In Memoriam: William Hopper

And so we come to another March 6th, another anniversary of the date William Hopper tragically left us far too soon in 1970. Eerily enough, Erle Stanley Gardner died within the week of the same year and we lost two key figures in the shaping of Perry Mason.

William Hopper brought his immortal contributions to Perry when he showed up to do a screentest for Perry Mason himself. He definitely left an impression and ended up cast as our beloved Paul Drake. That was most certainly a wise choice. He brought so much heart and soul to our cast and the reunion movies feel so lonely without him.

I love when Paul gets a chance to be tough and show his stuff, since sometimes he's used as a comic relief character. One of my favorite scenes is in The Stand-In Sister, when he corners the escaped criminal by calmly and smoothly holding a gun on him at the top of the pier as he starts to climb up.

That season 6 episode also has the curious distinction of being the only one, I think, to actually have kind of a downer epilogue. Even if the courtroom scenes end rather grimly, the epilogue usually tries to cheer things up and end the episode on a happy note. In The Stand-In Sister, however, the epilogue has John Gregory talking to his criminal brother Stefan and wondering why he changed his mind and lied on the witness stand in Gregory's favor instead of telling all the things he threatened to that would make Gregory look horrible. Stefan growls that he has to be nice, since Gregory is holding all his money for him. Gregory, who had apparently hoped that there was some spark of brotherly affection as the reason, goes back over to Perry looking downcast and the episode ends. Um, ouch.

The only other episode I can think of that ends rather grim doesn't even fully count, as it's season 9's The Vanishing Victim and it only appears grim because the version usually shown on television cuts off the epilogue for some bizarre reason. In the televised version, it generally ends with Hamilton talking to the murderer and telling him that he has one more trip to take and this time he can't pass it off on someone else to take for him. The real ending is that silliness with Perry and Paul and the money Paul is charging for expenses that Perry decides to give to Steve for charity tickets without Paul's permission. I still wonder whether Paul is really charging unfairly and hence, Perry might be somewhat justified in his actions, or if Paul is being perfectly fair (aside from maybe nineteen cents, heh) and Perry is not being very nice to just give all of Paul's money away. I usually tend to lean more in Paul's favor, since Perry has unfairly taken money away from him in other episodes such as The Married Moonlighter, although I still wonder.

Paul has some interesting hobbies. Fishing seems to be a casual thing with him, judging by the fact that he fishes with Perry in season 5 yet doesn't seem to know a lot about where specific kinds of fish can be found in season 7. He seems to want to take up golfing, at least in season 9, as he wants those clubs in The Vanishing Victim and then the very next episode is The Golfer's Gambit and he's out practicing on the green. He's in excellent physical shape, as shown in The Carefree Coronary, and he likely works out and exercises to be in top form for the very physically demanding parts of his job.

Of course, Paul's favorite hobby, most likely, is dating. And admiring beautiful women. Several episodes have scenes with him getting distracted by women, and many more have him either on dates or talking about going on dates. Or, unfortunately, being pulled away from dates. But, always the loyal friend, he goes about doing whatever Perry wants done.

Paul is more skeptical than Perry. Many times he's certain that a client is guilty, or at least, is wary of their innocence. But he supports Perry anyway. And in The Angry Astronaut, when Paul brings the case to Perry, he says that he thinks the client is guilty but that he still deserves the best counsel. Paul can be a good judge of people at times, though, such as when he pegged Mark Chester as a weak-kneed slimeball in The Candy Queen.

All of the Perry characters are very human and three-dimensional. Paul is definitely not an exception. He can be funny. He can be serious. He makes good decisions and bad. And all in all, Perry Mason could never be the same without him. William Hopper is still very loved and missed.

The Uncut Vanishing Victim vs. The Fugitive Nurse

First, a quick note: Rose and I have started a new Simon Oakland project, a Tumblr. We have weekly photo sets and post other Simon-related things during the week. I put up a Frantic Flyer photo set on Saturday. We're hoping the project will eventually reach the attention of all classic film and television fans on Tumblr, in addition to all fans of specifically Simon. If anyone wants to have a look, the link is: http://simonoaklandtribute.tumblr.com

The other day I finally did something I’ve been meaning to do for months: watch the uncut version of The Vanishing Victim. It’s taken so long for me to get to it since it’s one of my least-liked episodes. It remains so after the uncut viewing.

I watch it so seldom I’m actually not sure which scenes are new to me, besides the infamous epilogue. I ranted a lot about the cut version in another post, so I don’t think I’ll go into all of that examination here. I’ll just say that my previous opinions on the episode as a whole still stand. It’s a very messy, confused conglomeration, and the constantly changing idea of who’s actually dead around here makes it very wearisome by the time they finally get around to letting us know that the real dead guy is an extremely minor character we only barely saw.

And I’ll make a couple of comparisons with the episode it claims to be patterned after: The Fugitive Nurse. That season 1 episode is one of my most favorites, both of season 1 in general and the series as a whole. Hamilton and Tragg really have a lot of chances to shine in it.

Hamilton and Steve get a lot of screentime in The Vanishing Victim, but aside from Hamilton’s final comment to the murderer (which was just awesome) and Steve’s adorable appearance in the epilogue, they don’t really have much chance to shine. They’re by and large depicted as the antagonists, behaving ridiculously and unfairly, calling the hearing before there’s enough evidence and then, after the judge throws the case out, planning to re-arrest the defendant on a trumped-up charge while they try to gather new evidence to prove the murder. They honestly don’t often tend to pull stunts like that, so Perry’s comment about Hamilton being predictable with the re-arrest plan is still irritating to me.

Also, the defendant in The Vanishing Victim honestly seems like a block of ice. I’m all for aloof characters, but I like to get to know them a little even if they remain a mystery to the other characters. I couldn’t figure that woman out at all. Usually we get to know the defendants enough so that we can dredge up some sympathy for them, but it didn’t really seem like we got to know this one at all. Perry mused on trying to discover whether she’s a grieving widow or a murderer, and she didn’t seem to be either one. Her husband didn’t seem like a nice guy, but when Lisa Gaye’s character commented on how miserable she had made life for her husband, there was no refuting of that statement. I have to wonder exactly what their marriage really was like.

Compare that with the defendant in The Fugitive Nurse. She realizes she’s being selfish to not let her husband have a divorce if he wants it so badly and thinks the nurse will make him happier. She wants to do the right thing. She opens up to Perry and the audience gets to know her and that she’s a good person who handled some things wrong. Maybe the bad marriage was partially her fault, and she’ll own up to that.

The restaurant owner who was so key in The Fugitive Nurse doesn’t play much of a role here. In this version, the friend isn’t dead and his wife didn’t try to kill him. Their marriage is on the rocks, and she’s serving him divorce papers, but she’s not the cold-hearted penny-pincher Jeanette Nolan expertly played in The Fugitive Nurse. This character has class, running a very swanky restaurant instead of just a cheap burger joint. Her only scene has her sitting down with Paul to discuss her husband.

And then the epilogue. I was always annoyed by what I’d heard of Perry supposedly paying Paul and then taking the check away from him. I was also annoyed when I watched the epilogue alone and didn’t see the whole episode.

This time, having watched the whole episode and seen the epilogue again, I’m not sure what to make of it. My opinion hinges on the key question: did Paul really have some expenses totaling $175.19, or was he totally trying to rip Perry off just so he’d have the money for his golf clubs?

I honestly can’t believe Paul would try to cheat Perry like that. Maybe he’d add a random 19 cents, but I can’t believe the $175 wasn’t a real expense.

If Paul really did try to cheat Perry with the whole amount, then Perry taking the money away from him and giving it to Steve is perfectly fine in my book. But if, as I originally thought, Paul had an actual expense and Perry was just refusing to pay up, then the epilogue still annoys me. I suppose the interpretation is up to each viewer to determine.

Overall, The Vanishing Victim never will be a favorite episode of mine. The war between Perry and Hamilton would work better in season 1 than season 9, but the confusion over the dead man’s identity would be exasperating and bewildering in any season. Pretty much the only things I like are still Perry’s speech to Lisa Gaye’s character, Hamilton’s final comment to the murderer, and Steve being adorable in the epilogue.

Surprise! A weekday post again!

Now that things have settled down after the turn of the year, I may go back to posting more than one entry a week. At any rate, I felt that this entry needed to be written now, while it’s fresh on my mind.

For the last nights in succession, my local station (which has skipped most of season 7 and all of 8 for some unknown reason) showed two season 9 episodes that I feel bring out even more strongly what is wrong with The 12^th Wildcat: The Vanishing Victim and The Sausalito Sunrise. All three episodes have some elements in common. Some handle them better than others. The latter two handled everything better than The 12^th Wildcat, despite The Vanishing Victim having problems of its own.

As might be recalled, my problems with The 12^th Wildcat are varied. Some involve my complaints that Hamilton’s misconduct went without explanation and hence, looked more out-of-character than anything else. There’s my problem with them not explaining the crime. And there’s one other problem I realized when I saw a bit of the episode again last Saturday, when my station did its annual New Year’s Eve Perry marathon. I’ll get to that in a minute.

The Vanishing Victim is the second reworking of season 1’s The Fugitive Nurse, following season 3’s The Frantic Flyer. Season 9 remade several episodes from season 1, which isn’t a surprise since it seemed to think it was season 1 reborn.

One of my problems with season 9 is that some of the episodes seem to forget any and all character development that came before. Season 1 often featured Perry and Hamilton working against each other. I’ve observed the episodes from all the other seasons, and those instances greatly diminish to almost nothing by seasons 6, 7, and 8. Instead, Perry goes to Hamilton or vice versa, they discuss the case, and Perry has an idea for what to do next. But by season 9, they’re sometimes back to working against each other. There’s no explanation for it, no rhyme or reason to it. It just is, as though someone decided that they were getting too friendly and it had to be stopped.

Such is the case with The Vanishing Victim. Its plot is long, complicated and twisted, unlike both The Fugitive Nurse and The Frantic Flyer. First one man is thought dead, then another, then a third. Each time it’s wrong. By the time we finally learn who really died, at the very end, it feels absolutely incidental and randomly thrown in. The real point seems to be the vicious battle Perry and Hamilton are fighting over the client caught in the middle of this mess. Perry gets the case thrown out of court once. Then Hamilton and Drumm plot to arrest the client on a trumped-up charge outside the courtroom, presumably because they’re certain she’s guilty and don’t want her running free while they seek the information and the missing person Perry wants brought in before the hearing can reconvene. Perry pulls a switcheroo and gets the client out of the courtroom. Drumm catches him with Della later, instead of with the client. The problems between Perry and Hamilton continue in that vein throughout the episode.

One other little thing I didn’t like there was that when Paul told him of the trumped-up charge plan, Perry said, “One thing about Burger—he’s predictable.” The only thing is, he isn’t. I don’t recall them trying something like that ever before, even in season 1. But if they did, it was in season 1 and then didn’t happen in the succeeding seasons until 9.

Perry and Hamilton working against each other reminds me of the scene in The 12^th Wildcat at the train depot, where Perry and company are there to meet the train and Hamilton and Drumm are tailing them. If the episode had been in most other seasons (or heck, if it had even been one of the more sensible season 9 episodes), Perry would have squared with them and they would have been at the train depot working with and not against Perry and company. Instead there’s suddenly this adversarial element that hasn’t been heavily seen season 1. Why?

Of course I’m sure the writers didn’t care one way or another. As long as their scripts were accepted and they got paid, that was probably all they cared about. But why was there suddenly an influx of such scripts being written and accepted in the first place? That’s what I want to know. Why does season 9 seem like a reboot of season 1 half the time? Was it intentional? Were they trying to get back to their roots and make things more like the books again?

Even if most people don’t care about that puzzlement, they should all care about this next one. The problem in The 12^th Wildcat of not explaining the real crime is absolutely preposterous! So what if the defendant’s husband wasn’t really dead. Without explaining what actually happened, the defendant could easily be accused of killing whoever died.

The Vanishing Victim had a similar scenario. But to my surprise and pleasure, they acknowledged that very problem. Perry wanted to convene in the judge’s chambers to discuss what really happened and who actually died, so that his client could not be dragged into court a third time, being accused of the real murder. That was certainly a plus for that episode.

And how does The Sausalito Sunrise fit into all this? By bringing up my complaint of Hamilton’s gross misconduct in The 12^th Wildcat. As I’ve explained before, he was chewed out by the judge at least half a dozen times, and rightly so. The way he was acting, it really seemed that he had something personally against the defendant aside from thinking he was guilty. And Perry was visibly frustrated with Hamilton for one of only a handful of times in the series.

If there had been an explanation for Hamilton’s behavior it could have been an interesting and intense exploration into a darker but very human side of his personality. Without any explanation it looks stupidly cobbled together and out-of-character. Hamilton never behaved in such a way to that degree in other episodes. And when he got emotional, such as in The Fatal Fortune, it only took one reprimand to get him back in line.

The Sausalito Sunrise explores the darker side of Lieutenant Steve Drumm. Vengeful after the murder of a fellow officer, he is losing sight of all the facts of the case and focusing on his determination to convict whom he believes is the killer. Perry is worried about him. He says to Steve early on, “This isn’t like you.” And it’s clearly brought out that it’s this particular case that is getting to him. It’s still painful, to see Steve like that, but at least we know why, and we know that the other characters realize something is very wrong. That is the way to handle such scenarios, not by wildly flinging them around without any obvious point or reason to them!

In the end, the latter episode is the one I like best of the trio. By contrast there are only a couple of things I like in The Vanishing Victim. One is that they explained the crime, unlike The 12^th Wildcat. I also really liked Perry’s speech to Lisa Gaye’s character, where he tells her she can never be truly happy if her happiness is built on an innocent person going to the gas chamber. (I remember a similar speech in The Fugitive Nurse, but I don’t think it went into as much detail.) And lastly, the very last scene is quite unique. Hamilton himself gives the last line of the episode, as he talks to the killer. The killer says something about a last trip. Hamilton remarks that that is what the killer will be taking—one last trip. Cue the fadeout and the credits.

I still do not like The 12^th Wildcat at all. At this point in time, I feel it was the worst episode the series did. It was very badly handled.

Now that that’s out of my system, I plan to praise another good episode this weekend.