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"Hey! You ever feel like strangling your wife?" "Uh-huh." News of his latest triumph spread across the boardwalk in a tracking shot, Perry Mason (Warren William) is too busy studying delicious crustaceans to notice, "he's got cooking on his mind." Dinner with the coroner moves to coffee in the morgue and a wooden Indian in the coffin, a suave surrealism suits the tale of the supposedly dead husband who returns to prosecute his widows. Among them is the socialite (Margaret Lindsay) who turns prime suspect when the lout croaks for real, she's arrested while crouching in an airport phone booth with the lawyer-sleuth. A hangover ("My mouth tastes like the whole Chinese army marched through it last night") before the deduction, just something for the hero to do while on vacation in San Francisco. Michael Curtiz meets the complexities of plot with a tight technique made rather oneiric via continuous blurry fades, there are pleasing points of contact with Hitchcock's Murder! The secretary (Claire Dodd) pines secretly for the protagonist but his most emotional moment lies with the sidekick (Allen Jenkins), bawling together after taking whiffs from a hankie soaked with tear gas, "oh, this makes a nice farewell scene here in the moonlight, doesn't it?" Flatfoot duties for Barton MacLane, Warren Hymer dependably muggy, a "Burlesque DeLuxe" song from Wini Shaw. Coup de théâtre at the cocktail party, cf. The Thin Man, the flashback gets to the bottom of things and in the process locates Curtiz's future swashbuckler in his first Hollywood bit. "Sit down and let's talk about your last murder." "I'm too busy thinking about the one I got comin' up." With Donald Woods, Phillip Reed, Olin Howland, Charles Richman, Thomas E. Jackson, and Mayo Methot. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |