The Case of the Wooden Nickels

A very rare coin is at the center of this tale. It is listed at 50,000 dollars and is desired by a famous collector. Enter a man who can make near perfect copies of collectible coins. The story fizzles at the end, however.

Won 't recount the plot discussed elsewhere except that Paul Drake was entrusted with a rare coin someone murdered to possess. So, in a nightspot, he mistakenly gives the coin to a cigarette girl before retrieving it. Then Perry has the coin examined by an expert who the viewer but not Perry knows would move heaven-and-earth to secure.

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!

This episode of Perry Mason finds Raymond Burr defending Phyllis Love on a charge of murdering Jack Betts. Betts was both courting her and blackmailing her uncle Will Kulava over making counterfeit coins.

All kinds of people, coin collectors are involved here with Kulava and there's a real rogue's gallery of suspects in the cast.

Even if this wasn't a Perry Mason story it is a given that only innocent clients get his services, I'd be hard pressed to believe mousy Phyllis Love could murder anybody. William Talman looks like a real bully in prosecuting her.

The perpetrator who is a real smooth article tried to pull something on the witness stand. Foolish man. You have to see what he tries.

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.