User Reviews

**SPOILERS** And thank the almighty for it. Guest stars filling in for Raymond Burr, that is. Although, I will state for the record (okay, nobody cares), that I think Pidgeon did a better job than any of the other fill-ins. That includes Bette Davis. Maybe it's because I never had any use for her in any role, but also because she made an unconvincing attorney.

Now, also for the record, I think I'd put Joyce Bulifant in the same class with Bette Davis if it weren't for two things. 1) she IS pretty, and 2) she can't act, oh, yeah; also, she's got a whiny, squeaky voice that is like fingernails on a blackboard. Other than that, I guess she's okay.

As for the story, Hollis (Bulifant), behaves pretty much as a client of Perry's would; that is to say STUPIDLY, only more so. Not listening to advice, not paying attention to what she's doing, deliberately going against the directions of her legal counsel, lying to the police, etc. . To sum it up, this would have been a good one to lose, and then not get back. It could have happened just that way, too. See, all Vern had to do was deny everything. Nobody had any real evidence on him, did they? With Hatfield (Pidgeon), just figuring things out as he went, there was no case against him (Vern), at all. Meanwhile, Hatfield has just presented the Judge, and prosecution with a very possible alternative theory of the crime. Two, if you remember that Uncle John's own business partner had a seriously tricky deal going on with Swiss bank accounts, a passbook in John's safe. Where was HIS alibi? Still, though Hollis looks pretty good for it. Intellectual Darwinism, maybe?

Walter Pidgeon is next in line to try and fill Perry Mason's shoes while Raymond Burr recovered from his surgery. He plays attorney Sherman Hatfield who ends up representing Hollis Wilburn (Joyce Bulifant) when she is accused of murdering her uncle, John Wilburn (Carl Benton Reid). Burr only makes one token phone appearance in this episode, while at one point Della takes the stand for the prosecution.

Pidgeon does very well with his outing and I found him much more interesting than Michael Rennie or Hugh O'Brien, though perhaps not as good as the Bette Davis episode. But the real question is whether one can stand Joyce Bulifant's child like voice for an entire show. At this point in her career she was fairly hot, so I was able to tune her voice out a bit and enjoyed the show. But I can understand if others root for her and her voice to be convicted.

James Best appears as Martin Potter, who along with Alex Gaussieur (John Siegfried) are in competition for Hollis' attention as well as her Uncle's awarding of a franchise of his business in Europe. Hayden Roarke ("I Dream of Jeannie's" Dr. Bellows) is underused as the dead man's partner.

While better than the previous two episodes, one can see this show wouldn't have lasted very long had Burr not come back soon.

** SPOILER BELOW **

This is the last of four consecutive episodes with guest lawyers taking over for Perry Mason, who is recuperating from some illness (as apparently, Burr was recuperating from surgery himself). Perry only appears in one scene, via telephone, and veteran actor Walter Pidgeon assumes the part of the guest attorney of the week, defending another innocent defendant against Hamilton Burger.

IMO, all four of these episodes are very weak, albeit each for different reasons. But in all of these cases, the story is just not very compelling.

In this case, the biggest problem is that the murderer is identifiable as soon as she/he takes the stand. I saw it coming a mile away - and I bet you will, too. There was no real purpose for this person in the story except to implicate the innocent defendant only to be later revealed as the killer. I have never found it so easy to confidently spot the killer so early in any other Perry Mason episode.

I wonder if these episodes would have been any better with Perry Mason / Raymond Burr. Do these episodes give us a chance to see what this series would have been like without Raymond Burr in the role he was born to play? Or did the producers knowingly pick out four of their weakest scripts as "throwaways" in Burr's absence?

I think it would have been more interesting perhaps if Hamilton Burger had defeated one or more of these guest attorneys, showing him as a victorious prosecutor and reinforcing to the viewer that Mason did not just win because Burger was such a bungler, but because Mason was just that great. But I don't know if audiences in 1963 would have accepted that kind of out-of-the-box thinking, and perhaps I am applying a 21st century viewer mentality to an early 1960s TV show.

However, I do believe that the ONLY interesting thing about these four episodes is to watch them and imagine how they would have looked with Mason/Burr as the defense attorney, and whether or not that would have been able to save them.