Product: Perry Mason: Season Six, Vol. 2 (2011)
Rating: 5.0
The Case of the Missing Mason
Bette Davis, Michael Rennie, Hugh O'Brien...in early 1963 these were big stars. So with Perry (Raymond Burr) recuperating from some illness, the gang at Paisano Productions spared no expense getting credible substitutes for the ailing star. Actually, and to my surprise, it worked.In the Case of Constant Doyle, one of only three episodes not titled "Case of the" with the "the" underlined, Bette Davis stars as the widow and law partner of a great lawyer who undertakes to represent a young man accused of, what else, murder. Better yet the murder is connected to one of her husbands old clients. The CEO gives sage advice like, there are opportunities for women lawyers in divorces and juvenile justice. Bette, a veritable Portia, tears up the prosecution as neatly as Perry ever did, undoubtably causing young girls of the sixties to wonder if there could be life at the bar for them. Consider that when I entered law school in 1972 we had 9 women in a class of 200, yet by the time I left three years later the entering class was 35% female. Many of us were there because of Perry which makes the Bette Davis episode intriguing.Michael Rennie, the space man fromThe Day the Earth Stood Stilltakes over a case where one of the suspects could be a "Martian nine feet tall." Don't tell me the writers didn't have fun with that line. Hugh O'Brien plays Bruce Jason, an OSS operative implicated in an assassination plot but nonetheless defending the accused. The foreign actors, hired for the shoot, marvelously overacted like they were still doing war-era B movies. O'Brien, for his part, was familiar to all TV viewers of the time as the star ofLife & Legend of Wyatt Earp.As good as these interludes are, Perry does return for his courtroom heroics, and the bathrobe cameos are soon forgotten. This set however is a tribute to the producers and writers of the best lawyer show of the 20th century.