Perry Mason: The Case of the Lady in the Lake

Former tennis pro David Hasselhof married Doran Clark. The gossip was that he was washed up on the courts and he married her for her money. When she turns up drowned in a lake, Mr. Hasselhof winds up in a different sort of court. Good thing he's got Perry Mason as his defense lawyer. He always digs up lots of other suspects, makes witnesses recant on the stand and invariably one of them confesses to the murder.

At least, that's how the formula for Erle Stanley Gardner's lawyer-sleuth is supposed to have worked. Even on the TV series, where he tried 271 cases, he won "only" 268... I'm sure William Talman, playing Assistant District Attorney Hamilton Burger, was delirious about those three wins. What if Perry can't find someone to confess?

If the original Perry Mason TV show was a 10, at best these movies are a 6. I gave this a 4 because Drake does even more stupid stuff than usual. I have to think that in order to get "Della" to sign on to do these movies she required them to hire her son to play the Paul Drake character. Aside from hair color he is completely wrong for the part.... One of the worst instances of miss-casting ever. William Katt just does not have the gravitas to play the Experienced Detective and on top of that the writers continually have him doing the stupidest of things which either tip off his hand or put him in situations where it's him against multiple people where he walks in begging to be cut off at the knees. In this movie he repeatedly creates situations in which his quarry gets away. In the woods, in the store, at the motel, on the highway he stupidly goes in with little or no planning and no backup, lets himself be seen and the quarry rabbits away. Infuriatingly stupid.

As to the movie itself, if the stupidity was removed I'd give it a 6 because it's a slightly different approach to a murder and because unlike the first 4 movies in the series it seems Burr had been feeling better (or the directors were more insistent he be a little bit animated) and was able to bring some semblance of life to his part. In the first 4 movies he was figuratively phoning it in.

If you are a fan of Perry Mason, as I am, you would have figured that out there was something strange from the beginning of the movie. Normally Perry Mason spends his entire show defending his client and piecing together the crime and identifying the real criminal at the very end of the show. When the movie began, it seems that the killer was identified in the first few minutes of the movie. But obviously, things were not what they seemed. I was not sure what it was, but Raymond Burr and Barbara Hale seemed very flat and uninspired. At least William Katt and David Hasselhoff kept the movie alive. The ending was very interesting. I definitely did not see that coming. As a mystery the movie was worth watching, but as a "Perry Mason" movie, it was disappointing.

They accuse a famous tennis player, who is a married to a multimillionaire, of murdering her with the intention of inheriting all his fortune. In addition, a few hours before the murder, the tennis player had been pressured by his brother to give him an important amount of money. Perry Mason defends the tennis player ...

David Hasselhoff plays the tennis player and it's an interesting role, more so because strangely he isn't performing any heroics and he's rather vulnerable as he's facing imprisonment for his wife's murder. It's a compelling mystery and it's quite scenic out of the court and is packed with intrigue and lies.

Perry Mason: The Case of the Lady in the Lake finds America's most formidable defense attorney taking on David Hasselhoff as a client who is being accused of the murder of his wife. Hasselhoff is a retired tennis player now just hanging on in the tennis circles and is thought to have just married wife Doran Clark for her money. Everyone that is but family attorney John Ireland who retains Perry on behalf of Hasselhoff.

There's another part to this story, when they were teenagers Clark and her sister were kidnapped and thrown in the lake by the suspect just before a shootout with the local sheriff and his posse. The suspect was killed, the sister drowned and her body never recovered, and Clark was traumatized. It took her years to resume a normal life. And now her body is thought to be in the same lake.

The cases are indeed connected in a complicated scheme worked out by the murderer and an accomplice. The ending is a bit of a variation on the Perry Mason format. But Mason fans can rest assured that Hasselhoff didn't kill his wife. Perry just doesn't defend the guilty.

With an intricate twist in the plot and outcome, The Case of the Lady in the Lake is one of the better Mason films. Good, but don't expect Raymond Chandler either.