Poor Wanda

MeTV will be airing The Candy Queen on Monday. And while it remains a favorite, I have increasing issues with the defendant, Claire Armstrong, every time I watch it.

This post could be called “When Perry antagonists are right.” While of course Wanda wasn’t justified in committing murder, her frustration and hurt over how she was treated are completely understandable. It’s just as she said, the candy formula was as much hers as Claire’s. Why did the grandmother only give Claire the formula? Both girls had sold the candy as kids. Why didn’t Claire think about making Wanda a partner in the company, at least after it really took off? Why did she think making Wanda her secretary was good enough?

In Claire’s defense, she was not a good businesswoman. She was going to dump the guy who had helped her get started and who knew the business, in order to give the company to her spineless fiance. She also refused to listen to anyone who tried to open her eyes to what kind of crumb the fiance truly was. She even childishly hung up on Perry when he expressed concern at her business decision. Perry was diplomatic enough to say it might have been an accidental disconnection, but after seeing what Claire was like in the rest of the episode, I think it’s far more likely that she hung up on him.

Wanda was also upset at Claire’s nonsense, saying how Ed Purvis was worth ten Mark Chesters. Maybe Wanda wouldn’t have been good at running the company either, but at least she seemed to be thinking more logically until she ended up committing murder when she dug herself too deep in her scheme to get the formula that should have been partially hers to begin with.

One wonders what kind of sentence Wanda got. It doesn’t seem like the murder was premeditated, but an impulse decision when the gambler realized the woman he was talking to wasn’t Claire. Of course, it still wasn’t justified. But I have to admit that Wanda is one of the antagonists I really feel sorry for. In court, she breaks down on the witness stand exclaiming how Claire always gets it all and now she has it all again. “I hate you!” Wanda sobs over and over as the scene fades out. Despite being raised as sisters by their grandmother, they were not raised as equals and that has taken a heavy toll on Wanda all through her life. Why weren’t they raised as equals? Why did Wanda leaving to get married mean that she couldn’t inherit the candy formula too? There is so much more to the story that we’re left to wonder about.

Of course, Claire didn’t exactly have it all, being that she lost the man she thought she was in love with. And I’m sure that, and Wanda’s betrayal, will haunt her for a good, long time. But she does have the candy company still, and Ed Purvis saying he wouldn’t hurt her for the world. Hopefully the Claire at the end of the episode is a sadder and wiser Claire who will really appreciate what she has, including Ed.

Every now and then, the Perry antagonists really are characters one can feel sorry for or even possibly feel like were in the right. Are there any you hope got a better break after the episode’s events? How about Wanda? Do you feel she was right to be upset and that she wasn’t treated right by either her grandmother or Claire? Was she instead a whiny brat? Is the truth somewhere in between?

Season 9, Volume 1: First Thoughts

So the first half of season 9 arrived on Friday! I’ve been happily exploring some of the episodes I’ve never seen uncut.

I noticed one intriguing thing on the container itself: Steve gets pictured and mentioned! Andy is certainly never mentioned on the containers for seasons 5, 6, and 7. He is depicted on the ones for season 8 (with the wrong color hair, oy vey), but I don’t know if he’s actually mentioned in the blurbs. Anyone with season 8, please let me know if he is!

The very first thing I wanted to do was to dig out The 12^th Wildcat and find that missing scene with Hamilton from before court convenes. I skimmed past the first part of the episode and paused to watch Steve when he appeared.

You know, it’s really a shame about how that episode handled the court scenes, making Hamilton look so unable to control himself and having to be reprimanded every few minutes. Not to mention their refusal to even explain the crime at the end. The 12^th Wildcat has copious amounts of both Steve and Hamilton and I would probably greatly enjoy the venture if not for those problems.

I love the missing scene. There is no similarity whatsoever with what happens in court moments later. Hamilton is awesome, he handles the reporters asking about his narcotics bust awesomely, and his conversation with Perry is awesome. It reminds me of that great scene at Clay’s Grill in The Golfer’s Gambit, before everything goes downhill in court.

Hamilton is very happy and pleased about the bust, naturally, but he doesn’t come off as overconfident or prideful or anything like that. He’s very mature, logical, and composed. When Perry asks him to release the client, Hamilton refuses, but he has good reasons for his actions, and he explains them very nicely to Perry. And he even comments that he’s mellowed out to be giving Perry some of this information. He certainly has mellowed out in later seasons, and that canonical notation of his character development deeply thrills me.

Having seen such a wonderful scene, I cringe all the more to think of watching the court scenes again. But I do plan to give the episode one complete viewing in its uncut state, to make sure I see all of the missing material.

I sure would like to know the explanation for why the court scenes in the back-to-back episodes The Hasty Honeymooner and The 12^th Wildcat are almost identical, right down to the prosecutors being chewed out so frequently and the exact nature of Perry’s complaints against them both. It really does make the court scenes in The 12^th Wildcat lose a lot of their meaning. It makes me feel as though they were sloppily tacked on and possibly not even meant for Hamilton at all, since The Hasty Honeymooner comes first and the prosecutor is a random guy we never see again.

That would make me feel better about The 12^th Wildcat, honestly, because Hamilton gets such wonderful scenes outside of court that to me it’s just not believable that he would regress to being so unprofessional in court. When he has to be reprimanded, it’s usually only once or maybe twice in an episode, which is vastly different from how often it happens in The 12^th Wildcat.

Other things I discovered are that The Fatal Fortune is one of the most mangled episodes there are. I counted five scenes that are cut short or missing entirely from the syndication version! It will require a post all to itself to detail them all.

I also encountered another instance of Perry throwing an accusation at Hamilton, which he does in The Fatal Fortune. I really do puzzle over why Perry does that so often in later seasons, but I love how Hamilton reacts. He handles it very calmly and maturely as he responds and tells Perry that he is not doing what Perry is accusing him of doing.

I started skimming through The Bogus Buccaneers to find the missing scenes in it, and I located two or three by the halfway mark. And one of them does explain a bit why Clay would be chosen as one of the three godfathers for the baby. It’s an adorable scene of him wanting to make sure the mother-to-be has plenty of milk to drink. I’m looking forward to watching it all the way through, and The Runaway Racer, too. I’ve long suspected that it is also one of the most chopped-up episodes.

I also watched The Wrathful Wraith, but only found one long scene and one short bit missing from it. They’re important parts, though, especially the long scene. It’s where Louise goes for the diamond cufflinks and eerily gets locked in the room. Then she finds the cufflinks aren’t even in the box.

The short scene is a bit when Perry and Paul are going to call Della back after Louise goes to visit the clairvoyant. Paul talks Perry what he’s learned about the clairvoyant, and wow, she’s a character. And they comment that Della probably ran out of gas for the third time in a month and is probably walking to the phone in the rain. One of them remarks on how Della can remember the details of a four-year-old brief, but can’t seem to remember that cars run on gasoline. Haha, poor Della. That isn’t why she called, but it’s an interesting little conversation. I love anything like that, which sheds light on the characters’ personalities and quirks.

I also couldn’t resist watching The Candy Queen. It’s been a while since I’ve seen it uncut. But I was left scratching my head in confusion. I only counted one small bit missing from the MeTV version, the first half of Perry’s conversation with Claire in jail. Honestly, I could have sworn that there was a scene where Wanda was telling about being poisoned on the witness stand, even though that would contradict Hamilton saying that he had tried to avoid the subject. I wonder if I’m mixing it up with The Silent Partner. And yet I don’t see how I could be, because they didn’t go to court in The Silent Partner.

Maybe a scene really is missing, because on the container it says that some episodes may be edited. I’ve thought that the only edits on the DVDs are the specific opening sequences, but perhaps there are occasionally others. I’d have to wonder, though, why I could have seen an uncut version not so long ago and yet CBS wouldn’t have access to one for the DVD set! And judging from the running time (close to 52 minutes), it seems it surely must be uncut. I don't think the episodes ever ran longer than that, except in season 1.

In any case, cut or uncut, The Candy Queen is always one of my favorites to watch. I get Hamilton, Steve, William Boyett, and H.M. Wynant all in the same episode!

I’m looking forward to an upcoming week of more uncut scene discoveries (as well as a whole bunch of guest-spots by H.M. Wynant on MeTV over this week and the next).

Some Further Musings on The Candy Queen

So after a great deal of pondering off and on the last few days, I think I decided that season 8 holds its position as my fourth favorite season after all. For all of the oddities of the season, there are still many things I love, and those give it the edge over the negative aspects.

Tentatively I planned that the rest of the list would then go 5, 9, 3, 4, 1. But I hate plopping 3 and 4 so low, as there are many episodes I love. Really, every season has a number of gems. 3 and 4 are bumped low mainly because of the long stretches when Hamilton isn’t there. The plots, however, are consistently good, even during those times. In fact, I think some of the very best episodes without Hamilton are from 3 and 4.

I happily watched The Candy Queen on MeTV this past Tuesday. It’s one of my favorites of season 9. Hamilton is awesome, Steve is awesome, and William Boyett and H.M. Wynant are guest-stars (and are both awesome). I enjoy seeing Nancy Gates as the defendant, Claire Armstrong, too.

H.M.’s final Perry character is the manager of an illegal casino operating in the backroom of a nightclub. Very much unlike Slim Marcus from The Singing Skirt, however, Tony Earle seems to be a pretty nice fellow. And he isn’t mixed up in anything involving the murder, aside from knowing that his boss wanted the Candy Queen formula and later had it.

Oddly enough, both Slim and Tony suffer from an odd fate—neither of them receives credit at the end with their proper names! Slim is called Wilton in the cast list, even though Hamilton gives his first name as Joseph, and Tony Earle is listed as Tony Mario. Weird.

Also, I’m never quite sure what to make of Claire Armstrong and the co-owner of the Candy Queen company, Ed Purvis. It always makes me angry that Claire (off-screen) refuses to believe Ed that slimy Mark Chester is no good, and that her reaction to Ed’s news that Chester was illegally gambling is to decide to terminate his contract and have Chester take his place.

Of course, it sadly happens too often, to think the new guy is the bee’s knees and to not trust the guy who’s been faithful and loyal for years. Claire behaves very stupidly, but it’s believable.

It bothers me even more, however, that while it shows her heartbreak and devastation over later realizing that Chester really is a creep, she’s never really shown being properly regretful for the rotten way she treated Ed. She doesn’t even say she’s sorry.

She does sign the extension of his contract, when Perry brings it, but if I remember right, Perry did it without her requesting it, apparently feeling that it is what she would want. (And she was apparently alright with it, since she signed.) When Perry asks if there’s any message to go with it, she says to just give Ed the contract.

I suppose the implication is that Claire and Ed are so close, the contract extension is all that needs to be said. But after everything Claire did to him, it really feels like there should have been more. And I guess one could argue that Ed should have turned up to see Claire off on her cruise, but at that point he probably still wasn’t even sure how she felt about him or if she would want him there.

My most favorite line from the episode is still the one delivered by William Boyett, the tough detective in charge of raiding the gambling joint, when casino manager Tony Earle addresses him as “friend”: “I’m not your friend.” Ha, priceless.

The Candy Queen vs. The Silent Partner

I wonder a bit why the writers wanted to remake some of the older episodes. Were they running out of script ideas? Did they think they could tell the stories better? Were they fiddling around just trying to see what they could come up with?

Remakes of anything, of course, are usually not popular. I’m always surprised when I hear about one that’s really taken off, such as the recent Battlestar Galactica or Hawaii 5-0. (I still want to see the latter, out of curiosity.) When it comes to remakes of Perry episodes, my opinion varies depending on the episode itself.

As ranted about before, I found The Vanishing Victim, the remake of The Fugitive Nurse, quite terrible in many ways. There were a couple of things I liked, but overall the episode really belonged in season 1. The atmosphere even felt like season 1. It doesn’t seem to fit anywhere else, and certainly not in season 9. Had it been season 1 I would have liked it a lot better. When it appeared in season 9 it just perplexed me. I already spoke of it at length in another post, so I won't reiterate it here.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, I loved season 7’s The Woeful Widower, the remake of The Fiery Fingers. I felt that it improved on the story and really threw in a dark twist. Not that The Fiery Fingers didn’t have a dark twist as well, but the remake arguably had a larger or at least a more rare one. Perry defended someone who was actually guilty? Well, it was a robbery case, and Perry was a friend of the court, but still. That woman ended up being a multiple murderer (even though she hadn't been arrested for that at the point when Perry defended her).

Others I’m left not quite sure what to make of one way or the other. The Impetuous Imp falls in that category. Overall it’s a very intriguing and intense episode. But I’m not fully sure what the writer’s intention was with some of the plot angles he threw in. And I far prefer the more serious defendant of the original Negligent Nymph to the somewhat ditzy gal we get in Imp.

But that episode will get its chance at a full-length examination another time. This time I’m thinking more of The Candy Queen, the remake of The Silent Partner.

The first time I saw the former at any recent date, I had just come from seeing the original. I found that The Candy Queen did not handle some of the key plot elements as intensely as The Silent Partner. For instance, the girl who gets poisoned in the remake is never even heard of until she calls Perry on the phone, gasping for breath. But in the original, she is seen in a couple of scenes before that, and I think that works much better.

There’s just a certain intensity and intrigue present in the way The Silent Partner is told overall that makes it a classic. Half of the episode takes place over one night. The poor defendant has a nervous breakdown and is too ill to even be brought to trial. Hence, it’s the first time the mystery is solved out of court. And Tragg, rather grumpy at being disturbed late at night when he’s just taking his groceries home (including a loaf of Wonder Bread), has some wonderful screentime.

That’s not to say that there aren’t things I don’t care as much for. Season 1 certainly presented Hamilton as an outright antagonist more than once, and that is the case here. It’s the first time one of those wild accusations goes flying, I believe. Sometimes Hamilton has a basis in fact for what he’s upset about, but the accusation he makes here (that Perry told his client to fire another, random shot from the murder gun) just seems out of left field.

On the other hand, Perry has messed around with guns himself sometimes, including in the very first episode. Strangely, it seems like the things he does that are the most off-the-wall are things Hamilton doesn’t find out about. I suppose it’s possible that he does find out, off-screen, and those things are why he gets so upset and flings around the oddball accusations. That would certainly make it make more sense.

The Candy Queen did not ignore the character development with Hamilton over the past nine seasons, the way some of the other season 9 episodes did. In fact, I think just about everyone has awesome moments in it. And due to that, there are some rather surprising and delightful tidbits along the way.

This is the episode where Paul first seems to show that he particularly likes Steve Drumm’s company. When they call the police, worried about the girl having been poisoned, Steve answers. Paul perks up and asks, “Is that you, Steve?”

Paul must be in quite a good mood. While talking with Clay later on, he even acts a bit as though he’s defending Hamilton’s prosecution of Claire Armstrong, the titular Candy Queen, co-owner of a successful candy company.

Clay’s view of the whole thing made me raise an eyebrow a bit. He doesn’t think Claire should be prosecuted, even if she did kill the victim. After all, the victim was definitely a crook and not a good fellow to have around. Paul doesn’t vocally disagree but asks, “And if you were the district attorney?” Clay says he would pay Claire a bounty and that that’s how such cases should be handled.

Clay is definitely a unique and colorful character. I think I should do a character spotlight on him. He is a very prominent fixture during the final season.

The police are awesome, just as Tragg was in the original Silent Partner. Steve shows he is both tough and compassionate. While worrying for the poisoned girl he takes the keys from the fumbling apartment manager to get the right key for the girl’s apartment. Moments later he tells her not to pick up the phone when she finds it off the hook in the room. She is disgruntled (or further disgruntled, rather, after the key incident), and Steve tries to make amends by explaining why she needs to leave things alone. He looks adorably awkward and embarrassed, not having wanted to come off too harsh.

Sergeant Brice is around and gets stuff to do! Steve has him break up the crowd that has gathered outside the girl’s old address upon seeing the police. Later, he takes a call about the homicide at the gambling joint.

And we get a guest policeman in the form of William Boyett as a hardboiled vice officer. He leads a raid into the gambling establishment and it’s he and his men who find the body there. Best line, when addressed as “friend” by one of the staff members there: “I’m not your friend.”

Hamilton has a great deal of screentime, unlike the one scene he gets in The Silent Partner. They go to court in this version; Claire doesn’t have a nervous breakdown. He handles things in a mature and calm manner. I believe the only time he really objects to something is when Perry comes across as badgering a witness. It does look that way, definitely, especially to someone who doesn’t know what’s fully going on (as Hamilton doesn’t). Although even if he knew, he would still have to object on technical grounds.

And Perry definitely has good reason to be angry at said witness, who is a complete slimeball and lies to protect himself while digging Claire deeper into a pit. And that’s after he already told Perry and Paul the truth and said he would tell it in court to help Claire. He had threatened the victim with Claire’s gun, which was how it had gotten to the gambling joint. It had then been taken from him and he had fled.

In all fairness to the creep, if he deserves fairness, he does look sickened and guilty as he lies on the witness stand. But that doesn’t change a thing about his story. Paul comments in disgust that he knew the guy couldn’t be trusted.

Said slimeball was also someone Claire seemed to have been interested in. She had tried to help him repeatedly, so his betrayal was even more of a blow. And the guy who co-owned the candy business with her had recognized what he was but Claire had refused to believe him, even planning to not renew his contract. Those around Claire had thought she was just awful for it. I imagine she felt horrible too, when the whole truth of everything came out.

Perry does do something rather jaw-dropping at the climax. To prove that the poisoned girl is lying and that she couldn’t have eaten five pieces of candy without realizing there was something wrong with them, he brings a box of chocolates to court and has some of the pieces doctored with what he later claims is a bit of the poison. The girl recognizes something is wrong on the first bite.

I was stunned by that method both times I recently saw the episode, but I don’t think I put enough stock in it. I suppose that’s because I figured Perry didn’t put in enough to do any real damage, and that he would have stopped her if somehow she hadn’t tasted the bitterness, but still. And then I’ve also wondered if Perry really did put poison in those pieces of chocolate or if he just said it to psych the girl out and he substituted something else bitter instead. If it was the poison, that does seem like one of the most appalling stunts he’s pulled in a while. Even moreso considering that the girl really was poisoned with the stuff earlier (albeit she poisoned herself on purpose). Maybe even having a small amount could have caused a negative reaction, considering the poisoning.

The poisoner being the same person as the poisonee is the same as in The Silent Partner. That person is also the murderer. But the motive was different. The original girl didn’t even know the defendant, I don’t think, save for one brief meeting. Here, they were cousins, raised as sisters. But she was jealous of Claire and felt that Claire had everything. And she wanted the formula for the candy that Claire had inherited. It reminded me of the climax of The Fiery Fingers.

The epilogue has Claire going on a cruise, after finally renewing her co-owner’s contract, and Paul being late to see her off. He makes it just in time with a gift, which Della realizes in disbelief is a box of chocolates. Just what a candy-maker doesn’t need. But Claire is sweet and gracious and tells a downcast Paul that it’s just what she needed.

All in all, my conclusion about The Candy Queen is that, while The Silent Partner might be better plot-wise, character-wise I prefer The Candy Queen. And despite their similarities, if it hadn’t said at the beginning that it was based on The Silent Partner, there wouldn’t have been much to tie them together. The Candy Queen doesn’t even have the same atmospheric feeling as the original. It’s thoroughly embedded as a later venture. The two are really quite different episodes, and perhaps overall, should be examined as such. Standing on its own, The Candy Queen will likely fair better than if it is compared to The Silent Partner.