User Reviews

Angie Dickinson guest stars as Marian Fargo a blackmail victim of Samuel Carlin. He knows a dark family secret about her brother, an escaped convict who became wealthy.

Marian tells her husband all about the blackmail as Carlin demands one big sum. In return Carlin would give Marian an incriminating file back.

Unbeknown to Marian, her husband is in with Carlin in the blackmail. When both are found dead, Marian is suspected of the murders.

Luckily, Perry has a one eyed witness who saw Marian on a bus when the murders happened.

However Hamilton Burger is leaked the information about the witness and he manages to persuade the witness that events are not what they seem.

Based on a story by Erle Stanley Gardner. This turns into a hopeless case until the audience sees Perry Mason's cunning in full force late in the day.

Of course doubts would be cast on the witness as she sought out Paul Drake to give him the vital information. Soon it emerges that another game is being played, a convenient phone call to Burger's office and the witness who so readily changes her mind.

If there is a weak link is that a person who Perry has previously met is in the courtroom sitting close by. A risky move and maybe something Perry had become aware of along with other convenient witnesses.

**SPOILERS** Title is a good one. Angie Dickinson shows her basic good looks as a light brunette, and good acting skills, also. If you've read the other reviews, you've got enough of the plot to make you want to see this fine episode. It's better than it sounds, but, as usual, I've got a fine point here. SPOILER Now, I know that a lot of people smoked in those days, but it is ridiculous to show someone who has just said he has Tuberculosis lighting up and NOT hacking his lungs out. I remember this from seeing this episode as a kid; one of my old-west heroes was Doc Holliday, and the idea that someone who suffered with those symptoms not noticing what happens when they ingest smoke is just too painfully stupid to contemplate.

I would also, well, yeah; I'm gonna mention it. Beautiful Della just doesn't take enough shorthand. This is empirical knowledge. My mother was a legal secretary, and a shorthand sharpshooter. She taught my sister , too. Gregg Shorthand was the text they used, and I can tell you truthfully, once she had her hand centered on her book, she never really had to look at it. It's another one of those pedantic observations that I make that I feel good about. Della should ALWAYS have her book with her; as many business lunches, dinners, and meetings as she is required for. And, yeah, she would have a serious notebook, not just the basic pages, as usually shown. Of course, I forgive her, she's perfect.

HOWEVER, in this case it shows just how smart she really is, because if she had been taking notes, it would have shown that she indeed did know about this side of the case before Perry had an opportunity to tie down those pesky legal details.... Yeah, coffee really is expensive anymore, isn't it? The courtroom ending is great, with Perry separating the accomplice from the scumbag, and with Della's assistance, clarifying the one important detail. The main rat in this episode was truly evil, and You have to watch it yourself. The witness that Perry was relying on turned to be an accomplice, and would probably take at least a fifteen year hit even with her testimony. The ending exchange between Della and Perry is a solid closer. Great acting, and as always, Barbara Hale shines.

... and probably the best part of it is that Angie Dickinson is the guest star/defendant in this episode.

Marian Fargo (Angie Dickinson) is being blackmailed for a large amount of money - ten thousand dollars so far, and the blackmailer says he will turn over what he is blackmailing her with if she gives him a lump sum of another ten thousand. Here's the problem - The person she is covering for is her brother who was sent to jail as a teen for stealing food during the Great Depression. He had it with a bullying guard one day and hit him in the head and then escaped. He has made a pretty good life for himself as an adult, but could be sent back to jail if discovered. Paging Jean Valjean.

The thing is - If Marian's family was so broke in the 1930s where did all of this money come from? It is her money, because when she tells her husband about the blackmailing scheme he says - "After all Marian it is your money...". Just to clarify, twenty thousand dollars in 1958 is like over two hundred thousand dollars in 2022. And it's not like women in the 1950s had great avenues to make money. They were pretty much limited professionally to teaching, secretarial work, and nursing.

Also, one of the actual murder victims is faking his own death so he can keep the blackmail money and disappear. Except he doesn't disappear. He comes up with a not so cunning plan to get Marian convicted. Why would he care who is blamed? Why not just leave with the money?

All of this and Marian's brother saying on top of everything he caught TB in prison followed by lighting up a cigarette is just too much. For a series that prides itself on details, this was a surprising disappointment somewhat redeemed by the regular cast.

This episode was puzzling and too convoluted. First of all, we are to believe that the motive of the blackmailer, once he was found ripping off his partner, Marian's husband, is to kill his partner somehow. This he succeeds in doing by shooting him in the head at home, in his wife's home. However, he has to also take suspicion off himself, so he concocts a bomb to go off in his own place, to blow up a French waiter, about the same size and build as himself (he isn't), an hour after Mason visited his house, and after Mason witnessed a woman walking inside. First of all, how did he have explosives ready so quickly? And since his target, Marian's husband, was actually in his place, not at home, wouldn't he be blown up? From what we know, Samuel Carlin, Arthur Fargo and another woman (likely his confederate, Diana Maynard) were all in Carlin's house about 1-2 hours after Mason left, and yet hid himself behind a bush in someone's driveway (not suspicious that?) across the street to observe a bomb go off. In any case, we are to believe, as it plays out, that Carlin somehow got the French waiter to come to his house that night, after telling that waiter to tell his boss that he quit the job, and blew him up so the police would think Carlin was dead, meanwhile he hired Diana Maynard to testify to the police that Marian Fargo, Mason's client, did indeed board a bus 3 hours earlier than other witnesses claim, thus giving Fargo an alibi for the murder of her husband? Why? Why go to all that trouble to give her an alibi? If Carlin did not hire Diana Maynard to sit with and testify that Fargo was on the bus with her, then Fargo would go down for the crime of killing her husband, and there would be no need for Maynard to even get involved. As it stood, Fargo could claim that Carlin was blackmailing her to keep her brother out of jail, but since Carlin was blown up with an explosive, they'd have to prove she had opportunity to do so, but why would she kill her husband in her own home? And why was she leaving on a bus anyway? To force the exchange of Gallagher's paperwork for the money? This episode was way too convoluted. It started badly, with Paul claiming that the body they took out of the building was too badly burned to identify, yet he told Perry that the body had a bullet in his skull. Shoddy.

****SPOILER*** Unintentionally funny like an Ed Wood directed movie Perry Mason episode that among other thing has to do with the price of a cup of coffee as well as a fugitive from Justice who invented a refinement for the calibrator of the internal combustion engine that will revolutionized the automobile. It's the sweet and lovely Marian Forgo, Angie Dickinson, who's being blackmailed about her fugitive from justice brother Charlie,Paul Picerni,who ends up on the short end of the stick here. Both State prison investigator Samuel D. Carlin,Luis Van Rooten, and Marion's greedy husband Arthur,Peter Adams, have been shaking her down for hush money in keeping her brother's past from becoming public. And sure enough both end up dead with Marian as the #1 suspect in their murders.

Perry Mason,Raymond Burr, who interrupted an important luncheon date at a swanky and very expensive French restaurant, where coffee sells for $1.00 a cup, with his private secretary Della Street, Barbara Hale, to take on Marian's case has to prove that she wasn't at the scene of both her husband Arthur and investigator Carlins murder and get her off the hook or out of the San Quentin gas chamber. And the only person who can prove Marian's innocence is a passenger who was sitting next to her on the L.A to Harristown bus when the two murders took place. The rub in all this is that the mystery woman Diana Maynard, Dorothy Green, wears an eye patch because of a severe eye infection that may make her testimony highly suspect!

****SPOILERS*** Worth sitting through just for the presence of the beautiful 26 year old Angie Dickison being in the cast as well as the utterly insane as well as highly entertaining surprise ending. You just knew it would happened but didn't quite know how it was going to be pulled off. As it turned out one of the still alive co conspirators in both Arthur Fargo and Samuel D. Carlin's murders just couldn't contain himself in seeing just how ridicules all this, the blackmail & murder plot, was and spilled the beans as Perry was cross examining him.