by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I eventually got to run the first of six episodes I’d downloaded from archive.org of an intriguing true-crime TV show from 1957-58 called The Court of Last Resort, which appears to have been a 1950’s version of the Innocence Project. It was actually formed by Erle Stanley Gardner, the creator of Perry Mason and himself an attorney in the 1910’s before he gave up practicing law in favor of writing about it. The members of the “Board of Investigators” of the Court of Last Resort were Gardner (listed in the credits as “lawyer, noted author”), Sam Larsen (who appears to have been the Court’s principal investigator — essentially Paul Drake to Gardner’s Perry Mason — and was portrayed on the program by Lyle Bettger, the series’ recurring star), Harry Steeger (publisher), Dr. LeMoyne Snyder (lawyer, doctor of medicine, medicolegal expert), Raymond Schindler (celebrated private detective), Alex Gregory (lie-detector expert), Marshall Houts (professor of law, formerly with the FBI), and Park Street, Jr. (trial lawyer and chair of the Texas Law Enforcement Foundation), and though the show was a complete dramatization — all members of the Court of Last Resort appearing in the main story (as opposed to the tag scene at the end, in which they played themselves) were portrayed by actors.
This particular episode was called “The George Zaccho Case,”
was originally aired November 1, 1957 and directed by our old friend Reginald
LeBorg, who like a lot of other “B” movie directors grabbed jobs in TV when
work in the “B”’s started to dry up. It’s about a Greek-American fisherman,
George Zaccho (John Verros), who is accused and convicted of poisoning his wife
Rose (Fintan Meyler) with arsenic when she collapses and dies in his living
room with a witness — a neighbor who had urged George to call it in as an
emergency (the 911 number didn’t exist yet when this was made) and was baffled
when George refused — watching the whole thing and eventually testifying
against him. Zaccho is convicted largely on circumstantial evidence and motive
— his motive being that he’d started an affair with a Latina dancer, Margarite
Velez (Lilyan Chauvin) in a beach town he frequently docked at, and he’d
supposedly promised to marry her as soon as he could get rid of his current
wife, legally or otherwise. (Just how
they sustained an affair when they couldn’t communicate is a bit of a mystery —
George Zaccho spoke almost nothing but Greek; indeed, when Larsen interviews
him the priest of the local Orthodox church has to sit in and interpret — while
Velez’s only languages are presumably Spanish and the fractured
Spanish-accented English we actually hear from her.)
The Court takes his case largely at the instigation of
Zaccho’s adult children, including his son Alex (Nico Minardos), who took over
his fishing boat after dad was arrested. The Court gets hold of Mrs. Zaccho’s
medical records and discovers that Mrs. Zaccho had been admitted to hospital
for arsenic poisoning three times already, including at least one treatment before her husband met the Other Woman, and it turns out
that she became an arsenic eater (a plot gimmick also used in one of the Basil
Rathbone/Sherlock Holmes radio show, in which a former British music-hall
entertainer who married an East Indian potentate, who died and left her his
fortune, was about to be poisoned with arsenic despite her having a food taster
— who, as part of the plot, had been immunized against it by being fed small
doses regularly) because a Gypsy fortune teller named Vera (Irene Tedrow) had
told her eating arsenic would clear up her skin rashes and make her skin bright
and smooth.
It wasn’t that
exciting a program, and our download from archive.org suffered from an odd form
of distortion — black bars appeared across the screen whenever any rapid
movement occurred (I sampled one of the other Court of Last Resort episodes I downloaded and it didn’t seem to suffer
from the same problem, which since it also showed up on my computer file of the
Zaccho episode seemed to stem from the archive.org upload rather than any
limitation in the DVD encoding or disc burn on my computer) — but it was
certainly worth watching. As a rather hyperbolic reviewer on the archive.org
site noted about one of the other five Court of Last Resort episodes they have up (I say “hyperbolic” because
there are groups like the
Innocence Project doing similar work today — and with the advantage of DNA
testing, a form of potentially exculpatory evidence that didn’t exist in the
1950’s but which has since freed hundreds of unjustly convicted criminals), “It’s
hard to imagine a society where people actually cared that an innocent man
would be wrongfully executed. Now we lust for executions. In Mormon Utah they
die by firing squad, and we feast on the spectacle.” — 8/4/11
••••••••••
We ran the second in sequence of my archive.org downloads of
the TV series The Court of Last Resort,
“The Clarence Redding Case,” which was about a rather elderly drifter (John
Bliefer) accused of raping (the word in the script was “assault” because the
writer, James Goldstone, had to tread lightly around the Standards and
Practices department of NBC, but it was unmistakable what was really going on)
a woman inside a barn — we didn’t see the crime take place, but a 10-year-old
boy walked in on it while in progress in an intriguing anticipation of the
“guest body-finder” device frequently used on Law and Order and its spinoffs. Redding was arrested and, when the
woman died of her injuries, tried for murder, convicted and sentenced to death,
and the Court of Last Resort got involved just three weeks before he was
scheduled to be executed.
It turns out all this happened in a New England village
whose economy had gone so far down that there were only 27 people still left in
town — too small to sustain their own police force, so members of the citizenry
investigated crimes on a volunteer basis (I’d heard of volunteer fire
departments before, but a volunteer police
department was a new one on me), and when Harry Steeger (Carleton Young), Erle
Stanley Gardner’s publisher, hears of the case and assigns investigator Sam
Larsen (Lyle Bettger) — as I noted in my comments on the last episode we saw,
Larsen, who wasn’t formally a member of the governing board of the Court of
Last Resort, was essentially Paul Drake to Gardner’s real-life Perry Mason — to
go to the town and start looking into the case, he runs into three people in
the town’s general store, of which one was the dead girl’s father, who’s
naturally convinced that justice has been done and the man who’s about to be
executed for murdering his daughter is in fact guilty. Eventually Larsen digs
up the key piece of evidence he needed — the boy witnessed the attacker wearing
a red jacket, and Redding’s jacket is white — and Larsen eventually learns that
there have been similar assaults in other towns, also committed by a man in a
red jacket, so Redding gets freed.
The parallels between the Court of Last Resort and the
modern-day Innocence Project are obvious — one imdb.com reviewer
(“jnskjackson”) noted the similarities as well as the key difference: the
Innocence Project has had access to DNA testing, a tool that didn’t exist in
the late 1950’s — and though the Court members were played by actors (except in
a final tag scene in which the real ones, including Gardner, appeared as themselves)
the cases were actual ones and Goldstone’s writing and Reginald LeBorg’s
direction (as I’ve noted before, Universal did LeBorg no favors assigning him
to horror films; he’s far better as a director of physically possible suspense
stories than anything science-fictional or supernatural) get the stories on and
off the screen effectively in the 26 minutes available to them in the half-hour
drama format. I miss the half-hour drama format; the explosion in the time
commercial TV devotes to commercials has meant that an “hour” show in the
1950’s was 52 minutes compared to the 42 minutes common today, but even with
only 16 rather than 26 additional minutes to fill, a lot of hour-long dramas,
especially crime dramas, seem padded out to fill the length, either with the
cutesy-poo scenes attempting to “humanize” the protagonists (though the USA
Network has made these so much of a trademark they’ve even based their
promotional slogan for the entire channel, “Characters Wanted,” on them) or
with the insane melodramatic complications that have weighted down otherwise
good episodes of Law and Order and shows
like it. Like the “B” movie, the half-hour TV crime drama encouraged an economy
of storytelling a lot of modern-day shows could definitely benefit from! —
8/6/11
••••••••••
I ran us instead the next episode in sequence of the
interesting TV series The Court of Last Resort, a sort of 1950’s precursor to the Innocence Project established in
1948 by, of all people, mystery author Erle Stanley Gardner, whose name was big
box-office on TV just then since his character Perry Mason had just been adapted and was a huge ratings hit.
Alas, The Court of Last Resort
only lasted one season — and that on the chronically weakly rated ABC — because
the premise was certainly compelling: a half-hour drama (I miss half-hour
dramas; shows like this and both the 1950’s and 1960’s iterations of Dragnet prove that you could do exciting, intense crime
stories in half an hour without the dreadful sense of padding that afflicts
some longer crime tales being done these days at the now-obligatory hour-long
time slot; as I noted in my journal in one of my first comments on an episode
of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, “The time constraints of the original [Dragnet and its half-hour slot] had forced them to write
about relatively simple crimes, ones the viewer could readily imagine actually
happening; the new one had to stretch its plotlines over the obligatory hour
and therefore had to resort to the kinds of complications that are found almost
exclusively in crime fiction
rather than crime reality.”
This episode was called “The Case of John Smith” and deals
with an attempt to prove the innocence of a man who’d been convicted — actually
pushed by a court-appointed attorney into copping a plea to murdering a
shopowner during a robbery after a police officer intimidated and beat
(literally!) him into a confession (something actually quite common in those
pre-Miranda days; it’s hard these days
for police to get away with a physical assault on a suspect in custody but they
still use coercive interrogation techniques) — 22 years earlier, though surprisingly it doesn’t really go into the
difficulties of reconstructing events that occurred so long ago and it seems as
if all the principals except the man “John Smith” (it’s not his real name; he
was orphaned as a child, apparently left on the streets when his parents died,
and he speaks with a thick foreign accent — probably the normal one of Than
Wyenn, the actor who plays him) supposedly murdered seem to be alive and within
reach of the investigation of private eye Raymond Schindler (Robert H. Harris),
who eventually uncovers Smith’s alibi witness. It turns out that on the night
of the murder he bought bread and beans for a fellow homeless person, Carl
Halsted (Karl Swenson), and Halsted not only remembered but eventually got off
the street and became a successful businessperson in California, but never
forgot Smith’s kindness to him because the date it all happened was his
birthday.
This is the sort of story that’s a bit hard to believe
without the assurances of the narrator (Lyle Bettger in his role as Sam Larsen,
principal researcher and leg man for the Court of Last Resort) that it’s all
true, but it’s a well done tale, incisively written by Ken Kolb and powerfully
directed by Reginald LeBorg, who on the strength of both these TV shows and his
film credits was a quite good suspense director Universal unwisely pushed into
horror films when they had him under contract in the 1940’s. — 8/12/11
••••••••••
This Court of Last Resort episode was called “The Frank Clark Case” and dealt with a murder from
1956 (the show aired in early 1958 so it was a relatively fresh crime, not one
from 22 years earlier like “The John Smith Case”) in which a man named Frank
Clark (Dan Barton) was accused of knifing a middle-aged man, Peter Lucenic
(Gene Roth), in his home, leaping out of his open window and being seen by his
next-door neighbor, Eleanor Stacy (a marvelously twitchy performance by
Virginia Vincent), as he fled through the clotheslines full of laundry she’d
hung to dry in her backyard. At first Clark, whom we see only from behind, looks like your stereotypical
movie/TV “juvenile delinquent” from the period, but later we’re told that he’s
30 (and the real Dan Barton was even older than that, born September 20, 1921,
which would have made him 36 when the episode was filmed) even though he’s
still living with his older sister Roberta (played by Marian Seldes, who in
fact was seven years younger than
Barton — born August 23, 1928 — and who’s still alive and working!) and her husband Paul Farrell (Stanley
Adams), who’s lamenting the sheer amount of money and time Roberta has already
spent on various lawyers and investigators futilely promising to exonerate
Frank.
The Court of Last Resort’s investigator, Sam Farrell (Lyle
Bettger), takes up the case and talks to the police captain who led the
official investigation, Captain Cunningham (Harold J. Stone) — and no, we don’t
ever find out his first name — and eventually he finds that the $200 Lucenic
had lying around in his room but which wasn’t found either on him or on Frank
was in fact stolen by Eleanor Stacy, who used it to keep her car from being
repossessed. But she picked it up off the street where Lucenic’s killer had
dropped it — and in a quite surprising twist given that the series, and the
Court of Last Resort itself, were both products of the work of novelist Erle
Stanley Gardner, creator of the character of Perry Mason, it turns out that
Frank Clark really did commit the
murder: Eleanor saved the money clip which was holding the bills together when
she found them, and it turns out to match exactly one Paul Farrell had: a gift
from Frank Clark, who made one for his brother-in-law and an identical one for
himself in the machine shop where he worked. Roberta had been convinced Frank
couldn’t have committed the crime because he’d been home with her the entire
afternoon — except that she wasn’t feeling well that day, Frank gave her some
medicine, the medicine made her sleepy and she dozed off, she thought for only
a minute or two but in fact for longer than that, long enough for Frank to slip
out to steal Lucenic’s cash, only Lucenic was home unexpectedly, surprised
Frank and Frank killed him by stabbing him with a screwdriver he had in his
tool box and he’d taken along to jimmy Lucenic’s window open to burglarize him.
It’s a nice little vest-pocket drama and the ending is
legitimately surprising without getting into the absurd melodramatics of many
recent Law and Order episodes — and, as
I’ve written before about the half-hour crime dramas of the 1950’s and 1960’s,
not only this one but the original Dragnets as well, they have something of the same economy of storytelling as
the “B”-movies of the 1930’s and 1940’s and the time limit forced the writers
(even on shows which were totally fiction and not, like this one, at least
ostensibly based on true stories) to focus on crimes that could have happened and not the elaborate, far-fetched and
definitely fictional plots of today’s hour-long shows in the genre! — 8/14/11
••••••••••
I dug out the disc of the Court of Last Resort TV shows and played the next-to-last episode of the
six I’d been able to find on archive.org, and in many ways it was the best of
the five we’ve seen so far: “The Jacob Loveless Case,” which aside from its
status as a true story is a magnificent tale of injustice, prosecutorial
misconduct and the destructiveness of secrets that could well have made a quite
good plot for a film noir. It
opens in 1936, with a young couple necking (standing up!) in a field in Texas
when an assailant comes up and shoots them both. (The young couple don’t look at
all like people from 1936 — at least if the
movies of the period are accurate touchstones to judge by — they’re dressed in
1950’s clothes and wear their hair in 1950’s styles, but they’re not on long
enough for that to matter.) Jacob Loveless (Barry Atwater) is arrested and
charged with killing those two nice young people for the $4 and change they
were carrying, and since he’s still a teenager himself he isn’t given the death
penalty but is sentenced to life
in prison. Once in prison the illiterate Loveless not only learns to read but
finds solace in books and ultimately gets assigned to run the prison library as
his behind-bars job.
He appears before the parole board four times, but the first
three times the prosecutor in his case, Edward Kruger (Onslow Stevens), appears
before the board and talks them into not
paroling him, while the fourth time Loveless applies he finds Kruger actually on the parole board, stubbornly refusing to recuse
himself or to allow the other board members to vote to parole Loveless. Though
he insists all along he’s been innocent of the original crime, he’s given up on
seeking a pardon — in a nicely turned speech (the screenwriter was Sam Rolfe),
Loveless says he doesn’t care anymore what it says on his ticket out of prison,
as long as it gets him out — but when Court of Last Resort investigator Sam
Larsen (Lyle Bettger, the series’ star) starts researching the case in
association with Raymond Cole, who replaced Kruger as D.A. when Kruger retired,
he finds out that the real killer was Mort Walker (Paul Newlan), owner of the
property where the killings took place and a hot-tempered man who eagerly
resorts to threats of bodily harm whenever anyone trespasses, no matter how
innocently.
Loveless’s alibi witness was Walker’s daughter, who
sandbagged his case by changing her story when she realized her dad was the
actual killer — and she’s lived as a recluse on the Walker property ever since,
never going out and certainly never dating, working or doing anything to establish an existence independent of the dad she
lied for. Kruger’s guilt feelings about the case have led him to alcoholism and
turned his wife Josephine (Louise Lewis) into a classic long-suffering
co-dependent — they haven’t had any children — and Larsen and Cole muse over
the irony that Loveless, even though he’s spent 22 years in prison for a crime
he didn’t commit, has actually come through the experience with less emotional
scarring than anyone else involved. Though this episode was missing the “tag”
scene with real Court of Last Resort members that has enlivened some of the
previous ones, it was still quite good, well written by Rolfe and directed by
Reginald LeBorg (imdb.com credits Peter Godfrey as director, but LeBorg is the
name on the original credits), who as I’ve pointed out suffered professionally
from the decision of his bosses at Universal in the 1940’s to give him horror films
with supernatural or science-fiction premises, when his strength was in
suspense stories. — 9/28/11
••••••••••
Charles and I ended up watching the last of the six episodes
of the quite interesting 1957-58 TV series The Court of Last Resort we’d been able to download from archive.org: “The
Mary Morales Case,” which in some ways was the most unusual of them all,
featuring a surprise opening — instead of a narrator announcing what the
prosecution’s theory of the case was, it opened with a sequence showing Juan
Morales (Joe De Santis), who’d brought his family — himself, his wife Mary
(Marian Seldes, who had previously appeared as Roberta, the older sister of the
genuinely guilty Frank Clark, on an earlier Court of Last Resort episode), and their chronically ill young son
Miguel, who is talked about a great deal but never shown as an on-screen
character — from Laredo, Texas to Arizona in hope of finding work now that an
injury to his hand that had idled him for three years had finally healed and he
now could work. Joe spots Mary
talking to a white trucker in a local diner, leaps to the worst (and wrong)
conclusion, goes back to his own truck, gets out his automatic pistol, enters
the diner and …
Then the narrator (Lyle Bettger in his role as Sam Larsen,
principal investigator for the Court of Last Resort) announces that the charge
was murder and the accused was not Juan
Morales but his wife Mary and it’s not until quite a bit later in the show that
we find out what really happened. Juan waved his gun around and then went up to
the diner’s bar and ordered a drink (he’d already been established as at least
an incipient alcoholic, his drinking attributed to his troubles at home and his
inability either to provide for his wife or pay for medical care for their son)
while Mary skulked out in shame, embarrassed at the way her husband had treated
her and anxious to get even. She did so by taking the gun herself, first
removing its magazine so it (presumably) wouldn’t fire, intending to give her
husband “the scare of his life” by holding it on him, only by sheer
happenstance she pulled the trigger and the gun went off since Mary hadn’t
realized that there would still be one live round in the chamber even though
she’d removed all the other bullets. What’s more, the victim was not her
husband but a beloved older woman who had just happened to enter the diner at
that point.
Larsen investigates the crime and runs into a brick wall
composed as much of racism as shame — it seems virtually all the townspeople
couldn’t have cared less whether Mary was guilty of murder or manslaughter, and
if they didn’t exactly lie on the witness stand they, shall we say, shaded
their recollections on the ground that the defendant was a Mexican and “those
people” can’t be controlled and need either to go home or be jailed. Given the
ferocity of the modern-day Right’s war on so-called “illegal aliens” (and the
way Texas Governor Rick Perry’s pursuit of the Republican nomination for
President seems to have been derailed by virtually the only compassionate thing
he’s ever done in his political career, the granting of in-state college
tuition to the children of undocumented immigrants), the racism of the
townspeople as depicted by screenwriters Max Ehrlich and Arthur Weiss hits home
today. What complicates things even
further is that Mary Morales requested a local attorney, and Juan Morales wrote
the attorney a letter — but since he’d been jailed himself on a minor (and
possibly trumped-up) charge, he gave the letter to a sheriff’s deputy and asked
him to deliver it to the attorney, and the deputy instead just tore it up and
threw it away, so Mary got stuck with a court-appointed counsel and there was
reasonable grounds for a reversal on appeal on the ground that she was denied
the counsel of her choice.
Eventually Larsen presents his side of the case and
demonstrates what happened by bringing in an identical model of gun, taking out
the clip, and then firing it out the window while the original judge and
prosecutor are meeting with him (being sure to aim at the ground so the bullet
still in the gun will land without hurting anyone) — and the judge is
sufficiently moved to order a new trial, though frankly I would rather have
seen Mary Morales’ conviction downgraded to manslaughter and her sentence commuted
to time served. The Court of Last Resort
— founded by defense attorney turned successful mystery writer Erle Stanley
Gardner, whose reputation rests mainly on his series of stories featuring
super-defense attorney Perry Mason — anticipates the Innocence Project, though
in some ways it’s even more remarkable since they functioned before the
availability of DNA evidence and their investigator often had to dredge up the
records of cases from two decades earlier, with all the problems attendant
thereto, like the deaths of key witnesses and the loss of physical evidence.
It’s a real pity the show only lasted one season — some of the stories have
been quite compelling dramas as well as true incidents — and even more of a
pity that a modern-day version probably wouldn’t last much longer in this
hard-line, lock-’em-up, “tough on crime” age. — 9/30/11
