That Theme Music

schappe1

Perry Mason is one of the legitimate classics of TV history, easily among to top ten shows of all time. It probably has the smallest differential between the best and worst episodes because it is so formulamatic. I don't even know which episode is my favorite or least favorite. As with most shows, the earliest ones are generally preferable to the later ones but the quality held up pretty well through the ten seasons.

        One of the many memorable aspects of the show was that theme music by Fred Steiner. PM was essentially about lies. In one episode, Mason jumps up from his chair, pounds the table and says "I hate liars!" I almost think he's more interested in attacking falsehood than guilt, although the two obviously go together. If you listen to the blowzy jazz theme Steiner concocted it's not hard to see it as accompaniment for an ecdysiast, stripping away lies and deceit until there is nothing left but the truth. It's one of the most recognizable and evocative pieces of music ever written for a dramatic presentation.

        By the way, the opening credit sequences used are interesting. The most famous has Mason sitting at a table in an empty courtroom, looking at a document and smiling contentedly. The camera pans back to reveal the empty court room presumably after another successful defense. Before that there was shot of Mason receiving a piece of paper from a judge and smiling that same smile, only to turn into a stylized drawing of Mason and a court room with a towering judge looming over him. The opening of that sequence is taken from the original credit sequence, which has Mason taking the paper from the judge, smiling and handing it to Paul Drake and Della Street at the defense table, who in turn hand it to Hamilton burger and Lieutenant Tragg as each actor's credit is shown. In the original version of this, shown only in the first season's episodes, Burger and Tragg are rather uncomfortably seated at the defense table so they could be in the same shot as Drake and Street. This obviously made no sense and in fact the passing of this paper back and forth between them didn't make much more sense than that, so they eventually went with the later version.

score /10

schappe1 12 April 2002

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw0059846/