When I realized that Thorwald was played by Raymond Burr, I found it funny. On Perry Mason, he's the good guy and he fights for justice. In Rear Window, he's such a mean guy and a murderer. He kills his wife, kills a poor little helpless dog, and then he tries to throw Jimmy Stewart out the window.
shareI think he played bad guys in a number of movies before gaining fame as a good guy in Perry Mason and Ironsides. He was scary looking before we started to see him as the rescuer of the falsely accused. Perry Mason is my all time favorite TV series except for Star Treks. What wonderful shows they were.
shareWhenever I have seen Raymond Burr in the films of the 1940s and 1950S, he seemed to have played the bad guy every time. I don't know if there were any exceptions in his early film career?
shareHe played Peter, the Apostle, in "Triumphant Hour" in 1953. His character from Godzilla (1956), the reporter/narrator, wasn't evil, either. Whether his character in "Crime of Passion" (1956) is a bad guy or not is open to debate. He's not the classic Burr psycho, but he has a questionable work ethic and is quite callous toward the end. The lawyer he played in "Please murder me" (1956) was flawed, but honest.
You may cross-examine.
Thanks for some Raymond Burr non-baddie roles to look out for from the 1950s.
shareRear Window first came out in 1954, three years before the Perry Mason TV show came on in 1957. Soon Perry Mason as a big hit, and Raymond Burr was a big TV star.
Thus: in 1962, when Rear Window was re-released to theaters by Paramount, the print ads added a box in the corner: "Co-Starring Raymond Burr, TV's Perry Mason!" Except this was the black-haired smiling Raymond Burr of 1962, not the white-haired scowler Lars Thorwald.
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I've always found it a little ironic -- or at least "complimentary" -- that Raymond Burr's SECOND famous TV role was as "Ironside" -- the cop in a wheelchair. That made two of Raymond Burr's most famous vehicles to be about someone in a wheelchair.
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Also: its rare for a TV star to become famous as one character(Perry Mason) and then famous as another character(Ironside), but Raymond Burr pulled it off.
I like how while Perry Mason gives us a clear view of how the gray and dull 1950s edged into the more hip early/mid 1960s; Ironside thrust Burr into a program about the countercultural late sixties and how they became the activist seventies. "Ironside" had long hair, Afros and minority cops to usher Raymond Burr away from his Perry Mason years.
THAT said, the "gray and dull" 1950's of Perry Mason weren't THAT dull and gray. Every week brought us a murder and usually some sort of unseen sexual affair. Perry Mason got into the underbelly of the surface placidity of 50's life.
Ray wasn't the bad guy in Gorilla At Large, even as he was a bit on the shady side in that one. He brought some bonhomie to his character, and this was atypical of him.
I find it Interesting the number of times he appeared in films (and once, on TV) in "Gorilla themes" stories.
To return to Mr. Burr and the practice of law: he was on the right side of the law as the prosecutor in the 1951 A Place In The Sun; and yet his flamboyant courtroom histrionics seem out of place and out of character for his dour D.A.
He was Mason's evil twin.
shareHaha. I love Perry Mason, and I didn't realize that was Raymond Burr until I started watching the thing in the bonus features where they talk about the movie. I can't believe I watched the whole thing and didn't realize that was Raymond Burr. But he looked so different, didn't he?!
Fiction is a lie, and good fiction is the truth inside the lie.--Stephen King
Indeed.
shareI didn't realize it was Raymond Burr in the film myself - and I grew up on both Perry Mason & Bob Ironside!
shareHe was a much heavier man in Rear Window than on Perry Mason...it took him a few years to get the weight off, and he was fairly trim as Perry for most of the run.
Then, from the Ironside years on...the weight came back...but never quite as big as when he played Lars Thorwald.
Also odd: Burr's prematurely white hair in Rear Window. Or was he supposed to be blond? It is said that Hitchcock made up Burr(and added the eyeglasses) so that he would look like Hitchcock's producer/muse/tormentor David O. Selznick, too.
I liked Burr a lot and note that he was probably the best actor in TV history even though he didn't show all that much range.
Burr had two major problems. He was too heavy and gay and they tried to keep both conditions to a minimum. Burr's weight went up and down on the show but it always looked pretty much the same.
Another thing to like about Burr is that everybody who worked with him liked him and usually in some way was grateful for the way RB treated them during the filming.
The white hair in Rear Window is supposed to denote that he's a much older man. It's that weird, painted on white hair they used to do as part of the makeup back then.
I'd heard somewhere that Burr wanted the Perry Mason role so much that he locked himself in a hotel room and went on a liquid diet to drop pounds dramatically to audition for the role.