The Case of the Fugitive Fraulein

I was surprised that the other three reviewers gave this episode a good review. I am an addicted fan of Perry Mason and had high expectations of this episode but was very disappointed. Bottom line, this episode fell well short of the usual standards I have come to expect from the program.

To begin with, the script was naive and implausible. It was obviously an attempt to exploit the cold war tensions that existed between the east and west at that time. Good idea but very badly handled. There are just too many plot defects to even try to list.

All the fake accents were bad enough but what made it a complete farce was the court hearing being conducted entirely in English. Even if all those East Germans involved could speak English .... next to impossible at that time... they would speak German in a German court, and Perry would have had to utilize an interpreter.

Had the plot been even remotely believable, I could have overlooked that glaring defect, but it wasn't. There was little regard for what we Americans take for granted as justice in East Germany. There was essentially no concept of the right to a fair trial. Being accused of a crime was usually sufficient cause for being imprisoned or facing a firing squad. Thus the lame attempt to depict an American style trial in a communist bloc country was bad enough. But to do so in English.... laughable.

One of the many reasons I enjoy the Perry Mason franchise is because usually, it is NOT topical. These stories could as easily be set in 2018 as in the years 1957-66...except for this one (as well as episode #171, TCOT Two-Faced Turn-a-Bout.) In both instances, the story became topical and therefore dated rather quickly...especially after the Communist governments fell like dominoes behind the Iron Curtain after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. (I will remember to my dying day, my roomie and me watching that on the TV...his parents were Lithuanian escapees to the West in the early 1950s, shortly after he was born.) Mason had the deck stacked against him, but in the face of immutable truth even Herr Stromm had to see reality and let Frau Ritter free. There are a lot of people still alive who remember what it was like, to pass from Western Europe to the East - it really WAS like entering a prison - but making a TV show about the experience dated it immediately. Once us older viewers die off, future viewers will scoff at the animosity and distrust between East and West.

This is not so far removed from reality, but it is overdone a bit. Nevertheless, when truth conquers evil, even evil has to admit to it. Gregory Morton plays his usual, delightful bad guy and Ronnie Long gets his - nice and early. A good watch, all things considered.

This tries to be a sequel to the very interesting "the case of a place called midnight", and it fails to be as good as that episode was.

This is your basic Cold War episode where Perry Mason has to go up against the evil "East German Kangaroo Court".

I don't believe that courts even in eastern Germany or communist Russia back then were as depicted in this episode. Because nobody really knew? In America, all we really knew about Russia was what was told us by our own government. When you think about it, there were very few sources of real information about how life actually was in Russia. All that we had access to was Pravda, which gave us the official viewpoint of what Russian life was. Not the actual truthful version. Because no information ever came out of Russia, and usually people who went in to communist countries vanished. I had met people who were prisoners in Russia during that time, but I met them after the fall of the wall. The stories that they told me were not like what we were shown on television at all. We had no diplomacy with any of those countries, so on TV, we had to invent our own illustration of how Russian or East German life would be.

AND... a big AND here... We have to remember this was during the space race and the east Germans and Russia were trying to entice scientists to "come over to their side", and this episode is just one depiction of that process, where in this case it was a form of blackmail.

In fact, we don't really know how Russia or East Germany found people to come to their countries and work on their rockets, which then exploded. Oh, you didn't know? During the moon race, Russia built a rocket equivalent to our Saturn five- which had a gigantic and miraculous explosion, which ended their attempts to go to The Moon. I had watched the footage of that explosion on some documentary, where we had been given rare footage, it might be available on YouTube at this point, but I forget which documentary that was. I think it was referenced in James Michener's "Space", which was some fiction told in documentary style. And there might also have been an actual documentary called "space".

Everybody in the United States was behind the space race, and behind the moon trip, but the moment we get there, everybody loses interest. And without the space race, there really wasn't any more use for the cold war, except for posturing.

Which means that the United States did not necessarily win that little contest, nobody won. But you have to remember the importance of the space race and during this time, we were right in the middle of it.

This was during the most critical point of the space race, and both we the United States and Russia and satellite countries, were trying to get the best scientists to work with them.

And apparently the professor in this episode, was one of those geniuses who could have done a lot of good for either side, depending on where he went.

Granted, he would not have been very happy, going into East Germany- not with the situation that was set up.

This episode is very clever in that it sets up a MacGuffin - we are to follow the subject of a little girl, the professors granddaughter, and we, as we keep our eyes on her, we are missing what happens right in front of us at the very beginning of the episode.

Because the right hand is not telling the left hand what it is doing. And so we don't see what is actually going on at all until the very last moments of the episode. Sorry, I'm not even going to give you 1 inch of a clue you are going to have to watch this.

Starring the girl with the German accent who was also in "the case of a place called midnight"- we are given some pretty good imagery of what could have been east Germany. Also, the use of stock footage gives the illusion more weight.

Although not as good as "the place called midnight", which fools us into actually believing we are in Switzerland... we can believe that we are looking into east Germany.

The east German characters are just as nasty as they would have been in any Alfred Hitchcock Russian spy film.

And a number of other commentators are claiming that this episode was not very well directed. Au Contrare, it was directed very well. And the story was very well written. Because none of us saw what was right in front of us the whole time.

And that is what made Perry Mason great television for nine years.

Just watch how this episode develops we are thinking Perry can use his own cleverness to influence an East German Court. But he can't, and so there is one person, and one person only who can affect the result that we want. But who is that? How?

And then the ending drags us along until the twist becomes crystal clear. This is the case of the twice told twist, except it's the first told twist...

This kind of television writing was not very common, but it had its first examples right here. In Perry Mason episodes, like this. So, when you watch it again, give it a chance, let the story tell itself.

...though many of the season 9 episodes featured highly implausible plot lines and rather stilted dialigue .. it is the ugly reality of Erich Honecker's deeply repressive and highly controlled society that is the main character here...

.. Honecker was a vain, deeply suspicious man; and his Stassi (security service) made spies out of nearly every German...with even the children and relatives of dissidents paid off with plum apartments for ratting out their iwn family members...

...as a modern day parallel...simply Google former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, raised in Perleberg, East Germany...you can observe first hand, her innate reluctance to speak forcibly or assertively...this comes from a childhood where literally anyone she spoke to could be speaking to might report their conversation..everyone had to proceed with deliberate suspicion and circumspection...whatever you might divulge unwittingly could cost someone their "privileges", their freedom, even their very lives...

...younger viewers should try to speak to a former East German to appreciate just how much if our " freedoms" we take for granted...

...veteran English actor Ronald Long turns in a stelkar performance as the uunctious opportunist Franz Hoffer, and French character actress Lilyan Chauvin is appropriately creepy as the orohanage matron...

...kudos to Earl Stanley Garner and famed director Arthur Marks for a timely, and suspenseful episode...

In this episode Perry Mason takes on a client in a different venue than the Los Angeles County Court. The clients are Wolfe Barzell and Jeanette Nolan who are after their granddaughter whom they've never met and who is behind the Iron Curtain. She's being used by the East German government to leverage a defection east by scientist Barzell.

The People's Court in East Germany does not have the protections of one in where the Anglo-Saxon system of jurisprudence is used. And he's up against a ruthless public prosecutor in Gregory Morton. Still when Nolan of all people is accused of murdering one of those Ugarte like scoundrels played by Ronald Long, Mason if not actually in the court itself where he has a much limited role in that rigged system does prove who actually did the deed.

Perry Mason still triumphs in a rigged system. And beats the Communists at a propaganda game. Who could ask for more?