Sadly Over-hyped

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

The best portrayer of Perry Mason and the best Della Street in the same movie...Mason is portrayed in the same manner as in Gardener's books. He's playful, shrewd, irreverent and kind of a jackass. Definitely NOT the stodgy inert lump of good looks that Raymond Burr was.The man gets in people's personal space, jokes, tickles and even raids refrigerators of the people he's questioning. He is, for want of a better word, "wacky".The plot is kind of fun: A con man is killed and the main suspects are everybody. Mason, as usual, keeps one step behind the murderer and two ahead of the police. One of the cops is played by Barton MacLaine, a standard in thirties detective movies, later to become General Peterson on I Dream of Jeanie...

Something is fishy about the "lucky legs" contest at the big department store—in fact, the winner was cheated out of her prize money by the sponsoring hosiery company. The store owner enlists Perry Mason's help.Our first glimpse of Mason is a good indication of this picture's level of seriousness: he's asleep on his office floor, and when awakened turns out to be rather hung over, in a goofy mood—but quite sharp enough to efficiently gather some details about the new case.Or course it soon becomes a murder case involving multiple suspects and featuring assistance from Mason's secretary Della Street (Genevieve Tobin) and his associate Spudsy (Allen Jenkins).Warren William talks fast and appears to be having fun in what must be one of his sillier performances. Tobin is very funny as Della, delivering one coy look and sly smirk after another. Jenkins is right at home in this kind of a picture—his comical sour looks and unheeded protests are perfect foils to Tobin's and William's breeziness.The solid cast also includes Lyle Talbot as a handsome young doctor who gets mad at his girlfriend for immodestly entering (and winning) the legs contest, and Patricia Ellis as said girlfriend who tells him off, at least temporarily.The emphasis is on humor more than on mystery or suspense, so the snappy dialog stands out a lot more than the plot. It goes by awfully fast, it's frequently hilarious, and if you can't really remember who did it five minutes after it's over—well, that wasn't really the point, anyway.

One day in 1935, Erle Stanley Gardener wandered onto a Hollywood sound stage. "What's being filmed," he asked? "A new Perry Mason comedy," answered an underling who didn't recognize the author. "You can't be serious," shuddered Gardner "And neither is the movie," said the underling. "I mean there's one scene where a client comes in and finds Warren William as Perry Mason lying under his desk, sleeping off a hangover. The poor sap thinks it's a dead body." "Are the courtroom scenes at least serious," wondered Gardner. "There aren't any courtroom scenes," shot back the underling. "Mason solves the murder of a con artist while in his office, being x-rayed by a doctor who's as much as a nutcase as he is. But nobody really cares about who did it or why." Gardener could have filed an injunction since he was a lawyer-turned-author. Instead, he made plans for a Perry Mason TV series if and when television was ever invented. And "The Case of the Lucky Legs" opened in theaters and got quite a lot of laughs.

Raymond Burr's Perry Mason of the fifties practically defined the law to a whole generation of boomers. Words like incompetent, irrelevant and immaterial were on the lips of kids of all ages. Burr made defense attorney the highest calling imaginable. The thirties version is different. it's entertaining, but in a light comic way reminiscent of the Thin Man series. Warrem Williams plays for laughs and like the thin man is often drinking. The pace is snappy and keeps the interest from flagging. You won't be bored, but don't expect anything like the classic TV series.Missing here - believe it or not there's no courtroom drama, not even a surprise confession from the character you hardly noticed until Mason started his penetrating questions. There are no penetrating questions for that matter. Paul Drake is "Spudsy" Drake and, like his name, inserted for comic effect. The cops are more keystone and there is no Hamilton Berger D.A.On the whole OK, but more interesting as a comparison that shows what the 50's television series achieved and what changes made it possible.