Back in 2014, something very surprising happened in TV land. A staff writer for US magazine The Atlantic began pulling apart the complex set of computer instructions that allowed Netflix to predict exactly what its customers like to watch. For the first time, someone had split the algorithm. In doing so, the writer unearthed a remarkable fact. The data showed that Netflix users’ favourite actor in the whole wide world was Raymond Burr – the man who played Perry Mason.
At this point, the big-shouldered Burr had been dead for two decades. But his continuing popularity wasn’t the only surprise. Tucked in at number seven on the list, between Robert De Niro and Clint Eastwood, was Barbara Hale, the actress who played Della Street, the whip-smart confidential secretary to Burr’s charismatic defence lawyer.
It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that not only was Perry Mason America’s first great television courtroom drama, but that Burr and Hale were TV’s first great male-female detective duo. The surprise was only that the show was so old.
The original black-and-white series ran for 271 episodes in the US from 1957 to 1966 (airing on BBC One from 1961 to 1967). Burr and Hale later returned for a set of stand-alone TV films that began in 1985. They made 26 of them, right up to Burr’s death in 1993 (although a further four were made without him).
In between, Burr starred as a wheelchair-using cop in Ironside, and there was a failed reboot – The New Perry Mason – with different actors, which lasted one season in the early Seventies. Now, the character has been revived again by HBO for an eight-part prequel, about to air on Sky Atlantic – with chameleonic Welsh actor Matthew Rhys replacing Burr, and London-born Juliet Rylance playing Della Street. It’s set in Depression-era Los Angeles, in the period before Mason became a courtroom force to be reckoned with, and it’s an altogether different beast. But more of that later.
The original TV show was based on former trial lawyer Erle Stanley Gardner’s series of Perry Mason novels. There are 82 of them, plus four short stories, beginning in 1933 with The Case of the Velvet Claws. Believe it or not, they’re the third-bestselling series of books in the world, after JK Rowling’s Harry Potter novels, and the Goosebumps series of children’s horror stories by RL Stine. Raymond Chandler admitted that he learnt to write fiction by copying Gardner’s plotting.
Gardner, though, had been disappointed by early film adaptations of his work – one producer even tried to recast Mason in a Western, at which point the author withdrew his permission. He had to be talked into the television adaptation by actress-turned-producer Gail Patrick Jackson, who was married to Gardner’s literary agent. She allowed the author to retain control of his character – he didn’t want any back story or romantic complications – and what emerged was formulaic but brilliant.
The television show kept Gardner’s hard-boiled plots – bad men, bad girls and murder most foul – with their whiff of glamour and sleaze: drugs, escorts, adultery, sex. Women characters were often beautiful, rich or both, and styled for a Vogue photo shoot – pencil skirts, bust darts ’n’ all. Mason oozed confidence in great-fitting suits. Courtroom scenes invariably contained what has come to be known as the Perry Mason moment: under tough questioning and the introduction of shock new evidence, someone confesses in the witness box, revealing the true killer and allowing Mason’s wrongly accused client to walk free.
This played into an American tradition of the showman lawyer. It goes back to Clarence Darrow, the crusading advocate who in the late 19th and early 20th century represented defendants in many high-profile murder cases, and defended teacher John T Scopes – who broke US law by teaching evolution in school – in the famous Scopes “Monkey” Trial of 1925. Arguably, life began to imitate art as real-life trial lawyers searched for the showpiece moment of drama that would swing the case their way. Johnnie Cochran’s bloody-glove defence of OJ Simpson – “if it don’t fit, you must acquit!” – in the Nineties is a perfect example (although Mason’s clients, it should be noted, were actually innocent).
As in the best Hollywood film noir, men and women in Perry Mason are equally smart, equally devious, equally deadly. The show transferred the books’ quick-fire dialogue, and the greater part of the Mason-Street partnership, directly on to the screen. In the books, the two spar even more than on TV, as in this exchange from The Case of the Cautious Coquette (1949), when Mason returns from an interview with a “gold-digger”, who has used all her charms on him.
“‘Come on,’ Della Street said, ‘give.’
“Mason grinned. ‘A very nice girl with wheat-coloured hair, laughing blue eyes, a luscious strawberry mouth with white, pearly teeth.’
“‘Oh, my Lord,’ Della Street said. ‘He’s in love.’”
Street is a little more demure on the small screen, but still has an active role. She can be found chewing over clues with Mason, even going undercover, as in The Case of the Hesitant Hostess (1958), a heady cocktail of blackmail, heroin trafficking and murder adapted from Gardner’s 1953 novel. In it, Della applies for a job as an escort to get a close look at the shady operation run by its boss. He throws her out when she tells him she’s in town with her husband with time on her hands. No married women allowed. It should be noted that Mason and Street had a third partner: the tall, blond, playboy-esque private detective Paul Drake, played by William Hopper in the original series. The character of Drake is just one of the significant modifications in HBO’s new adaptation.
Bringing Perry Mason back to television, though, has been quite the saga. As far back as 2011, news surfaced that Iron Man star Robert Downey Jr was planning to revive the character for the big screen. In an internet chat in 2014, Downey Jr revealed that he and his partners were “mining the original material for things that are ‘new’” and developing “a pre-Chinatown gumshoe thriller”. He intended to play Mason himself. The plan shifted to a TV series in 2016, and Downey Jr bowed out from the lead role only in 2019, giving it up to the talented Rhys, best known for playing a Russian spy in The Americans.
Rhys’s Mason is anything but cocky and sure of himself. He’s a hangdog, unscrupulous sleuth with a permanent five o’clock shadow and some very rumpled suits, more Peter Falk as Columbo than Raymond Burr as Mason. Rhys is intensely watchable, though he lacks Burr’s charm.
As for the show as a whole, neo noir doesn’t get much darker. Prepare to encounter a dead baby with its eyes sewn open and the closely observed smashed-in face of a man who falls onto brick steps from a great height. Darkness is pervasive. LA feels more like Gotham City than Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974). Set in 1937, that depicted Jack Nicholson’s private detective coming up against the crushing, immutable power of money and influence backed by law enforcement.
In the new Perry Mason, historical power structures are up for change. Drake (Chris Chalk) is now a gifted black police officer, who finds his route to detective blocked in the LA police. There is a real-life parallel – in Thirties California, Jamaican-born Samuel Marlowe was a war veteran and private detective. Della Street, meanwhile, does not plan on being Mason’s secretary. At the time, women lawyers were doing well in law schools but finding themselves thwarted by a patriarchal legal system. HBO’s Perry Mason eschews the original’s witness-box confessions as implausible, yet happily suggests that Mason runs the most progressive law firm of the era. In this sense, it no longer feels like “period drama”, at all, but a revisionist tale with modern sensibilities projected on to an earlier age – fighting to right the wrongs of the past, one might say. It’s compelling none the less. Maybe there just aren’t going to be any period dramas, any more.
Perry Mason begins on Sky Atlantic on June 22
Five classic Perry Mason Episodes
1 The Case of the Restless Redhead (1957), Season 1 Episode 1
Where it all began. Mason faces a tough task defending a woman who admits she fired two shots at a car driven by a hooded man, who then turns up dead in the Pacific Ocean.
2 The Case of the Hesitant Hostess (1958), Season 1 Episode 29
A grieving alcoholic is charged with the murder of an escort, who was blackmailing her former boss. Street goes undercover to check out his shady business, which hides a heroin-smuggling operation.
3 The Case of the Lucky Loser (1958), Season 2 Episode 2
A suspicious husband, an adulterous wife, and a corpse made to look like the victim of a hit and run. Mason has his work cut out when he gets involved in the affairs of a wealthy family, in which a drunken nephew fits neatly in the frame for murder.
4 The Case of the Flighty Father (1960), Season 3 Episode 26
Two men claiming to be the long-lost father of teenage heiress Trudy Holbrook turn up after her mother dies, leaving her $10million. Then her uncle, the only person who could identify the real father, is killed, and Trudy’s fingerprints are on the murder weapon… Step forward, Perry Mason.
5 The Case of the Renegade Refugee (1961), Season 5 Episode 13
A journalist is murdered while tracking a Nazi war criminal, believed to have gone to ground as an executive at an American company, and a former GI seems to be guilty of the crime. Mason intercedes in a tale of secret identities, extortion, embezzlement and a religious retreat.
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