User Reviews

**SPOILERS** Probably, that is. I just reviewed an episode of 77 Sunset Strip in which Kathleen Crowley had me believing she was Eva Gabor; ya gotta see that one. In this episode, she's an heiress playing a very dangerous game. The beauty of this role is that she is actually NOT dumber than a mud fence, like almost all of Perry's regular clientele. Anyway, she's great in both roles.

Anna Navarro plays the "Latina spitfire" in this story, and she also is just terrific. Not just beautiful, but totally believable in her oblique reasoning. L.Q. Jones does real justice to the knockout fall that is his end of the episode. All three of these actors are at the top of the game when it comes to talent and utterly solid performances. It's a sweet episode, glad I have my own copy.

I have read a few of the PM books, "The Case of the Lonely Heiress" among them. This televised distortion is disappointingly different from the book.

Yes, the book has a lonely hearts magazine... and that is the only similarity. The book's colorful characters are missing from this presentation.

The motivation for the crimes - a contested will - is entirely absent from this show, as are the relatives of the deceased and the husband-and-wife team who operate the magazine, all colorful characters.

Compare the compressed version of "The Case of the Vagabond Virgin" (televised as "Vagabond Vixen" in the Eisenhower era, when all American women were virgins and acknowledgment of the word could imply that another condition might exist for American women: unthinkable!). The story in "Vixen" is simplified and abbreviated, but it remains the same basic story.

None of the several PMs I've read has been subjected to the wholesale butchery that has mistreated this story. I'm not saying that the televised story is not enjoyable... but it can be disappointing to a reader of its source.

***SPOILERS*** Wild and crazy Perry Mason, Raymonmd Burr, episode that involves the sleaze ball publisher of this lonely heart magazine Edmund Arthur Lacey, Robert H. Harris, who together with his fellow low life country bumpkin Romeo Charlie Barnaby, L.Q Jones,use it to flees rich lonely and love sick women out of their life savings. Setting up their latest victim Marylin Clark, Kathleen Crowley, for the kill things go terribly wrong with lover boy Charlie ending up dead when his lover and partner in crime the hot headed Mexican spitfire Delores Coterro, Ann Navarro, in a staged fight belt him in the head with her handbag killing him. As it soon turns out it wasn't Doleros who did Charlie in it was the bottle of champaign that he was shearing with Marilyn that in fact put him to sleep forever. It's discovered by the police pathologist that the bottle contained a lethal dose of poisonous prussic acid which Marylin was accused of spiking it with.

With Perry Mason as Marylin's defense attorney he has to sort out all the facts in the case in finding out just who poisoned Charlie Boy which is no easy task for him. The hardest part is to get Delores to answer his questions under cross examination. Delores feels that in Perry defending Marylin whom she's sure murdered her lover Charlie that he's just as responsible for his murder as much as Marylin is. It's the con job that Charlie together with Delores and Lacey has been pulling for the last few years, on unsuspecting lonely and desperate women, that eventually lead to his murder. But which of the women, that number in the hundreds, is the one who eventually did Charlie in?

***SPOILERS*** There's really no love lost for anyone in this Perry Mason episode in that their so low down and corrupt that whatever happens to them the badder it is for them the better you feel about it. But it was Charlie who deserved everything that he ended up getting in his plying both sides against the middle in thinking he's both too smart and clever to get caught and pay for what he's doing that in the end did him in. Not that the person who did Charlie in was any better then he was. But at least he or she was honest in the con game that he was involved in but the double crossing as well as back stabbing Charlie wasn't. And in the end it was Charlie got everything that was coming to him!

Charles Barnaby (LQ Jones) is a charming country bumpkin who is a dab hand at the Badger Game con.

He romances women, gets engaged to them, borrows money and then it emerges that he is married to the fiery Dolores who walks in on them.

Barnaby gets his mark from a lonely hearts magazine. One person that comes to his attention is heiress Marilyn Cartwright. The publisher Edmund Lacey wonders if she is genuine and comes to see Paul Drake about it.

Marilyn is romanced by Barnaby and it seems he has genuinely fallen for her. When he is found poisoned, Marilyn is arrested.

It seems Marilyn and her step brother planned to ensnare Barnaby into a trap. To get revenge for the suicide of their sister. They blamed Barnaby for swindling her.

This is a messy and confusing episode but it was badly adapted.

I do wonder just when Barnaby got serious with Marilyn and figured that she was the one for him. Not knowing that he is the mark this time.

You can sense the variation of the formula for television. The opening scene is in Paul Drake's office as Lacey, the publisher of the lonely heart's magazine comes to see him. We even get to see Drake's secretary.

Anna Navarro steals her scenes as the raging Dolores. At one point refusing to answer Perry Mason's questions in the witness box.