{"id":2732,"date":"2020-08-23T20:37:45","date_gmt":"2020-08-23T20:37:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/?p=2732"},"modified":"2020-11-14T22:29:03","modified_gmt":"2020-11-14T22:29:03","slug":"not-the-perry-we-want-but-maybe-the-perry-we-need","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/?p=2732","title":{"rendered":"Not the Perry We Want, But Maybe the Perry We Need"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

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You had to wait till HBO\u2019s Perry Mason<\/em> ran its course to realize how good it was in the same way you had to wait till the end of a vintage CBS\u00a0 Perry Mason<\/em> episode to find out who the real murderer was.

It was<\/em> good and, at times, great. But it was touch and go throughout, world. If you\u2019re binge-watching it now, you might not appreciate how many of us who took each episode in weekly installments were ready to bail on this old\/new\/new\/old iteration of the Lawyer Who Never Loses. The art direction, which remained the true star of the series till the end, kept our heads in the game with its meticulous recreation of Los Angeles in the deepest pit of the Great Depression.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\r\n

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But brothers and sisters, did this ship take its sweet old time to reach port! It seemed intent, at times, on creating its own fog and squalls along the way. One more histrionic revival meeting, one more instance of Perry (Matthew Rhys) physically and emotionally getting his butt kicked, and some of us were ready to abandon ship without bothering to find out what kind of asshole sews open the eyelids of a dead infant as a way of making his parents think he\u2019s still alive.

Which doesn\u2019t sound even remotely like the kind of murder case that would create billable hours for Raymond Burr\u2019s Perry Mason back when he was sweeping the courtroom floors with William Talman\u2019s Hamilton Burger on CBS\u2019s prime-time schedule in the late fifties and early sixties. Granted, those old shows could get pretty weird themselves with their noir-ish SoCal landscapes, berserk red herrings, cobra-like plot shifts and absurdly alliterative episode titles like \u201cThe Case of the Woeful Widower,\u201d \u201cThe Case of the Bountiful Beauty,\u201d \u201cThe Case of the Devious Delinquent\u201d \u2013 and that was just the seventh season!<\/p>\r\n

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Yet I happily and regularly devour those old CBS episodes as have many of my friends lately for the tasty, caloric comfort food for the soul they always were. Yes, they were formulaic. But as art critic Dave Hickey writes in his wondrous essay, \u201cThe Little Church of Perry Mason,\u201d there remains after all these years something at once sublime, gnomish, fortifying and finely wrought about the series; Hickey especially appreciates how, after a murderer\u2019s confession was successfully yoked on a witness stand, Perry, Paul Drake (William Hopper), Della Street (Barbara Hale), and sometimes Ham Burger and LAPD Lieutenant Tragg (Ray Collins) would always get together for coffee, dinner or a late-night office nosh to go over how Perry figured out yet another one.<\/p>\r\n

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I came later to read some of the original Perry Mason mysteries by his creator Erle Stanley Gardner<\/a>. In all there were roughly 80 such novels published between 1933 and 1973 (two years after Gardner\u2019s death) and I know only one person who managed to read all of them after combing through used bookstores, tag sales, church basements and garages. Apparently, he finds them just as addictive as the old TV show. They can seem just as formulaic but, to their immense credit, just as unaffected and straightforward in their overall presentation.<\/p>\r\n

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\u201cI write to make money,\u201d Gardner once said, \u201cand I write to give the reader sheer fun.\u201d He called himself a \u201cFiction Factory\u201d and he dictated his stories to typists, at least two or three books at a time, or so I\u2019m guessing. Every once in a while, they read as if they were dictated and Gardner\u2019s friend Raymond Chandler once wrote a note warning him of occasional discrepancies and inadvertent repetitions finding their way into published texts.<\/p>\r\n

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Even so, the Mason books are<\/em> fun to read, as crafty, rakish, unflappable and droll as their hero. Burr\u2019s interpretation of Mason retains the character\u2019s almost eerie composure and serene command of the legal code to the point of breezy, but never brash arrogance.

Speaking of Raymond Chandler, here\u2019s part of a morale booster he wrote to his friend Gardner in early 1946 that pretty much sums up how the world felt about Mason even before he became a TV icon :

\u201cI regard myself as a pretty exacting reader; detective stories as such don\u2019t mean a thing to me.<\/em> [NOTE: THEY REALLY DIDN\u2019T] But it must be obvious that if I have half a dozen unread books beside my chair and one of them is a Perry Mason, and I reach for the Perry Mason and let the others wait, that book must have quality\u2026.<\/em>
\u201cYou owed nothing to Hammett or Hemingway. Your books have no brutality or sadism, very little sex, and the blood doesn\u2019t count. What counts, at least for me, is a supremely skillful combination of the mental quality of the detective story and the movement of the mystery-adventure story\u2026.Perry Mason is the perfect detective because he has the intellectual approach of the judicial mind and at the same time the restless quality of the adventurer who won\u2019t stay put. I think he is just about perfect\u2026\u201d\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\r\n


HBO\u2019s Perry Mason,<\/em> on the other hand, has plenty of brutality, blood, sadism and sex\u2026all the lurid stuff that Chandler appreciated the Gardner books for avoiding. You could say it\u2019s a lot closer to Chandler\u2019s vision than to his friend\u2019s. Try imagining, to press the point further, what Day of the Locust,<\/em> Nathaniel West\u2019s house-of-horrors vision of Depression-era Los Angeles would read like if Chandler had written it instead.

Having this iteration of Mason start out as a bottom-feeding private eye is at least consistent with Gardner\u2019s roots as a Black Mask<\/em> contributor of hard-boiled crime stories in the twenties and thirties. But devotees believed it altogether inappropriate to bring up the baggage of Mason being a shell-shocked WWI vet adrift and hopeless in 1931 Los Angeles, all too ready to dive headfirst into a Hooverville, a speakeasy or between the legs of his sultry Latina lover (Veronica Falc\u00f3n). I suppose it\u2019s possible to imagine this grimy, war-haunted vagrant evolving from the depths of the Depression into the coolly competent smoothie we remember from the dawn of the Space Age. In those latter days, we would never expect Mason to get into the kind of trouble this poor schlub endures.

Burr\u2019s Mason, as noted, was like a sheet of ice on the sidewalk at night: too cold, too slippery and too devious to get stuck in mundane dangers like guns to the head or being roughed up and tortured by goons. What danger was for Mason, especially in the Gardner novels, was risking disbarment for \u2013 how did Della put it? \u2013 \u201cstepping over the line\u201d to prove his client\u2019s innocence. The law for that Perry Mason wasn\u2019t an occasion to be cynical; it was a near-holy order, a call to secular grace:

“I have never stuck up for any criminal. I have merely asked for the orderly administration of an impartial justice … Due legal process is my own safeguard against being convicted unjustly. To my mind, that’s government. That’s law and order.\u201d<\/em> \u2013 from 1943\u2019s The Case of the Drowsy Mosquito.<\/em><\/p>\r\n

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Matthew Rhys\u2019 Mason climbs up from the mire to where he\u2019s supposed to be, eventually. There are hints throughout the series that he was always there, even if for much of the series he looks less like a budding smoothie and, in his still moments, like the ravaged, doom-haunted photos of James Agee taken by Walker Evans in the late thirties while they were struggling to finish Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. <\/em><\/p>\r\n

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The kidnap-murder of the infant boy and its ties to an evangelical church run by an Aimee Semple McPherson-style superstar preacher (Tatiana Maslany) is so sordid and complicated that you look forward to the light-and-lively banter among Mason, legal secretary Della Street (Juliet Rylance) and her cuddly, curmudgeonly boss Elias Birchard \u201cE.B.\u201d Jonathan (John Lithgow). But Mason can\u2019t truly relax with them any more than he can figure out how to hold on to his family farm somewhere near the Mojave. Or figure out how he can get enough scratch for his keyhole-peeping to cover himself and his partner-mentor Pete Strickland (Shea Whigham).

But this apparent inaugural season isn\u2019t about a dead baby, a glitzy temple or even a murder case whose thinness, wearing away even more during the trial, makes one wonder the same thing Murray Kempton wondered while covering New York City\u2019s (Black) \u201cPanther 21\u201d trial in 1971 after the prosecution rested its case: \u201cAnd is it all no more than this?\u201d<\/em> (from Kempton\u2019s The Briar Patch<\/em>, 1973). It is, in short, not about the central mystery at all. It\u2019s about the growth of a human being.

\u201cAnd is it all no more than this?\u201d<\/em> you may well ask. Quite a bit more, especially at this point in our own real-life history.

Let\u2019s do what we always do in a Perry Mason story and look for clues. To me, the biggest clue comes towards the end of the first episode, when a movie mogul and Groucho Marx look-alike takes Mason into a back room and has him trussed up by a couple of goons, shaking him down for the compromising photos he took of a naked horndog comedian. \u201cYou need to think about your actions,\u201d the mogul purrs to Mason who\u2019s about to get a heated gun barrel applied to his chest. \u201dYou need to decide what kind of person you want to be.\u201d

The protests we\u2019ve been seeing since May throughout the country over police brutality and systemic racism have been asking variations of the same question. And it\u2019s been hurting us to ask that of ourselves, about as much as that hot rod is hurting Mason.

It\u2019s worth remembering here that Erle Stanley Gardner shared the same view of justice vs. law-and-order that his lead character did. His early career as a litigator was taken up with defending underdogs, often Mexican and Chinese immigrants, who he believed were unjustly indicted and couldn\u2019t afford the defense they deserved. In the early forties, he formed an organization, \u201cThe Court of Last Resort\u201d, devoted to helping those imprisoned unfairly or couldn\u2019t get a fair trial. Both a prize-winning book and a short-lived TV series carried the name and the mission of Gardner\u2019s precursor to today\u2019s Innocence Project.

Maybe watching Rhys\u2019 Mason, as opposed to Burr\u2019s, struggle, stumble, whine and grumble his way towards his ultimate destiny is an analogue for our own halting, stumbling and grudging efforts to restore balance and fairness to our legal system. And while Gardner, if he were alive today, would likely shudder over just how much of a mess the American criminal justice system has become, he would likely put his man, high-handed tactics and all, in the forefront of setting it all right again.

From the apparent success of the HBO series, we\u2019re going to see more of this new\/old Mason, and it\u2019ll be interesting to see how or if his self-improvement continues as his cases get as weird or weirder than the ones his predecessors dealt with on- and off-screen. I\u2019m also wondering just how the producers are going to finesse a Black Paul Drake (Chris Chalk) trying to pry buried secrets from white people in an L.A. mired in Depression, impending war and racial segregation.<\/p>\r\n

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No, it\u2019s not your father\u2019s or grandfather\u2019s Perry Mason. But this stressed-out, caffeinated and volatile Perry Mason belongs to us more than we’re willing to acknowledge. He knows we’re all guilty. But that doesn’t mean he’s giving up on us. So don’t give up on him.<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      You had to wait till HBO\u2019s Perry Mason ran its course to realize how good it was in the same way you had to wait till the end of a vintage CBS\u00a0 Perry Mason episode to find out who the real murderer was. It was good and, at times, great. But it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[368],"tags":[1046,1047,1048,704,851,1049],"class_list":["post-2732","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tv-reviews","tag-erle-stanley-gardner","tag-matthew-rhys","tag-perry-mason","tag-raymond-burr","tag-raymond-chandler","tag-william-tallman"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2732","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2732"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2732\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2863,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2732\/revisions\/2863"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2732"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2732"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2732"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}