The Case of the Howling Dog (Warner Bros., Vitaphone Corporation, 1934)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, April 18) I watched a quite good 1934 film on Turner Classic Movies: The Case of the Howling Dog, the first film featuring Erle Stanley Gardner’s super-attorney Perry Mason. Gardner had created the Mason character only a year earlier, in 1933, with The Case of the Velvet Claws (the title comes from a self-published essay written by an anti-feminist woman), and he objected strenuously to Warner Bros.’s decision to cast gentlemanly actor Warren William as Mason. The film opens with a haunting shot of the allegedly howling dog and then cuts to a shot of Mason’s offices, which in this version take up at least two floors. We know that because not only do we see two rows of office windows painted with “Perry Mason, Attorney-at-Law” legible from outside, but when we pan into the building we see row upon row of individual offices, each one occupied by an attorney and his secretary (naturally, this being 1934, all the attorneys are male and all the secretaries are female), as well as a telephone switchboard to handle the sheer volume of calls. It’s quite a different picture of Mason’s operation than the one we get on the famous 1955-1966 TV series, in which secretary Della Street and investigator Paul Drake appeared to be Mason’s entire staff. The titular howling dog is owned by Clinton Foley (Russell Hicks), and the neighbor who’s complaining about it is Arthur Cartwright (Gordon Wescott). Arthur pays Mason $10,000 as a retainer and writes a holographic will leaving everything to Foley’s wife Bessie (Mary Astor) – or is she Foley’s wife? It seems she may be legally married to Arthur instead; there are some conflicting stories about how Cartwright’s legal wife Evelyn (whom we never see) may or may not have run off with Foley, or Bessie with Cartwright, while the two couples were living near each other in Santa Monica years before. Mason takes Cartwright’s case and then Cartwright disappears mysteriously. Mason then decides that Bessie Foley is now his client because Cartwright willed her 90 percent of his fortune. Shortly thereafter Clinton Foley is killed in his home by someone who also shoots his dog, and the police and district attorney Claude Drumm (Grant Mitchell, who seems a much more able prosecutor than William Talman’s Hamilton Burger on the Perry Mason TV show!) indict Bessie for the murder.

Eventually it turns out that there were actually two identical-looking dogs, one which howled and one which didn’t (which explains the contradictory testimony on whether the dog howled or not), and Foley swapped one out for the other at the local pound. Mason agrees to represent Bessie Foley at her trial, and he strongly hints that Clayton Foley’s maid, Lucy Benton (Dorothy Tree), killed both Clayton and the dog because she was in unrequited love with Clayton and was jealous of Bessie. Mason’s investigators visit Benton’s home in search of pages from her diary to establish that she wrote the telegram Bessie allegedly sent to her husband stating that she was running off with Arthur Cartwright. They pose as reporters offering to purchase the diary for publication but, on Mason’s orders, tear out the pages for June 21 of that year and bring them to Mason’s office. Mason determines that Benton forged the telegram to Clinton Foley by using her left hand to write it, since she’s ambidextrous and can write equally well with either arm. This certainly makes it seem like Benton is the murderer, and on the basis of that evidence Mason is able to get Bessie Foley acquitted, but later in the film’s tag scene Mason recovers the original dog from the pound. When Bessie comes to Mason’s office the dog greets her warmly without making any hostile growls or other gestures. Thus Mason deduces that she did indeed kill Clinton Foley, though it’s excusable as self-defense because Foley killed both Arthur Cartwright and his wife Evelyn and had his sights set on her, too. One bit of evidence that led Mason to this conclusion was that Clinton Foley was renovating his garage to accommodate three cars even though he doesn’t need that extra space. Mason arranges for the trial to be moved to Clinton’s living room, where the sounds of jackhammers cleaning up the concrete floors make it impossible to understand much of anything being said there. Mason succeeds in dramatizing this by having the last session of the trial moved to Clinton’s home, where the jackhammers mostly drown out the proceedings. It turns out that Clinton Foley murdered both Arthur and Evelyn Cartwright out of jealousy and buried them under the concrete being laid for his new garage addition. So Bessie Foley really did kill her husband after all, as is revealed in a tag scene in which Mason explains that he got the original dog, “Prince,” by buying him from the pound, and it didn’t bark or growl when it approached her as the replacement dog did on the night of the murder. But since she’s already been acquitted by a jury, she can’t be tried for Clinton’s murder, and Mason decides that since she acted in self-defense and Clinton was a psychopathic monster anyway, he’s O.K. with the outcome (though one wonders what he’d do if the police and prosecutors went after the innocent Lucy Benton and indicted her).

Incidentally The Case of the Howling Dog was remade as an episode of the Perry Mason TV series with Raymond Burr, only in the TV version the ending was rewritten so the housekeeper was the killer after all and that bizarre final twist was deleted. William K. Everson in his book The Detective in Film called The Case of the Howling Dog a sort of dry run for Mary Astor’s role in the 1941 The Maltese Falcon, which also cast her as a murderess (albeit a far less sympathetic one!) – and the scene involving a defaced diary had an eerie parallel two years later in Astor’s own life, in which her husband accused her of having an affair with playwright George S. Kaufman. Astor’s husband’s attorneys subpoenaed her diary, but when it came into evidence the judge in her divorce case ruled it inadmissible because some pages had been torn out. Turner Classic Movies host Ben Mankiewicz gave a different explanation for how Raymond Burr got to play Perry Mason on TV than the one I’d read before in an old TV Guide article. TV Guide claimed that CBS was considering three actors for the role and left the final decision to Erle Stanley Gardner, who chose Burr. It didn’t name who the other two were, but Mankiewicz’s version of the tale was that Fred MacMurray was set to play Mason on TV and Burr was up for the role of his nemesis, prosecutor Hamilton Burger. But Burr asked to read for Mason as well, and Gardner saw his reading and insisted that Burr be cast as Mason. Gardner had always imagined Mason as a roughneck type, which was why he hadn’t cared for the Warner Bros. films (four of which starred Warren William and one each used Ricardo Cortez and Donald Woods as Mason – which had me thinking that, since William and Cortez played both Perry Mason and Sam Spade, it’s a pity Warners didn’t cast the third and by far best-known Spade, Humphrey Bogart, as Mason in their last film with the character, especially after Bogart did so well as a Thomas Dewey-esque prosecutor in the 1936 film Marked Woman – and Burr likewise had played a prosecutor in the 1951 film A Place in the Sun four years before his debut as Mason) and he loved the TV series with Burr, Barbara Hale, William Hopper and William Talman.