Perry Mason - 2020

 

The criminal lawyer Perry Mason has stood for defending the innocent for nearly one hundred years. Author/lawyer Earl Stanley Gardner (1889-1970) wrote eighty Perry Mason novels and short stories, beginning with The Case of the Velvet Claws, published in 1933 and selling twenty-eight million copies in its first fifteen years. At the time of his death, he was the best selling American author...ever. Beyond the novels, six Perry Mason movies were made during the 1930’s, a radio show ran on CBS from 1943-1955, the television program starring Raymond Burr as Mason ran from 1957-1966. You can still view the first eight seasons of Perry Mason on CBS All-Access. 

Earl Stanley Gardner

Those of us of a “a certain age” all have Perry Mason in our backgrounds in some way or another. I remember the fifteen minute radio show, gathered around the radio in our third story New York apartment. In books as well as films and tv the formula of half a show dedicated to the investigation and the second half devoted to the trial, always ending in the accused being found innocent, is still the basic model for detective fiction and film. This formula for telling the Perry Mason story still dominates the current version, whose first season has just been completed on HBO Max, where it was green lighted for a second season before the first one ended. But the differences in style and substance are considerable, and perhaps not acceptable to some older Mason fans. 

Raymond Burr

The calm, self-possessed, Perry Mason played by Raymond Burr who inhabits the consciousness of so many of us, is not the current character at all. Perry Mason, played by Matthew Rhys, who you’ll remember as the two-lives spy in The Americans, is tortured by fear and doubt as a shell- shocked (now properly labeled as PTSD) WW I vet in 1931 Los Angeles. The series provides back-stories for all the major characters appearing in the books, on film, radio and television - Della Street, Hamilton Burger, Paul Drake - but they’re nothing like the mid-century cutouts you’d recognize. No Black characters appear in the original Perry Mason shows, while this iteration is filled with color, awareness of women’s concerns, ethnicity, and real language you’d never experience on television. 

Matthew Rhys

The plot, very broadly, concerns the kidnapping and murder of an infant child. Also, front and center is a  religious zealot looking and sounding a lot like the famous (notorious) evangelist, Amy Semple McPherson, who created a national sensation during the 1920’s and early thirties from her base in Los Angeles, played by Tatiana Maslany.  Mason is a down-at-the-heels private investigator doing the legwork for DB Jonathan, played by the always terrific John Lithgow. Included is a full-scale explanation of how the attorney Perry Mason emerges, as well as other familiar Mason characters like Della Street and Paul Drake. All the characters emerge as complex individuals, each coping with real issues complicating their lives while making them interesting as well as arresting. Cloaked in moral, sexual, and religious ambiguity, this story moves way beyond anything you might see on network television, even today, which remains one of the great gifts of streaming television.  

Juliana Rylance as Della Street

The settings are period Los Angeles, nighttime scenes are often dark and threatening while agricultural and desert surroundings brightly, even harshly lit. The film noir atmosphere provides a perfect setting for tortured, often violent lives of the characters. Car lovers will enjoy this series simply for the range and quality of antiques on display. The sets capture the period highlighting architecture, furniture, lighting fixtures, and more to create perfect settings for the hardship of the times. The script reflects the racism, sexism, police, and civil corruption into which Mason tries to bring his simple morality of right and wrong over what’s simply legal. 

Running for eight recently completed episodes on HBO Max, Perry Mason proved itself to be a highly rewarding, tension-filled police/legal procedural with plenty extra. Ratings were: IMDb = 8, Rotten Tomatoes = 75%. Irene sometimes found it to be “too talky,” but I enjoyed the pacing, development, and nuance of the plotting and acting added to the pleasure of the entire production. Perry Mason has been renewed for a second season, which I hope will lead to several more.

Yellowstone - A Modern Western

 

The great West, as portrayed in movies since The Great Train Robbery, was made in 1903 and known as the first western. From my first experiences with Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, and the Lone Ranger, the myths of western self-sufficiency have fevered my imagination, and built our nation as well as our notions of manhood, inspiring while damaging us, too. A leader in this tradition was the great sixties era Bonanza, standing out as a model for Yellowstone as the family empire built on the power, will, intelligence, and hard work of a patriarch whose children cannot possibly live up to his standards, but strive to be true to the great mythic tradition they come from.

Kevin Costner

Executive producer and star Kevin Costner has contributed mightily, and often with great sensitivity and intelligence, to this tradition in films like Dances with Wolves, Wyatt Earp, Silverado, and more. In Yellowstone, as John Dutton, the patriarchal figure, he’s a fifth generation rancher, a billionaire trying to preserve the traditions of a cattle ranch set in unbelievably beautiful scenery beside Yellowstone National Park. Besieged by commercial development, age-old conflicts with the indigenous population (referred to as the Confederated Tribes), as well as local, regional, and national politics in a modern world where ranchers break horses and fly helicopters on the same day, there’s endless room for drama, conflict, action, sex, and intrigue in this compelling series. 

Now completing its third season, the program retains its drive and drama, often also tugging at the heartstrings as characters develop further every week. The program sometimes displays raw violence in large and small ways. For instance, newly hired and properly taken into the inner circle, new ranch hands are brutally branded with a large Y on their chests, making their jobs a lifelong, two-way commitment, and Yellowstone a place you leave at great peril. Gunfights no longer feature two men meeting each other face-to-face on Main Street, but often control and revenge are taken with automatic weapons in military style insurgent raids.

The Dutton Family

Action in the series alternates between the conflicts and machinations of the Dutton family and life in the bunkhouse where there’s an active social life as well as dreams, challenges, and choices. The secondary characters are well drawn, convincing personalities adding to the show’s richness. The three Dutton offspring, each one a damaged yet compelling personality tortured by the early death of their mother and deeply conflicting motives, strive to succeed. Meanwhile, Costner’s John Dutton drives them all to keep the family together and the ranch in one piece. 

The Bunkhouse

The cast is filled with quality, but not big, recognizable names. Dutton’s two sons and a daughter are, as you might suppose, each dealing with such an overpowering father in their own ways, and by season three coming to terms with their relationships. Spouses, lovers, and children are all built and damaged by the relationships, as in any good soap opera. 

For, after all, Yellowstone is a first rate horse opera which has attracted loyal fans to what must be the Paramount channel’s most successful offering ever. A fourth season of Yellowstone has been optioned, but filming has not yet begun due to the pandemic. We watched the show through our cable system’s app’s on demand feature, which reduced, but didn’t eliminate, the commercials. It can also be rented without commercials from Amazon Prime Video or other film outlets. Just Watch is a useful website for discovering every channel carrying particular programs. Season three will end in a couple of weeks, and I look forward to the coming season four with great anticipation. Stream from the beginning to keep the history and the story straight. The biggest star of the program, however, is the incomparable western scenery.

Five Came Back by Mark Harris - Book Review

Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War by Mark Harris (Penguin Group, 2014, 528 pages, $29.95) tells the story of the wartime experiences of five of Hollywood's most awarded and successful directors' experiences as they volunteered for service during WW II, forsaking their careers to produce and direct propaganda, training, and documentary films for the Army, Navy, and Army Air Corps. Focusing on the experiences of John Ford, George Stevens, John Huston, William Wyler, and Frank Capra, Harris details in unsparing yet admiring prose the backgrounds, motives, skills, experiences, productions, and personal costs experienced by these five men as they moved from successful and lucrative careers at the top of the film industry to the demanding conditions of producing film for the military. He also takes a clear-eyed look at the effects of their military experiences upon the kinds of films these men made in the aftermath of the war as well as the political climate affecting the film industry and the nation during this period. It's a fascinating and detailed exploration which sheds light on today's complex social and media environment as well as expanding the reader's film literacy as the internal workings of these film pioneers is examined. Harris has taken on an ambitious agenda and succeeds at the highest level. 

George Stevens in Europe

 

Throughout the1930's the film industry had remained as apolitical as it possibly could, while individuals increasingly spoke out against the rise of Hitler in non-studio settings. The studio executives, most of whom were Jewish immigrants, were cautious in the face of the pervasive sentiments of Antisemitism in the country and the growing suspicion of Communist influence in an industry dominated by “foreigners,” many of whom had immigrated from eastern Europe. The Hollywood elite sought to avoid controversy, serving up feel-good movies and doing it's best to avoid compromising foreign markets by denying Hitler's danger. The Japanese attack against Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 changed American attitudes towards both the Japanese and Hitler in one startling attack. Frank Capra, whose success had been built upon light hearted, touching comedies, realized immediately that the war was real, and that the film industry had much to contribute.

John Ford

 

John Ford joined the Navy even before Pearl Harbor, while the others chose to join various services shortly after the attack. (An interesting sidelight is the picture of John Wayne who became a star in the John Ford western epic Stagecoach, never served but became an icon at least partly as a result of his military roles and well-articulated hyper-Americanism.) Ford developed Field Photo as a publicity and recruiting device for the Navy. The chronological structure of Five Came Back cuts from director to director within the gradual movement away from isolationism toward war, emphasizing the differing viewpoints, ambitions, and capabilities of the five directors. Each learns to cope with the military bureaucracy as he develops ways to portray the goals of the war (Capra), battle scenes (Wyler and Stephens), and progress in their skill at both educating and supporting the war effort. As the war continues, this country becomes less enthusiastic about war propaganda and more hungry for greater realism. Stephens, in his meticulous and detailed fashion captures the epic Battle of the Bulge and is the first major film maker to experience and film the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps, changing his life and approach to film making forever. Similarly, Capra found himself unable to make the same quality of films after the war he had made before, while Wyler and Huston learned a new realism they were able to translate into their later, greater films.

Frank Capra

  

For a reader from nearly seventy years away, the language of both criticism and the films themselves seems stilted and filled with ethnic and nationalistic character since shown to us as both stereotyped, insulting, and inaccurate. No claims of contemporary “political correctness”can contradict this reality. The internment of the large majority of west coast people of Japanese ancestry and the inability of the film makers to depict the contributions, patriotism, and valor of discriminated against black Americans both speak to the level of prejudice and discrimination rampant an American society throughout the forties. Films and the creation American exceptionalist myth receive their greatest development as WW II changes the subject matter and language of the film industry and the country. The War Department became increasingly uncomfortable with the language of propaganda as the country's leaders began to look beyond winning the war to establishing the peace and reconstructing both Europe and Japan. The revelation of the death camps and the emergence of the rivalry with the Soviet Union point inevitably to the next decades of cold war.

Mark Harris

  

Mark Harris is the author of Pictures at a Revolution. He formerly edited Entertainment Weekly and has written about pop culture for many other outlets. He graduated from Yale University and is married to playwright Tony Kushner. 

John Huston

 

Five Came Back is a swell book in the parlance of the times. It took this reader back to his earliest childhood memories as well as those developed from TV and films watched through the eventful 1950's and sixties during the Cold War. It was especially chilling and compelling considering the present situations in Russia and the Middle East. While many of the films are mere shadows of memory, others provoke vivid memories of my childhood and youth, recalling an age thought past, but which, in many ways, predicts and presages our current difficulties. Toward the end of the book, two film makers emerge with particular poignancy. William Wyler's return to his boyhood hometown of Mulhause in France, destroyed by bombing, where he is told not to search for any of his Jewish relatives because “they are not to be found” is heartbreaking. Even more difficult is the portrait of George Stevens almost mechanically detailing the horrors of Dachau while understanding that he is creating a record for later use in the post-war war crimes trials to be held in Nuremberg. Harris takes the time to make clear the difficulty of readjusting the peacetime Hollywood and the effects on each film maker of his war experiences. Today we recognize this syndrome as PTSD.

William Wyler

with the Crew of Memphis Belle - 4th from right 

Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywoodand the Second World War by Mark Harris (Penguin Group, 2014, 528 pages, $29.95) explores the role of film during the second world war with thoughtfulness, insight, and a clear eye for detail and nuance. The difficulties of making the kinds of film the government wanted and the interruption of flourishing commercial careers are explored through the examination of five directors who went to war and came home changed forever, as was their country and their industry. It's timely, important, and readable. I received the book as an electronic galley from the publisher through Edelweiss. I read it on my Kindle.