The Case of the Twice-Told Twist

I'm thinking that Gail Patrick Jackson who produced the Perry Mason series must have thought let's give Erle Stanley Gardner's intrepid defense attorney the look of color. By 1966 CBS and ABC were converting to color which was previously the province only of NBC. It was not only a new look of color, but the whole tone of the episode was that of something that could have been from the Seventies, like Starsky&Hutch.

William Hopper as Paul Drake got in some action sequences as befit his role as Raymond Burr's personal private eye. The story was not so loosely based on Oliver Twist with Victor Buono running a ring of juvenile car thieves and being paid off in art objects for his collection. One of Buono's epicene villains and a good one, but not one you see in Perry Mason.

The villain really is Bill Sikes and if you remember Bill Sikes and Nancy meet a bad end in the Dickens novel. Here Scott Graham and Lisa Seagram also meet a bad end and it's the Oliver Twist character Kevin O'Neal that gets hung with the rap.

Burr, Hopper, and the ever present girl Friday Della Street save O'Neal's bacon. And in color too.

Recidivism or rehabilitation? The whitest, most clean-cut bunch of hoodlums L.A. has ever seen attacks Perry's Lincoln Continental for parts rather than just steal the thing (and car theft was easy in those days!). Perry won't press charges because, well, the boy is only 17, and cute besides (irony alert, Raymond Burr).

Considerable comic relief is provided by Victor Buono as the evil henchman Huggins (rotund and in a bathrobe) managing the 'clean-cut' boy gang. "How many pairs of bucket seats can you use?" he coos to his fetching Mexican fence, and pronounces "penchant" in the manner francais. Good thing the gang goes to an expensive prep school so they can understand things like that. Oh for the days when petty criminals wore jackets & neckties...

The exceptionally vivid color, the jazzy score and the silly 'Oliver Twist' theme separate this from most PM episodes. It's definitely not one of the strong, tight Perry Mason plots (see the early seasons for those), but it's fun and scenic.

The only color episode was probably due to the introduction of the 1965 Ford Mustang called the 19641/2. Ford Motor supplied the cars for the show at that time. The premise of the show was teenage car thieves working for a chop-shop.

Everyone in the episode was driving the Beautiful Mustang. Mustangs of every color were in many scenes, Especially inside the chop-shop.

I guess the Ford marketing was a little too subtle.

Yes, that was the NBC voice over with the peacock. I did enjoy the bright, vivid color in this one shot episode. What I thought about watching it was the photography. Over the years, Mason had a lot of location shooting. This show seemed nearly 100% studio bound. What is also very noticeable is the constant use (or overuse) of many very tight close-ups and few master shots and medium shots of people together. When people are having a conversation, the use of close-ups got me wondering if the actors were shot saying their lines solo at different times and it was all put together by the editors later. This may have been due to the lighting setups for color.

It's a shame that there were not more colour episodes or there was never a tenth season.

I really don't see the basis of any complaints for this, this was 1960s television, mid 1966 as a matter of fact. It actually looks a lot like Star Trek as well as Batman. And as such, it shows a remarkable teaser for something that should have been that CBS neglected to give us: a full 10th season of color Perry Mason episodes. This could've also been the precise focal point where Perry Mason transitioned from 1950s film noir television to mid 60s psychedelic color TV.

I finally found a good color print of this and the Soundtrack had been enhanced for surroundsound, so it's actually pretty wonderful. The DVD set I had only had this episode in black-and-white which was completely disappointing as I have always seen this particular episode in my daily Perry Mason binges in absolute full color. They used to show two solid hours of Perry Mason on San Diego XETV channel 6 in the early 90s and while I was recovering from an illness for a few months Perry Mason was my only solace. Even my father liked it and he would sit with me and watch it and we both enjoyed this particular episode very much we would point out things about it laugh about it etc. The appearance of "King Tut" (Victor Bono) gives it a connection to Batman, but the parent company CBS is more strictly connected to Star Trek today than 20th Century Fox was back in the 60s- which used to use all of the sets from Irwin Allen shows for all of their science fiction shows including Time Tunnel, Batman, Voyage to the bottom of the Sea, and Lost in Space.

But the very production crew for Perry Mason is more related to Star Trek in the fact that several people who worked on Perry Mason ended up working for the Star Trek franchise either during the original run or later during the Next Generation and Voyager, which included the script supervisor Cosmo Genovese, who they even named a character for in a second season voyager episode, "Non-Sequitur": "Cosimo". Who was a very Perry Mason-ish alien who was looking after Harry Kim, he had the same kind mannerisms that Perry Mason showed to his clients.

The story is not an Erle Stanley Gardner episode and as such doesn't match up to some of the classics, but it does however have a modern upbeat look and feel including the background music, and the vehicles being used are very upbeat for the year that this was made. Especially the Ford van being used which was the Ford version of the Dodge A100 compact cab that used to be seen delivering and retrieving all of Batman's accessories during that show. In this Perry Mason episode, it is used as a mobile Chop Shop.

I very much would have loved to see more color episodes but alas, this is the only one. Perhaps somebody who is creative with computer video can colourise some other episodes, for personal use, of course.