This Getty image of Raymond Burr instantly recalls the actor’s long-running role as Perry Mason. That stern and suited lawyer, in the courtroom, defending a client who has been wrongly charged with murder and, with the help of his secretary, Della Street, and his loyal PI, Paul Drake, invariably proving that someone else did it. If you are a part of a certain generation of lawyers, it was most probably Mason that set alight your passion for the courtroom.
While crime drama has moved on from a world of moral victory and justice seen to be done in weekly doses there is still room in these stranger times for the fable of it all. The original CBS series ran for 30 years and then expanded into TV movies before syndication reruns and reboots saw it continue for almost a half-century.
Given that pedigree, Hollywood would inevitably remake the show — Perry Mason, coming to NEON on June 22. The Welsh actor, Mathew Rhys, plays a younger, punchier Mason in 1931 at the start of his career working a kidnapping case during the Great depression. The poor First World War returned soldier is an outsider. He gets his clothes from corpses in the morgue and wears a crushed fedora as he slithers around the dark foreboding streets of LA trying to fit in. As he does so you sense bleak times that only the city of stars has for a young gumshoe.
