The Case of the Wooden Nickels

This episode was a good and interesting story. However it faded at the end. I felt like I had just been giving an ice cream cone and after the first lick the cream left the cone and fell on the ground.

As with all 'Perry Mason' episodes, we are accustom to an ending where someone is painted into a corner and then they confess to end the show in the time alloted. In this episode we get a mess. It resembled a car crash than solving of a mystery.

The show begins with a homely looking women hiring Paul to delivery a very rare coin to a unknown person and follow directions like a scavenger hunt.

And to make a story short- we have a replica coin maker, a rich coin collector, a seedy con artist along with our homely Ms Doubleday. Well the con artist gets shot and Ms Doubleday is seen holding the gun over the body. And she get Perry to defend her against Mr Burger in court.

So just from this information we know we are going to have replica coins being sold as original rare coins in the episode. The story was actually interesting. We have some good acting from the cast and some good dialog that ties the entire show together in one good viewing. Then we have the end!

Perry, outside the courtroom, gathers the entire cast and then begins to explain how and why the murder happened. We are left shaking our heads because we have to take Perry's explanation of events as fact even without the slightest evidence of such things ever happening. Perry wraps the entire case up in that gathering and we are left befuddled trying to make sense of the entire show.

The first 40 minutes of the show was good. The last ten seemed out of place for such an interesting story. The ending made the entire episode seem useless. A middle of the road episode for sure.

I'm going to start out by giving the writers a rare credit here for coming up with an interesting story with lots of intrigue, red herrings and suspense.

Yet with all that said, it still missed the mark somehow, and I can't quite put my finger on it. Perhaps it was the subject matter, although I was somewhat of a numismatist as a youth.

At any rate, it is worth the watch. No complaints with the acting or directing, but somehow it just came up tails for me...

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Coin collectors will enjoy this whodunit, likely what Jonathan Latimer had in mind, who wrote several film classics. At stake is an 1861 Confederate half dollar, valued at $50,000 -- approximately $522,000 dollars today. Worth committing murder for? Wait and see.

Paul Drake gets into this one, acting as a courier for Minerva Doubleday (Phyllis Love), afraid to deliver the coin to a buyer herself.

Comes the question as to whether the coin is legit when she turns up near the body of a man who was blackmailing her uncle (Will Kuluva), suspected of cranking out fake mazuma. Yes, one big happy family to meet and greet Perry.

I agree, there's as many twists as there are suspects to keep you on your toes. Latimer did his research on coins, making this a very educational episode, a notch above the rest of the formula whodunits.

Also, Burger is extremely irritated here. Seemed the more cases he lost to Perry, the more angry he became. William Talman should have received at least one Emmy nom for intensity.

Kuluva, who majored in roles as professionals, is well cast, good guy or bad apple? Same for veteran actor Murray Matheson, who played his share of sly old gents. Look for Walter Burke, famous as leprechauns, playing a panhandler.

Producer and director Arthur Marks elevates the courtroom finale. Always the faces.

SEASON 8 EPISODE 12 remastered CBS dvd box set. Volumes 1 and 2.

You description of the fugio coin is wrong!!! You wrote that there's no such coin and that you couldn't find it anywhere!!! If you look up "fugio coin" on wikipedia, you would find that it DOES EXIST!!! In 1787, George Washington designed the coin!!! Wikipedia has the whole story behind the coins!!! So, you should do better research before you write your comments about the shows you're watching!!!

Perhaps it's because I collected coins myself when I was a kid, or having read Sherlock Holmes stories so many times, but this one gave the viewer JUST ENOUGH info to lead him/her to deduce the ending, yet have to solve the puzzle how all the clues fit together. Reminds me more of an Ellery Queen episode from ten years later. (Had Mason broken the fourth wall, turned to the camera and said "Think you got it solved? - let's find out!" I wouldn't have been surprised.) If that's not enough - Berry Kroeger is in it, too! - he of the slimy, lugubrious manner and the face perpetually drenched in sweat. Why he was not in the Indiana Jones movies is beyond me. He's one of the best Perry Mason bad guys ever; whenever he appears, you just KNOW he's in some scheme up to his eyebrows.

I was led away from my original deduction a few times; this show had more twists, turns, and dead ends than an Iowa corn maze. Far from being a disappointment at the end, the way it fell together at the end was quite well done. Let's just say that, had the guilty party not been betrayed by one close to said party, his or her plan would have been airtight.

The only thing that made me laugh was the reference to a gold Fugio cent. No such gold coin exists, now or ever. If you've ever seen a gold dollar coin (about the size of a dime), imagine a coin one-one hundredth of that size..it'd be a waste of time and specie to make them!