moonshot.” He’s one of the good guys, but he realizes too late that the astronaut they are sending up to the moon is an alien imposter.
By the start of Season Two, the producers realized that having David Vincent fight an isolated battle against both the aliens and an unbelieving world was rapidly becoming a dead end. And so they aired the episode “The Believers,” and introduced a character, Edgar Scoville, played by Smith, who would become a regular for the rest of the series. Scoville was a wealthy and brilliant industrialist whose far-reaching involvement in world development had led him to form his own belief that aliens had infiltrated the planet. At last, here was a person David Vincent didn’t have to convince! What’s more, Scofield had assembled a group of like-minded thinkers and had access to high-level officials and advanced technology to finally provide a real counter-threat to the alien invasion.
I have heard it said that series star Roy Thinnes himself blamed the entrance of the Believers to have destroyed all that made the show interesting: the man alone, the paranoia, the spookiness of the aliens working in the shadows. I agree with Thinnes, and so, apparently, did millions of viewers who simply stopped watching. David Vincent got a (sort of) happy ending, but those of us into cool sci-fi thrillers were the losers here.
Smith appeared in two episodes of Perry Mason. We’ve already discussed “The Case of the Meddling Medium” above (small world! Lea Marmer, who played the fake medium in that episode, co-starred with Smith on the Outer Limits episode “It Crawled Out of the Woodwork” as the cleaning woman who started all the trouble!); the other was “The Case of the Prankish Professor,” the fifteenth episode of Season Six, which premiered on January 17, 1963. This is your classic archetype episode: great hook, odious victim, nice range of suspects, and an ending that mildly pisses you off for not playing fair. Let’s discuss!
We’ll start with the victim, English professor Ronald Hewes. Hewes is played by Barry Atwater, who really should be another name on this list: in addition to making six episodes of Perry Mason, he appeared in both The Outer Limits and The Invaders! (He even played a Vulcan on the original Star Trek series!) In Limits, he plays a geologist in the episode “Corpus Earthling” who unwittingly stores alien invaders masquerading as rocks but capable of possessing human minds. That’s exactly what happens to poor Barry Atwater, with tragic results.
In The Invaders, Atwater plays an alien leader in the Season Two episode, “The Organization.” Intent on recovering the remnants of a crashed saucer, Atwater’s team accidentally grabs a cache of heroine belonging to the Mob. It turns out that human criminals are just as ruthless as evil aliens, and perhaps even more of a threat to the human race!!!
As Professor Hewes, Atwater is terrific at being awful, and the first quarter of the hour follows him as he does all manner of awful things. First, he conducts an experiment in his class where a man bursts in and shoots him “dead.” (Oh my! Did this make me think of Carr’s The Black Spectacles). It turns out that this was an experiment in which Hewes’ students would now be required to write a report about what they saw. What shakes Hewes and his hired gunman up, however, is that someone had snuck into the Professor’s office and substituted real bullets for the blanks.
Most of Hewes’ venom is reserved for his ex-wife Laura (Patricia Breslin, three episodes), who has found out from her publisher boyfriend (John Bryant, six episodes) that Hewes has a hidden stash of money earned from a novel he has written, based on a report he stole from a student who later committed suicide after finding herself pregnant. Other suspects include Dr. Metcalfe (Smith), the dean of English who is letting Laura stay with him, Esther Metcalfe, his wife (Constance Towers, whom we will talk more about in the future), Sally Sheldon (Joyce Van Patten, two episodes, plus she was in an episode of The Outer Limits called “A Feasability Study” that is still too disturbing for me to watch!), the sister of the dead girl, and Ned Bertell (Don Dubbins), a student of Hewes who was in love with the dead girl.
I must pause to discuss Don Dubbins for a minute!! First of all, he also appeared in The Invaders, in the episode “The Captive” which we discussed when we talked about Douglas Henderson in Part I of our Invaders discussion. Dubbins plays the alien who is captured and examined by the Soviet-like doctors and determined to be not of this earth!! But Dubbins is also important to Perry Mason for appearing in seven episodes, appearing as a suspect in four of them and then graduating to the law in the final season for three appearances as an assistant District Attorney!
We now return you to our regularly scheduled programming . . . Predictably, Professor Hughes is stabbed to death and a neighbor (played by the great Barbara “Doris Ziffel” Pepper) saw his wife enter his home. She is arrested and the trial is notable for how badly Perry wants Sally Sheldon to appear in court but can only make her a feasible witness by teasing Hamilton Burger with constant mentions of her name. It’s quite funny, and it almost makes up for the solution coming out of nowhere. In the end, this is another case where the victim was such a bad guy that Mason agrees to defend the real murderer!
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“One of those faces” is a descriptor we could use for most of the character actors we’ve discussed here – people whose names you don’t know but who you feel you rcognize the moment you see them. This is definitely the case for Leonard Stone, who appeared in dozens of films and over 120 television shows. He could be dramatic, but he was an excellent comic actor, playing fussy ordinary guys to perfection.
Born in Salem, Oregon, Stone studied theatre at the Royal Academy of Drama Art in London and then went on to appear in West End, Broadway and touring productions for years. He toured for eight years throughout Australia and New Zealand, playing the featured comic character of Luther Billis in South Pacific. He also won a Tony Award in one of the few musical whodunnits around: Redhead, co-starring Gwen Verdon and Richard Kiley. (Here’s a SPOILER that will please fans of this blog: Stone played the killer!)
Of all the movies in which he appeared, the one that made Stone most famous was Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971) in which he played salesman Sam Beauregarde, father to Violet. By then, Stone was a frequent guest star on nearly every network TV show you could think of. He was a regular judge on L.A. Law and on Days of Our Lives. He played a boxing trainer on General Hospital. He appeared in multiple episodes of Dragnet, Bonanza, Mannix and many other shows. Was he in The Outer Limits? Of course he was! Stone has a major role in one of the most talked about episodes of the series: “The Architects of Fear” concerns a team of idealistic scientists, led by Stone, who manufacture an alien invasion in order to panic the warring nations of the world into putting aside hostilities and standing together.
Stone appeared in a Season Two episode of The Invaders called “The Watchers,” which contains a bit of stunt casting just as memorable as that of Michael Rennie later in the season (see above). Keven McCarthy, who ran up and down the California highway warning folks that the aliens were already here in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, plays a defense contractor who is killed and replaced with an alien double. Leonard Stone plays a loyal assistant who discovers the replacement and is murdered for his troubles.
Stone made four appearances on Perry Mason, and we’re going to talk about two of them here. First up is Stone’s second appearance: “The Case of the Accosted Accountant,” which debuted on January 9, 1964 as the fourteenth episode of Season Seven. Thanks to writers Albert A. Vail and Samuel Newman and director Arthur Marks, plus a stellar cast, this is a standout episode worthy of a deeper exploration.
Lots of Perry Mason episodes revolve around corporate shenanigans, and that’s how this one begins. The central conflict is between B.K. Doran, the co-founder of Vero Plastics, and his chief accountant and son-in-law, Edward Lewis. B.K. is played by Murray Matheson and Ed by Richard Anderson. Matheson appeared in two episodes of the show, but Anderson appeared in twenty-six. We’ll be talking a lot more about Anderson in December, but I can’t move on without mentioning that both these actors also appeared in The Invaders – both of them as aliens!
Matheson’s episode, “The Ivy Curtain,” came in Season One and deals with a posh educational academy in New Mexico that is actually a front for the training of aliens in how to behave like humans. Matheson plays Dr. Reynard, the head of the institution, who runs afoul of a pilot (Jack Warden) who has uncovered the aliens’ existence. Reynard bribes Warden’s character to fly incoming aliens to the academy for training, and Warden gives a great performance as a man torn by guilt for betraying the human race. (Matheson also showed up in an iconic episode of The Twilight Zone, “Five Characters in Search of an Exit,” as The Clown!)
Richard Anderson appears in what was probably the most anticipated episode of the entire series. Up till Season Two’s “The Enemy,” viewers had never seen what the aliens really looked like; whenever their human form got damaged, it burnt up before they could transform back to their true, icky, shape! I remember how much ABC promoted this first look at a real alien: Anderson plays Blake, an alien who is severely injured when his saucer crashes. The accident makes it impossible for Blake to undergo the usual cellular treatment aliens use to maintain their human form. Blake ends up under the care of an ex-Vietnam War nurse named Gale Frazer (Barbara Barrie) who, even after David Vincent finds her and tells her the truth about Blake, refuses to put aside her vow to treat all injured creatures. Lots of cool philosophy about the worth of all lives, but nobody was paying attention! We were all watching Blake slowly transform into this goopy thing!!
Back to Perry Mason: this is one of the most thoughtfully paced and richly characterized mysteries of the series. The conflict between Ed and B.K. has massive ramifications for a whole slew of interesting suspects. Chief among them is Ed’s wife and B.K.’s daughter Gertrude (Gail Kobe, who made two episodes of Perry Mason, two of The Outer Limits, and three of The Twilight Zone!) who is torn between the two most important men in her life, both of whom insist that the other is an embezzler out to destroy the company.
Then there are the other employees of Vero Plastics, each of them a sterling example of the type of character who has been exposed on the show as a killer. Dee Hartford (three PM episodes) shines as Lesley Ross, B.K.’s legal counsel and lover, and a terrific femme fatale thoughout. For a long time, it looks like she will be the victim, but that’s one of the surprises this episode has in store. Walter Cord (J. Edward McKinley, two episodes) co-founded the company with B.K. and has always been something of a yes-man, much to the dismay of his ambitious wife Sylvia (Lynn Bari, two episodes and sooo good at playing Lady Macbeth here!). Arthur Sutton (Stone) is B.K.’s nephew and another worthless ne’er-do-well, but Stone makes him into a fascinating fop!
Phil Jenks is B.K.’s loyal assistant and is played by Robert Armstrong, who we just talked about while discussing “The Case of the Sardonic Sergeant” and who is equally great here. And Vera Hillman (Jean Engstrom, three episodes) is another of those long-time secretaries in love with their boss. Or . . . is she? There’s this incredible moment where everyone is having a discussion in B.K.’s office and Vera serves coffee to Leslie. The two women’s eyes meet, and then Leslie exposes her legs in this alluring manner. A modern viewer can’t help interpreting this action in multiple ways.
Anyway, B.K. invites all these people up to his lodge to discuss all these matters, making this one a great example of a closed circle mystery. And Ed, before he drives up there, has the good sense to visit Perry Mason and invite him, along with Paul Drake, up to the lodge to represent his interests. (William Hopper spends most of this episode in shorts, demonstrating that at 49, he was a very attractive man!) This is the last smart thing Ed does, as the rest of his actions ensure that he will be arrested for murder. The machinations of all involved are so riveting that the trial only covers the last quarter of the hour. This one is also notable for how much D.A. Hamilton Burger works closely with Perry Mason to get to the truth, even after he discovers how Mason scored a continuance playing one of those great tricks he is known for in the books.
Yes, this is Top Ten – put it on your list!!
I wish Stone’s final guest shot on the show, “The Case of the Bogus Buccaneers,” was as good, but this, the fifteenth episode of Season Nine, which premiered on January 9, 1966, is so-so at best. Final season episodes are a mixed bag: the producers and writers were experimenting with ways to make the show more action-based and youth-oriented, and it didn’t always work.
Here, the murder occurs before the first commercial: Grace Knapp (Kathleen Crowley, three episodes) is in her apartment one hot night, chugging down booze and watching a program on TV where a handsome buccaneer promises that any woman will be transformed by his beauty products. Clearly, something about the man is triggering Grace’s drunken rage, and she makes a phone call where she demands money of someone; all this is witnessed through her open door by her neighbor, Mrs. Webb (Meg Wylie, four episodes), who also observes another buccaneer arrive at Grace’s door to give her some promotional products. Grace attacks the man, and he strikes back in self-defense, then runs away. Mrs. Webb calls the police, and when they arrive, Grace is dead.
Tough luck for that poor buccaneer: he’s Tony Polk (Steve Harris), an ex-con with a pregnant wife (Mary Mitchel, two episodes), and he’s quickly arrested for Grace’s murder. However, Tony’s parole officer Abe Heyman (Michael Fox, whose twenty-five appearances on Perry Mason deserve further comment in a couple of months!), one of the few Jewish characters I remember seeing on the show – hey, he calls Lieutenant Drumm a “mensch”! – asks Perry Mason to defend this young man with a chip on his shoulder.
It’s a good premise, but then the plot stretches credulity. The police have rounded up four or five buccaneers, all of whom have been hired by sleazy producer Harlan Keen (Stone) to deliver cosmetics to selected viewers. Frankly, the plot became too convoluted without making much sense, but it strikes me that a producer who hires this many troubled men as TV pirates either shows terrible judgment or has a fetish for danger. The other pirates are played by some fine actors, including Rhodes Reason and Richard Jaeckel, but they are wasted in a weak story and so-so script.
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I’ve had a lot of fun this week acknowledging these connections between various horror and science-fiction films and TV shows and Perry Mason. If you’re keeping track, this month we’ve focused on seventeen horror-adjacent actors and covered twenty-five episodes of the show!!
Next month happens to be Noir-vember, so you can bet our Perry Mason connection will follow suit!
