The Case of the Dangerous Dowager

Matilda Benson is the wealthy but dangerous dowager. She has poisoned her family.

Sylvia Oxman is the granddaughter who has taken to drink and gambling. She also has an estranged marriage where she is fighting for custody for her son.

This could be at risk if some IOUs fall into the wrong hands. They are gambling debts and could be used to show that Sylvia is an unfit mother.

Danny Barker is the gambling club owner who plans to auction off the IOU's. To him they are worth more than the face value of $7500.

Matilda Benson and her son go to see Perry Mason about the problem. Only when Barker is found dead, Sylvia becomes his client when she is charged with murder.

There is a courtroom scene where it seems Perry Mason has an hopeless case. A petrol pump owner and a priest positively identifies Sylvia.

It leads to a heart to heart between her and Perry Mason. Her poisonous childhood especially when she was abandoned by her mother. Who ran off with a Neapolitan fisherman while on holiday. Perry learns that this is one toxic family.

Poker functions as a plot device in several Perry Mason episodes, and it is front and center in this one. The location of much of the action is the Clover Club in Gardena, CA; even at the time (1959), poker playing was legal in certain parts of California, and Gardena was the home to six legal card clubs (none of them named the Clover Club, of course, but you get the idea.) Perry and Paul are shown playing at the Clover Club and Paul tries to run a bluff, which is called by a woman poker player played by the one and only Ellen Corby, who would later play Grandma on the 1970's TV show, The Waltons.

Incidentally, Ellen Corby had a small part in the Alfred Hitchcock classic, "Vertigo", which came out a year before this episode aired. In another Hitchcock connection, the accused killer in this episode is played by Patricia Cutts. Cutts was born in London, England in 1926 and her father was Graham Cutts, who was a well known film director in the 1920's. Cutts' assistant director was none other than a young Alfred Hitchcock, who would eventually step into the director's chair and come to America, becoming an iconic figure in the history of film. Sadly, Patricia Cutts died young, in 1974.

A casino, a young alcoholic woman with a gambling addiction, an ugly, controlling grandmother with oodles of money, and a blackmail scheme, gets us to this sort of sick episode. Perry is frustrated because if the nasty actions of virtually everyone in the plot. No real heroes.

Patricia Cutts is Perry Mason's eventual client when she's accused of murdering Robert Strauss. Originally Raymond Burr is hired by her grandmother Katharine Givney an imperious old woman used to issuing orders. She finds out early that Burr is not going to be treated like her hired help early on.

Cutts owes some heavy gambling debts to a club owned by Strauss and Leo Gordon. Strauss is trying to make some extra money on his own by selling the debts to her estranged husband Gene Blakely. Blakely will use these in a custody battle he is having with Cutts over their son who as Givney's great grandson will be heir to a considerable fortune.

When Strauss winds up shot to death its Cutts that Ray Collins arrests for the crime. The usual nice mix of suspects is included in this Mason story. I will say that the motive for killing Strauss by the eventually discovered murderer is a strange one. And the murderer was one you wouldn't suspect for most of the story it was like our perpetrator was part of the wallpaper.

I couldn't quite buy into the characters here in Givney's family so this is not one of the better Perry Masons for me.

All the characters here, without exception, are tired cliches. The wealthy domineering mother, the cruel, gleeful blackmailer, and the fallen woman in distress, afflicted (the script tells us) by alcoholism, compulsive gambling, and spiritual emptiness, but miraculously redeemable (we are supposed to hope) by the unconditional faith of her defense attorney. This thankless role is played by Patricia Cutts, trying her best to look sultry and to sound like Grace Kelly. (This was 1959, five years after Grace had done her three big hits with Alfred Hitchcock, and three years after she had become a princess of Monaco.) But Patricia Cutts ain't no Grace Kelly.

Perry plays the fatherly, gentle, wise man-of-the-world-who-can-see-the-good-in-everyone, delivering brain-numbingly banal platitudes about suffering and spiritual growth, in his velvety bass voice. Raymond Burr was a really great actor, and he proves it by actually putting some feeling into his lines here. Other than that, there's nothing worth watching (as far as I can see). Even the character-actors and bit-part players are dull, which is unusual for this series.