Jim Hutton, the district attorney of a small county some place in southern California (with some exteriors shot in San Anselmo in Marin County) is confronted with a puzzling murder: a man shot in a pool by two guns -- so it's unclear which one killed the man -- with lots of suspects, no motive, an annoying defense attorney among them, played by Lloyd Bochner, and a growing pile of corpses.
Erle Stanley Gardner started out as a lawyer, but was bored by the practice of law. He started writing in 1921. When he became a full-time writer in 1933, he felt that any year in which he wrote fewer than 1,200,000 words was a bad year, and he used eight or so pen names to avoid flooding the market. That may seem like a lot of books, short stories, radio scripts, travel books, and articles on forensics. In the 1940s, he founded the Court of Last Resort, a forerunner of such organizations as the Innocence Project. He died in 1979, at the age of 80.
He's best remembered for creating Perry Mason, who appeared in more than 80 novels, a dozen movies, and hundreds of episodes of the TV series and succeeding TV movies. This TV movie is from a lesser known series. In an inversion oft he Perry Mason formula, District Attorney Doug Selby, confronted with a puzzling mystery, faces off in court against defense attorney A. B. Carr, This is the only screen version of the characters; doubtless it was intended for a series, but after Raymond Burr, who could believe such a thing. Nonetheless, it has a fine and confusing plot, Ed Asner as a brutish police chief, Leslie Nielson with an Irish accent, and Vic Tayback as an insurance investigator. Very watchable.
