Yes, those early Perrys are in a class by themselves. Maybe because it lasted so long Perry Mason is a fascinating show to watch evolving, from squabbling couples and blue-haired ladies to teens and more "international" feeling episodes later on (Perry never quite "got" the international vibe,--LOL!--it was terminally back lot in this). There's a starkness to the early seasons that they dropped as the Sixties got into swingin' mode ('61-62?,--roughly). The sport jackets changed. Early on, most guys wearing them looked more or less like Jimmy Olson on Superman; while by the last couple of seasons they're coming to resemble, sartorially anyway, Felix Unger of The Odd Couple. That's a loong time in TV land! George Reeves had been dead for over a decade when The Odd Couple began in 1970. During the first couple of seasons of Perry he was still alive.
The sex stuff, whether voyeurism or couples spending the night together, was very under wraps, far more so on Perry and on TV generally than in the movies. On the big screen there was Liz, Marilyn, Audrey, Shirley MacLaine, and for those who lived in or near major cities and college towns, such international stars as Sophia Loren and Brigette Bardot. But on television it's like Irene Dunne and Myrna Loy had never retired. Girls next store were still like the June Allysons and Jeanne Crains of ten to fifteen years earlier. In the movies, though, you could actually see the rise of "hot" girls next store, and even hot teens: Natalie Wood, Carroll Baker, Carroll Lynley. Dobie Gillis had that mad crush on Thalia Menninger (what a name!), as played by Tuesday Weld, but this was before Miss Weld went on to become a screen star and, for a while there, a sort of thinking man's sex symbol (often troubled, but smart troubled, not dumb).
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telegonus (727)
7 years ago
Agreed on the opening scenes in Psycho feeling like a Perry. I have no doubt that this was intentional. Leaving aside, again, the sex stuff (isn't there a better turn of phrase for this?), the movie plays like a Perry up to Marion's auditory hallucinations in the car and her arrival at the Bates Motel. Even some of that could have come from a very early Perry. There were those strange motels on PM, and in the early episodes a fair number of old dark houses, though they never did an outright horror or even honest to gosh old dark episode. If only they'd gone and tried to do a PM version of the Hitchcock hour's An Unlocked Window. The Perry way, of course, and far less gruesome. You can see some early entries dang near flirting with that, then pulling back. My sense is that Erle Stanley Gardner wouldn't have permitted it.
Also, there's scarcely a non-Perry series player somewhere among the supporting cast of
Psycho, from Vaughn Taylor and Frank Albertson very early, through John Anderson and Mort Mills, Lurene Tuttle, even Simon Oakland, who appeared in a very good Perry. The larger parts players, no. There's no Balsam or Miles or Gavin on Perry that I can remember. One thing that bothers me a little about Perry is that they never could settle on one studio to film the show in, thus it doesn't have the consistency of many series filmed on familiar back lots. Psycho is Universal even as the film is Paramount. Perry's first few seasons were done at Fox but don't really vibe that way. Only a few sets, notably PM's office, remain the same (more or less) for the entire run of the series.
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ecarle (14979)
7 years ago
Agreed on the opening scenes in Psycho feeling like a Perry. I have no doubt that this was intentional.
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Probably so. Hitchcock knew the look of HIS TV series, but Psycho has more of a "Perry Mason" noirish, business-like feel to its early scenes.
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Leaving aside, again, the sex stuff (isn't there a better turn of phrase for this?),
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Well, its a quick way to cover a key taboo of TV and movies , but perhaps "leaving aside the suggested sexual content." Nah, that doesn't work, either. I'm all ears. Ha.
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the movie plays like a Perry up to Marion's auditory hallucinations in the car and her arrival at the Bates Motel.
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Definitely.
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Even some of that could have come from a very early Perry. There were those strange motels on PM, and in the early episodes a fair number of old dark houses, though they never did an outright horror or even honest to gosh old dark episode.
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I yield to your knowledge on this. I will say that motels seemed to have a certain "spooky cachet" back in those days. We didn't have the Motel Six and Best Western chains in such homogenous multiplicity. These were anonymous small businesses run by...who knows? I know that in REAL LIFE, I was a bit spooked by the motels our family stayed at "on the road" well before I even KNEW of Psycho.
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ecarle (14979)
7 years ago
If only they'd gone and tried to do a PM version of the Hitchcock hour's An Unlocked Window. The Perry way, of course, and far less gruesome. You can see some early entries dang near flirting with that, then pulling back. My sense is that Erle Stanley Gardner wouldn't have permitted it.
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Probably so. Hitchcock came to understand the role of the gruesome in thriller entertainment, and its ability to "raise the stakes" of audience involvement. But that came at a cost. Hitchcock was found to be a fairly creepy guy in Hollywood circles. Erle Stanley Gardner probably wasn't interested in such a reputation. And his stories were really about the courtroom.
In fact, I knew a guy who went to law school in the 80's and watched old Perry Mason episodes to "brush up on civil procedure." He said the evidence/hearsay type stuff as used in the 50's courtrooms on Perry Mason was still fairly up to date for the 80's. Watching the courtroom scenes gave him a sense of how to get "comfortable with the terminology and when to use it" -- like when to object.
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ecarle (14979)
7 years ago
Also, there's scarcely a non-Perry series player somewhere among the supporting cast of
Psycho, from Vaughn Taylor and Frank Albertson very early, through John Anderson and Mort Mills, Lurene Tuttle, even Simon Oakland, who appeared in a very good Perry.
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I noticed those actors in some of the Perry Masons I watched over the years. (I've seen many of them only in "bits and pieces" while dial flipping, but I always lingered on those actors.)
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The larger parts players, no. There's no Balsam or Miles or Gavin on Perry that I can remember.
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Well, when Psycho was made, both Vera Miles and John Gavin were seen as "possible movie stars" (she had done The Wrong Man and The FBI Story, he had done Imitation of Life) and were probably kept off of series appearances. That would change very quickly for them.
Martin Balsam did a lot of TV, but perhaps his contracts bound him to different studios. He did The Twilight Zone and The Untouchables, for instance. After Psycho, he very well may have raised his TV asking price, too.
Perkins and Leigh were seen as purely movie stars in 1960. Perkins told a story of his seeing John Cassavetes at the Universal commissary while making Psycho. Cassavetes said, "what are you doing here?" Perkins said "working for Hitchcock." Cassavetes was incredulous: "You're doing his TV SHOW at this stage of your career?" No, no, no... a movie. Oh, OK.
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ecarle (14979)
7 years ago
One thing that bothers me a little about Perry is that they never could settle on one studio to film the show in, thus it doesn't have the consistency of many series filmed on familiar back lots. Psycho is Universal even as the film is Paramount. Perry's first few seasons were done at Fox but don't really vibe that way. Only a few sets, notably PM's office, remain the same (more or less) for the entire run of the series.
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Great insights. It seemed pretty clear in the 60s and 70s that Lew Wasserman's Universal had a "lock" on most NBC dramatic series -- one became aware of how identical all the rooms looked ("Oh, that's a Universal hotel room; oh, that's a Universal courtroom.")
"Psycho" -- coming before Hitchcock's final run of all-Universal films from The Birds to Family Plot -- remains a unique item in film history. It has a Paramount logo at the beginning, but the soundstage sets, backlot(Sam's hardware store), and even the sound effects (closing doors, honking horns) all SCREAM "Universal." Universal owns Psycho now, but it will always have that "bastard child" Paramount logo attached. It was one of the biggest hits Paramount ever had in the 50s or 60s. Now, Psycho makes money for Universal exclusively.
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ecarle (14979)
7 years ago
Yes, those early Perrys are in a class by themselves.
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I find them fascinating. My parents watched the series when I was a boy, it was on a lot in our home, and I kinda/sorta found it interesting. And then re-runs kept the show's "fifties style" before our eyes in the seventies and eighties. "Happy Days" may have been recreating the fifties with a modern cast, but Perry Mason was the real deal.
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Maybe because it lasted so long Perry Mason is a fascinating show to watch evolving, from squabbling couples and blue-haired ladies to teens and more "international" feeling episodes later on
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In this regard, Perry Mason rather matches up to the Alfred Hitchocck Presents/Hours which stretched roughly over the same years. The early Hitchcock TV shows were rather musty and old-fashioned(blue haired ladies abounded there, too), but the later ones had that mid-sixties hipness(and some teenagers), too.
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(Perry never quite "got" the international vibe,--LOL!--it was terminally back lot in this).
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Yes, well, those were the days. You could recognize "Universal's Europe Street" within seconds on any show.
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There's a starkness to the early seasons that they dropped as the Sixties got into swingin' mode ('61-62?,--roughly).
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One critic called the first half hour of Psycho: "As bare, stringent, and minimal as an old Jack Benny TV episode." I think you could insert "as an old Perry Mason TV episode" and be accurate.
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The sport jackets changed. Early on, most guys wearing them looked more or less like Jimmy Olson on Superman; while by the last couple of seasons they're coming to resemble, sartorially anyway, Felix Unger of The Odd Couple. That's a loong time in TV land!
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Interesting fashion analysis, Telegonus! When I think of the best use of a sportcoat, I think of James Garner in The Rockford Files. No tie. Comfortable. I've always liked that look.
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ecarle (14979)
7 years ago
The sex stuff, whether voyeurism or couples spending the night together, was very under wraps, far more so on Perry and on TV generally than in the movies.
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Yes, but I suppose what was interesting on PM was that the adultery was clearly going on, just never seen or shown or discussed. It was "in the air." It was all very Hays Code. I'm reminded that the Hays Code allowed for adultery if one or more of the adulterers got killed. Like Marion Crane. Or a Perry Mason victim.
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On the big screen there was Liz, Marilyn, Audrey, Shirley MacLaine, and for those who lived in or near major cities and college towns, such international stars as Sophia Loren and Brigette Bardot. But on television it's like Irene Dunne and Myrna Loy had never retired.
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A great comparison. Perhaps the TV producers of the 50s/early 60s felt that TV shows had to be made with the content of the 30's and 40s? Only "at the movies" were sexually realities being allowed for discussion. There was always this issue: unlike violence, sex is something that a lot of people really like to do, and there can be "consequences"(pregnancy, disease, "reputation" issues.) So a mass broadcast medium like TV didn't want to beam that material into family homes. Or show the kind of women who get those thoughts going.
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ecarle (14979)
7 years ago
Girls next store were still like the June Allysons and Jeanne Crains of ten to fifteen years earlier. In the movies, though, you could actually see the rise of "hot" girls next store, and even hot teens: Natalie Wood, Carroll Baker, Carroll Lynley.
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Yes...the movies of the 60s started to bring forth the concept of "the sexual woman." Given that Women's Liberation hit in the 70's, I've always kind of seen the 60's women as the most sexual in movie history. All the ones you've mentioned, plus Ann-Margret and Raquel Welch, the "Bond girls"(yikes), and a host of hotties on TV shows like Man From UNCLE and Wild Wild West.
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Dobie Gillis had that mad crush on Thalia Menninger (what a name!), as played by Tuesday Weld, but this was before Miss Weld went on to become a screen star and, for a while there, a sort of thinking man's sex symbol (often troubled, but smart troubled, not dumb).
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Tuesday Weld had an interesting career. She had a "troubled" reputation(not her fault -- bad parents) and a "Method" reputation. But she worked a lot in the sixties and early seventies. She was Warren Beatty's first choice for Bonnie in Bonnie and Clyde. Weld turned it down she said, BECAUSE she knew it would be a big career-changing hit . (Beatty had been, briefly, a Dobie Gillis player...before hitting instant movie stardom sexually with Natalie Wood in Spelndour in the Grass.)
I've always been interested by Tuesday Weld appearing in "The Cinncinati Kid" as the "blonde good girl" versus Ann-Margret's "redhead bad girl" in that film. Weld resisted sharing the screen with A-M, but took the role and offered a kind of "subtle competitive sexuality." Star Steve McQueen dallies with A-M...but ends up with Tuesday.
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telegonus (727)
7 years ago
TCOT Angry Mourner on tonight. I've seen it a few times. It's one of the better "pastoral Perrys", with great location (or back lot) scenes, so different from the starchy L.A. of the Fifties.
Great guest cast headed by, yes, Barbara Eden and Malcolm Atterbury, among others. Eden looked so different when she was young, and she was a good eight years younger than she was on I Dream Of Jeannie .
Atterbury had that "born old" look, was virtually interchangeable casting with so many others in those days. It was a good mystery, too, with a great Big Reveal. James Westerfield, whom you may remember as the big mug face at the loading dock in the closing scenes of On The Waterfront was the sheriff, Paul "Micah" Fix the D.A., a role he played a few times on PM. He was sort of the rustic Hamilton Burger but more laid back. Much more.
I think that Perry was best when it featured a lot of nocturnal scenes. When in sunny L.A. mode, which it so often was, it was visually unexciting, as compared to, say, Peter Gunn or The Untouchables or even the darker Twilight Zones. Tonight's entry had some dark scenes and they helped a lot, gave it a few Night Of The Living Dead vibes, something it often had when "up country" (yeah, go figure). Another show with a lot of dark scenes: The Fugitive. The "lightening up" of Perry post-1960 or thereabouts robbed it of some of the aura, as it often came off as stodgy in those later years.
Or maybe I'm being influenced by the Hitch hour An Unlocked Window, which was aired at an ungodly hour on Decades last night and which I watched and loved as usual. There's something about blood and thunder settings, dark and stormy nights...
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