jimdoyle111

The quality of the Season 6 episodes shows a downturn and this particular one if not quite the nadir is close. It starts and ends with Perry Mason credits, but what we get in between is a poorly scripted melodrama about a schoolteacher accused of unprofessional conduct with a pupil. All the town characters are cliched caricatures and the acting smells of matured ham. This looks like a storyline developed for some sort of Peyton Place show, but Perry Mason has been shoehorned into it. And that ending - are we really supposed to swallow that given everything that went before? No courtroom scenes and no Della make this one to forget.

This may not be the worst ever episode of PERRY MASON but it comes very close with a muddled and hard to believe plot and a lead performance from Albert Swenson that's somewhere out in space with an accent that's as Danish as Dick Van Dyke's chimney sweep was Cockney - and his supposedly nice character is punctuated with wild nonsensical outbursts and comes over as one of those people you sometimes see in the street who talk loudly to themselves. I really wanted Perry to lose this one but it suffered like so many other episodes of someone standing up at the end and shouting 'I did it' as so many episodes did. And to think the 50 minutes I wasted watching this could have been spent doing something worthwhile!

This is a bizarro episode with a jazzy soundtrack and an early 60s vibe including wipe edits, Perry and Della all dressed up for a wedding and it also contains the premiere of 'A Walk In The Black Forest' which the producers had purchased cheaply from Europe which would later became a worldwide smash. It has Constance Towers who once played the lead in "The King And I" on Broadway, a few genuine jazz stalwarts and Walter Burke doing that gangster thing he always did so well, but the plot is too thin and contrived and there is seven minutes - I counted every one of them - of music filler. And also an attempt to introduce an apprentice lawyer which slowed down the action even more. Objection Sustained.