Della shreds a witness in court. The prosecution shreds Perry’s credibility.
Season 2, Episode 6: ‘Chapter Fourteen’
I can’t remember the last time I shouted at the screen as much as I did during this episode of “Perry Mason.” I’m not kidding: I was hooting and hollering for what seemed like half the duration of this week’s installment. It didn’t work out as well as I’d hoped in the end, of course. But in the meantime? What a rush!
The rush came primarily from the episode’s centerpiece scene, in which Della Street takes over the cross-examination of a prosecution witness from Perry midstream. The witness in question is Councilman Taylor, the brother of the murder victim Brooks McCutcheon’s incapacitated mistress Noreen. Della knows where Perry’s line of questioning is headed: directly to the fact that Brooks enjoyed strangling his lovers with his monogrammed belt.
Della presents her proposed takeover as a way to better handle the “sensitive nature” of the subject matter. But by the end of her questioning, by which time she has wrapped the belt around her own neck in full view of the jurors, it is apparent her real motives were much less high-minded. She didn’t just want to explain to the jury that Brooks got off on choking beautiful women — she wanted to show them what a beautiful woman being strangled looks like. The resulting display is a slam dunk for the defense.
And it all stems from another surprising step into the spotlight. Rather than continue to battle against Perry and his team, our crooked old friend Detective Holcomb decides to volunteer for that team instead. (To be fair, it’s either that or be forced to testify about his role in Brooks’s shady dealings and lose his job and pension.)
Holcomb, as we’ve seen, can’t figure out how Brooks’s grift operated, so he turns to Perry, whose deductive mind he recognizes as superior to his own, for help. In return, he hands over Noreen’s medical file from the San Haven rest home and brings Perry to a dumping ground on the shore where McCutcheon produce can be found discarded and soaked with oil. The import of the latter is still unclear, but the info contained in the former very nearly wins Perry the case.
But only very nearly. Perry isn’t the only person involved in the case with investigative aces up his sleeve. Mason may have Della and Paul and even Holcomb in his corner at this point, but the prosecutor Tommy Milligan has Perry’s old buddy Pete Strickland. In a development that literally had me booing and hissing (what can I say? I’m a vocal TV watcher), someone, almost certainly Pete, breaks into Perry’s office and discovers the murder weapon hidden in his safe. Later in court, Milligan smugly reveals the news about the gun to the judge, who orders the whole gang over to Perry’s office to witness the retrieval of the weapon firsthand. Shea Whigham’s mustachioed dissolution as Pete really shines through in these scenes; you can certainly believe this is a guy who would turn on his oldest friend if the price were right.
Pete and Perry’s relationship at this point can be held up in contrast to that of Paul and his brother-in-law Mo. Paul hires Mo to help him stake out a street corner where a rich junkie implicated in the case is known to score heroin. But Mo is no experienced P.I., so his notes leave something to be desired. Paul, who ought to know better than to hold a rank amateur to his own exacting standards, goes ballistic, causing a family rift.
It’s not really Mo’s lack of prowess as a private dick that’s bothering Paul. He is haunted by his role in the beating and, presumably, death of the young, small-time gangster Ozzie Jackson, whom he was forced to rough up. Indeed, Ozzie’s blood-soaked Converse All-Stars are found dangling from a telephone wire by a local kid, who in the opening scene retrieves and wears them in the dead man’s stead, causing Paul to pretty much lose his mind the instant he lays eyes on them.
And if anything is going to sink this case, it’s the Mason team’s personal demons. Paul has his guilt over the Ozzie Jackson affair. Della has her budding relationship with the screenwriter Anita St. Pierre, for whom she leaves her previous girlfriend; and don’t forget that a mysterious stranger is aware of her clandestine love life.
Della also has a very thinly veiled job offer from the gazillionaire Camilla Nygaard to consider. Camilla invites her over for drinks and “marihuana” and implies heavily that she is considering ditching her existing counsel for Della. Given the choice between a gifted but unpredictable sad sack like Perry and a rich and vivacious piano-virtuoso stoner like Camilla … well, it’s not going to be an easy decision, is it?
Finally, Perry himself turns on his schoolteacher girlfriend, Ginny Aimes, on a dime when the gun is brought to light, assuming she is the person who ratted him out. Finally, Ginny is getting a taste of the mercurial side of Perry that isn’t quite as alluring as the Perry who slugged some jerk in the schoolyard.
From start to finish, this episode is twisty, sexy, sordid fun, featuring richly realized acting from a double-digit number of lead and supporting players. This may be anecdata, I realize, but I’ve seen more and more people saying what a pleasure it is to watch this show every week. Consider me another voice in favor.
From the case files:
In the annals of “terrific throwaway shots from ‘Perry Mason,’” the vertiginous angle with which Perry’s fire-escape exit from his compromised apartment, broken into by parties unknown the previous week, takes the cake.
I also loved how the “Perry Mason” logo appears just as the kid who retrieves Ozzie’s bloody Converses looks up at the now-empty telephone wire, wondering just what the hell happened to the shoes’ previous owner.
Detective Holcomb is one of television’s finest dirtbags at the moment. I’m so happy for the actor Eric Lange, whose work I’ve been enjoying since I watched him play an eccentric drama teacher on Nickelodeon’s “Victorious” with my kids while they were growing up; more recently, he was delightfully sleazy as a Hollywood movie producer in Netflix’s gruesome horror satire “Brand New Cherry Flavor.” He’s perfect in this part, and I admit a part of me hopes that he and Perry reach some kind of permanent rapprochement and work together in the future now that Strick is out of the picture.
“Paul. Paul. Put it away.” Clara’s words of wisdom to her transparently distraught husband ring out loud and clear thanks to Diarra Kilpatrick’s restrained but forceful performance. I remain hopeful that she’ll eventually be given more to do than react to the men of the house.
Let’s note here that Rafael Gallardo is handling incarceration much worse than his older brother, Mateo, to the point of needlessly picking fights with guards and getting hauled off to the hole. What’s going on there, I wonder?
The awkward elevator ride in which the prosecution, the defense and the judge all travel up to Perry’s office is straight out of “Mad Men.”
“I just want to know if you’re all right,” Della says to District Attorney Hamilton Burger regarding his unexpected, and frankly unjustifiable, offer of a plea deal to the Gallardos. Is someone squeezing him, perhaps because of his sexuality? And is this the fate that awaits Della, given the shadowy figure who trailed her to the lesbian nightclub last week?
Della on Ginny, to Perry: “Nice work. She’s tasty!” Perry to Della: “Oh my God.” Even in the 1930s, it’s awkward to hear your friends tell you how hot your girlfriend is.
Source: Television - nytimes.com
