‘America’s lawyer’ focus of English prof’s book

2:38 p.m., Nov. 28, 2005--When UD English professor Thomas Leitch was asked to choose a television program to write about as part of a continuing series of books profiling classic television shows, he said there was never a doubt as to what his final choice would be.

“A friend of mine told me that Wayne State University Press was starting its TV Milestone series, and asked me if I would be interested in writing a book for the series,” Leitch said. “I spent about 30 seconds looking at the list, and when I saw that it included Perry Mason, I stopped looking.”

TV Milestones is a series of short monographs aimed at providing a comprehensive account of a particular television show in the context of the history of television and broader cultural history.

Works in the series include Disney TV, by J.P. Telotte, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, by Marcia Landy and The Rifleman, by Christopher Sharrett.

Writing about the legendary lawyer was a logical progression for Leitch, whose previous book, Crime Films, included a section about lawyer films.

Leitch, who earned a doctorate in English at Yale University, where he taught for several years, has directed the film studies program at UD since 1983. Other books by Leitch include Find the Director and Other Hitchcock Games (1991), What Stories Are: Narrative Theory and Interpretation (1986), Lionel Trilling: An Annotated Bibliography (1992) and The Encyclopedia of Alfred Hitchcock (2002).

“I found out that there have been a lot of studies of gangster films and film noir, but nothing much had been written about lawyers films,” Leitch said. “I thought Perry Mason would be easy to write, because I already had recently written about lawyers in Crime Scenes.”

The new book also continues a lifelong fascination with the series, which ran on CBS from 1957-66, and remains one of the most influential crime melodramas from any period.

“I think I must have started watching Perry Mason at age 8 or 9, and, as I child, I was fascinated by the show,” Leitch said. “As I got older and saw how the legal system really works, I thought that perhaps Perry Mason might have warped my attitudes towards the law.”

In examining why the series and its hero, played by Canadian-born actor Raymond Burr, achieved such enduring popularity with several generations of viewers, Leitch found that the basic element of its success was its strict adherence to a dramatic formula that varied little during it 271-episode lifespan as a one-hour dramatic show.

“We know each week that Mason’s client is always innocent, which means that somebody else did it,” Leitch said. “The first half of the show is outside the courtroom, while the second half is in the courtroom, with Mason, his team and the accused always sitting on the judge’s right-hand side. Four minutes before the end of each show the guilty party is shown.”

Each episode, Leitch notes in his introductory chapter, “America’s Lawyer,” also begins with “a troubled family or quasi-family group, an innocent threatened with expulsion from the domestic circle or worse, and a murder for which the innocent was invariably arrested.”

While the family group of the accused changed weekly, Mason’s TV family remained constant for most of the life of the series. Joining Mason were his devoted secretary Della Street, played by Barbara Hale, and William Hopper in the role of private detective Paul Drake. Mason’s TV family also included the cagy homicide detective Lt. Arthur Tragg, played by Ray Collins, and Mason’s adversary in more than half the series’ episodes, district attorney Hamilton Burger, played by William Talman.

In looking for answers as to why such a basic formula was so successful for so long, Leitch said he believes there was something about Burr’s portrayal of Perry Mason that was especially appealing to American audiences.

UD English professor Thomas Leitch: “As I got older and saw how the legal system really works, I thought that perhaps ‘Perry Mason’ might have warped my attitudes towards the law.”

“As Perry Mason, Burr was your friend, your dad, a nourishing and caring dad,” Leitch said. “Perry Mason is a symbol of the entire justice system, and what Burr did was to put a human face on that system.”

The idea of the lawyer as a caretaking father figure as portrayed by Burr also led to similar lawyer-father figures in movies, such as To Kill a Mockingbird and Cape Fear, Leitch said.

While fans of the series are continually fascinated with the title character, there is also a soft spot in their hearts for Burger, the luckless district attorney who never won a case against Mason.

“When I was a kid, it never occurred to me that Burger would win,” Leitch said. “When Burr was asked why he always won, his answer was that ‘You only see the cases I try on Saturday night. Burger wins a lot of the cases during the week.’”

If Burr, as Perry Mason, was winning over fans and television juries, he also was becoming auteur of the title character, something that the creator of Perry Mason, Erle Stanley Gardner, had taken steps to avoid when the show started in 1957.

Gardner, writes Leitch, was a “scrappy and resourceful California attorney, who having created Mason largely in his own image in 1933, had pioneered the television franchise and was determined to rule it with an iron fist.”

Despite these efforts, which included the creation of Paisano Productions, through which Gardner would exert a greater measure of control while avoiding day-to-day production responsibilities, it was Burr who achieved iconic status as the personification of the character of Perry Mason.

“It had already happened by the early 1960s,” Leitch said. “As time went on, there was less and less mention of Gardner, and people began to view Burr as both the character and creator of Perry Mason.”

By the time the series resurfaced in 1985, with Burr and Street reprising their original roles, the public perception of lawyers and the legal system had undergone a sea change, and the public now envisioned a much different role for the lawyer superhero of the 1950s.

"When the TV movies successfully brought Perry Mason back 20 years after the end of the original series, their target audience no longer believed in the legal system," Leitch said. "What this audience wanted was to see Mason rescue the system--to restore justice to the justice system."

While Leitch has some problems with the later TV movies--too long and not as interesting in the mystery element--he said writing the book was fun, a way to vacation for a year in the 1950s.

“I loved going back and watching the original shows again,” Letich said. “It was a time when lawyers always knew best, criminal defendants were always innocent and, at the end of the hour, the case came to a satisfying conclusion and everybody was happy.”

Perry Mason can be ordered from Wayne State University Press [http://wsupress.wayne.edu/index.html], Amazon.com [www.amazon.com] and Barnes and Noble [www.barnesandnoble.com].

Article by Jerry Rhodes
Photo by Duane Perry

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