The Case Of The Velvet Claws

Legal Claws

The Case Of
The Velvet Claws
USA 1936
Directed by William Clemens
Warner Archive DVD Region 1

The Case Of The Velvet Claws is the fourth of the six Perry Mason feature films made by Warner Brothers in the 1930s but it’s also the last one with Warren William playing Mason. Eddie Acuff takes over as Spudsy, the comic relief private detective assistant to Mason on this one but we also welcome back Claire Dodd as Della Street, who played her in the second movie also, The Case Of The Curious Bride (reviewed here).

This one is actually based on the very first Perry Mason novel from 1933 and, I can only hope the meaning of the title is made clear in that book because I’ve got no idea what it has to do with the content of the film, for sure. One thing opens the movie, though, which I’m sure must be a pretty big deviation from the source... that is to say, well, in the books there is often some sexual tension between Mason and his secretary Street. Apparently, in the 2020 TV show, which is still set in the 1930s, they remove that element by making Della Street a lesbian. Here, they come at the issue from another angle. The film starts off with Mason interrupting a legal proceeding and the judge takes a ten minute adjournment in order that she can marry Mason and Street in her chambers. After the two tie the knot, they set off on a honeymoon but, of course, before they have had five minutes of the married life, Mason is taken at gunpoint by a new client, Eva Belter (played by Wini Shaw) and he very quickly gets involved in a case defending her from a murder wrap, with a difference...

In this case, both Eva and the audience think she did it. Mason figures differently but, unfortunately, to save herself, she tells the police she heard Mason get into an argument with the victim at the scene of the crime and throws suspicion on him. So Mason has to try and solve the case while staying ahead of the police who want to arrest him. Of course, by the end of the film, Mason fills everybody in on who the real murderer was... much to the surprise of Eva.

While this one is a little more on the serious side than the screwball antics of the previous two films, there’s still a lot of humour being forced into this one, although it doesn’t seem as well written and falls flat most of the time, it seemed to me. Shenanigans include a running joke where Perry has to keep running out on his new wife, a running joke about him catching and giving everyone a cold and a horrible sequence where Spudsy goes under cover dressed in drag. Yeah, the comedy is not great in this one but it doesn’t distract too much from the plot, it has to be said.

All in all, it’s not a terrible movie although the director did nothing special to push the semiotics of cinema the way one or two of them on this series did. William Clemens also directed the four, quite brilliant 1930s Nancy Drew movies and a couple of The Falcon adventures too. Once again, this was one of a number of films which were promoted on the credits as part of The Clue Club Mysteries, a gimmick Warners were pushing to act as a brand for their mystery movies at the time.

And that’s me done on this one I’m afraid. I’m sorry this is such a short review but I don’t have much more to add. I don’t know if Mason is still married to Della Street in the next film in the series but I’ll let you know sometime soon. Meanwhile, The Case Of The Velvet Claws (whatever that means) is not the best in the series and not one I’d recommend to hook you into these.

The Case Of The Lucky Legs

Leg-ality

The Case Of
The Lucky Legs
USA 1935
Directed by Archie Mayo
Warner Archive DVD Region 1

The Case Of The Lucky Legs is the third of only six Perry Mason movies ever made (that I can find out about, surely some other countries made some?), all within a very short period during the 1930s. This one, however, has none of the experimental and sometimes sophisticated visual language of the former film, which incorporated some interesting camera movements and dissolve fades to drive the visual syntax. So in terms of film-making, this one comes across as pretty pedestrian compared to the previous entry. However, what the studio did do was push the humour they’d brought into the second film and take this fully into, pretty much, ‘screwball comedy’ mode... which is, of course, a very 1930s genre. Director Archie Mayo would, just over a decade on from this movie, direct The Marx Brothers in the final film in which all three appear on screen at the same time, A Night In Casablanca... so it could be said he was a director who had a flair, or at least an aptitude for these kinds of comedy shenanigans. However, even though I don’t know the character that well, it seems to me that trying to ‘comedy up’ a character like Perry Mason is a bad idea.

Once again, Warren William plays Perry Mason and William Jenkins returns as Spudsy Drake. There are a few other returners in terms of actors but, like the last movie, they returned to different but sometimes similar parts. One person who was new again to the series was the actress playing secretary/future spouse Della Street, the third in as many films, performed here by Genevieve Tobin. This time they’ve given her a succession of equally comic, witty lines to match Perry quip for quip so, yeah, most of the time this film rockets along merrily, so fast you feel you should maybe stand back in case the movie takes off from the screen and damages someone.

This time, the film is about the winners of various Lucky Legs contests across America. It’s a scam and the guy who brings the idea to each state takes all the money from each sponsor and, also, he leaves town before each winning lady can collect on the $1000 they won. Patricia Ellis plays one such girl, who is holed up with another former winner and they both get involved with the murder of the swindler, complicated by the presence of two meddling boyfriends and a sponsor who is also in love with one of them. Luckily for them... and their fortunate legs... Perry Mason is on the case. Not only is he almost implicated in the crimes himself but, to make the comedy shenanigans even more uproarious, his doctor has denied him to eat anything but healthily, due to a bizarrely false diagnosis being brought on by Perry sucking on a ice cube to help cure his hangover. So in addition to the sprinkling of hindering husbands and plodding policemen, we have the various comedy routines where he’s drinking milk and pilfering food from clients fridges. Not the Perry Mason I remember from those few brief glimpses of Raymond Burr in the part on the famous TV show.

Once again, the writers eschew having any kind of court scene for the film... something which I’m told was always the big feature the books would lead up to. Instead, Perry has a moving feast of suspects and law enforcers circulating from his office, to his doctor’s and then back to his office as he sums up his case and proves who the real murderer is. It’s all a bit loopy and, while I love this kind of stuff, I don’t think you’d be able to get away with something like this today and, of course, all the drama of the situation is deliberately stifled by the exclusion of the courtroom... so I can see why the writer of the novels, Erle Stanley Gardner, would be none to happy about the way his legendary lawyer was progressing in his screen adventures.

All in all, being as I have no familiarity with the character, I found myself fairly entertained and intrigued by the direction the writers were taking with The Case Of The Lucky Legs... which was mostly to make the lead character appear and act as ridiculously as possible, aided by his equally ridiculous friends but somehow still managing to save the client’s, not to mention his own, neck. Fans of 1930s screwball should have a fairly breezy time with this one, I reckon. Fans of Perry Mason... maybe not so much. Warren William would play the character only one more time after this so, yeah, I’ll watch that one and report back here to sum up my conclusions fairly soon.

The Case Of The Curious Bride

Making It Legal

The Case Of The
Curious Bride
USA 1935
Directed by Michael Curtiz
Warner Archive DVD Region 1

The Case Of The Curious Bride, the second of the Warner Brothers movies based (lightly enough for th original author to actually hate them) on the famous Perry Mason novels by Erle Stanley Gardner, once again stars Warren William as the famous legal hotshot. But already, by the second film in the series, it’s a very different kind of movie from the first one. It also has a very famous director in the form of Michael Curtiz, who would direct many popular (too numerous to mention them all) Hollywood classics in his career such as Yankee Doodle Dandy, The Commancheros and, of course, Casablanca. I’ll name a couple more of this director’s movies in a little while when they become very relevant to one of the minor actors here, just a step up from an extra, in this movie towards the end of this review.

Okay, so I said this was a very different kind of Perry Mason and I certainly mean it. The film pretty much transforms the story and characters into a very frothy, funny romp, starting off with a scene where Mason practically takes over a restaurant in order to prepare a meal. And it’s almost as if the scriptwriters are trying too hard to make it witty and funny and... they don’t let up all the way through. It’s not quite like watching The Marx Brothers at work but it is a little inappropriately handled for a Perry Mason adventure, I would say. It even has a scene where Mason’s detective assistant ‘Spudsy’ Drake accidentally subjects Mason and himself to tear gas and the two have a touching scene where they are crying for comic effect. This movie really is skating on thin ice but... yeah... it just about gets away with it, I think.

And talking of ‘Spudsy’... he’s played by Allen Jenkins, who played the disgruntled police detective in the previous movie (eagle eyed veterans might also remember him as the original version of Goldie Locke in at least one of the early Falcon films). We also have a new Della Street already, this time in the form of actress Claire Dodd. She does alright here though, at least as good as the last person and ably assists Perry when she can, as he gets involved with an old flame who is now married to one person and who was married to another who was legally dead for four years except... now he’s turned up again. However, he doesn’t turn up for very long as he’s soon bumped off for real and she is now the prime suspect. The corpse in question is played by an actor who would soon be even more famous than the director and, okay, I’ll get to that in a minute.

What’s really interesting here is the amount of crude but persistent camera movement in this movie, which seems a little out of place for its time, this close to the transition from silent films into talkies... maybe this was when the equipment started getting quieter to move about again. Anyway, there seems to be a lot of dollying up to characters like a kind of ‘do it yourself’ zoom shot and, also, there’s some very nice footage of a low key car chase where the car behind is shot from the back of another car with a very dynamic set of sweeping camera movements. This really does seem ahead of its time for 1935.

The shots seem to get more elabourate as the film wears on, too. There’s a really odd shot where Della is looking into the camera longingly after Perry has left and the shot just holds for way too long before she suddenly freezes altogether and the frame seems to push in like a zoom into the camera. Not long after this, the director starts using something similar to transition from scene to scene. So, for instance, he’ll dolly out of a shot at the end of a scene and then it will blur and dissolve into him dollying into the exterior of a building, acting as an establishing shot, which will in turn dissolve out as he dollies into the next scene within that location. So, yeah, a very specific visual language is being established by Curtiz as the film progresses. It’s distracting but interesting and I wonder if he was just experimenting with what he could get away with here.

Okay, so I’ve mentioned the comedy and I’ve mentioned the convoluted camera moves... let’s talk about the corpse of the murdered ‘former’ husband. Well, we see him for a few seconds with a sheet over him without getting a look at his face. Luckily, a flashback revealing how he died takes place in the last five minutes or so of the film where the character gets into a fight and then gets accidentally pushed back onto a broken glasss before we see the life fade out of his eyes. He has no lines and he’s on screen for maybe not much more than a minute but this is the fourth little part for an up and coming Tasmanian actor the world would soon know more of, namely, Errol Flynn. I can only assume the director met him while working on this movie and he would, that same year, direct him starring in what would be his break out role from extra to star, Captain Blood. The two would work on many more movies together such as The Charge Of The Light Brigade, The Adventures Of Robin Hood and Dodge City. So, yeah, this movie is worth watching just to see the start of this famous director/actor working relationship.

One last curious thing which I should possibly mention is that, this being a Perry Mason story, there is no courtroom scene in this one at all. Instead, Perry throws a party for a number of guests at short notice (why the heck they all came is anyone’s guess) and unmasks the real culprit (who he will go on to defend after the film is finished, we are told) at the party. So, hmm, don’t know if this was the case in Gardner’s original novel but, I’m guessing not and it seems strange to me to have a film about a famous lawyer and not have any time in court. Still, even for all it’s faults, The Case Of The Curious Bride was certainly an interesting movie and I had a good time with it. I’m looking forward to watching the next one to see if they decided to carry the tone over from this one or not. As always, I’ll let you know.

The Case Of The Howling Dog

Mason Gets
A Case On

The Case Of
The Howling Dog
USA 1934
Directed by Alan Crosland
Warner Archive DVD Region 1

Okay, I’d best make a confession. Not only have I never read any of Erle Stanley Gardner’s popular books about the much loved law room warrior Perry Mason, I’ve also never seen any of the movies or TV shows based on his books about the character either. I mean, sure, I’ve seen the odd ten minutes of the early Raymond Burr TV shows here and there, as my dad likes the character but, I’ve never really cottoned onto him until now. I bought my dad a set of the six, original movies which were, as far as I know, the only ones made in the US for cinema release... the various TV shows kinda carried the legacy of the character after these. And, well... I thought I’d watch this with him to see what the fuss was all about.

So The Case Of The Howling Dog is the very first screen adaptation of one of Gardner’s books and, unlike those books and future versions (from what I understand), Mason is already a very successful lawyer commanding a huge law firm and large set of offices. Here’s he’s played by Warren William and he’s also aided by his perpetual secretary Della Street, played here by Helen Trenholme in her only shot in the role. I believe that, later on in the books and also the films, the two characters get married.

The plot set up has an unusual hook of a neighbour’s police dog troubling a guy who moved in two months before. He hires Mason to take care of his will and also to try and arrest the guy who he believes is making the dog howl. It all gets very convoluted with Mason getting embroiled in a plot which involves two wives and two husbands (one of whom is initially Mason’s client) and the woman later suspected of shooting one of the men, who Mason is also, because of his contract with his initial client, in a position to defend. Of course, there are a couple of more murders before the story is through and, I have to say that, while I was kinda expecting the way the story played out in the film, it’s a little more restrained and unusual than many of the film series with running characters I’ve seen from this time period.

For instance, this is not rough and tumble movie where the main protagonist chases and fights his way to the solution of the case, picking up helpful clues along the way. Mason is a lawyer and doesn’t get involved with all that malarky, by the looks of it. This is not The Saint, The Falcon or even the Charlie Chan film series in terms of how these are put together. However, in spite of this, the film doesn’t get boring and Mason does do quite a lot of, well, shall we say skillful manipulation and staging of the facts which, I must say, I really wasn’t prepared for. It’s not that he’s fabricating evidence so much as creating new evidence which is just the right side of that distinction to discredit other observations and throw things into doubt... so, yeah, wasn’t expecting that so much. Nor was I expecting his clients, who he is defending, to lie to him either but... well, yeah, this is not familiar territory for me.

The film rolls along at a fair crack and, about twenty minutes before the end, the trial of Mason’s defendant starts. Now, another of my expectations dashed was the assumption that there would be a lot of court room drama in this but, barring a couple of quick adjournments and the discovery of two more corpses just around the corner from the trial (which seems a bit bizarre in terms of placement of the action), the courtroom scenes are over pretty quickly. There’s a slight rumple which I didn’t quite understand in terms of legal distinction at the end of the movie but, well, in the end the defendant goes away unscathed and with a new lease of life... and a new leash too, courtesy of a dog which Mason brings in for his client at the end (the howling dog is shot by... a person I won’t reveal here).

So, yeah... The Case Of The Howling Dog is not my usual kind of picture but I enjoyed it right enough and I’ll probably watch the others with my dad when he starts going through them. So look out for more Perry Mason movie reviews on here sometime, relatively, soon. Apologies for the short length of this review but, yeah, I really don’t have too much to say about this initial entry.