Reviews & Ratings for
"Perry Mason" The Case of the Latent Lover (1964)

4 out of 4 people found the following review useful:

An awkward recording leads to a murder charge

Author: kfo9494 from United States
6 December 2012

Eric Pollard works at a financial institution and is very well respected. But Eric has started acting odd after having dizzy spells. One afternoon he commandeers a taxicab by use of a gun and states that he is on his way to rob a bank. He also finds evidence that his wife, Sibyll, is having an affair with an unknown man and plans on leaving the country.

Sibyll gets a probation officer friend, Roy Galen, to get Eric off just on probation instead of spending time in prison. But just after the proceedings he accuses his wife of cheating on him with Roy Galen and then passes out.

Sibyll Pollard, by contract, takes over Eric's job while he is unable to work and that leads to money being taken from an investor with the signature of Sibyll as authority. When a private investigator photographs Sibyll and Roy in each other arms this leads most to believe they are the two going to fly out of the country together using the stolen money.

But when Roy returns to his office, he receives a phone call from Sibyll while she is being assaulted. He rushes over to the house but is knocked out. When police arrive they find Sibyll dead and arrest Roy for the murder. Perry is called in to defend Roy against an almost mound of suspicious evidence.

Nearly everyone has an alibi to there whereabouts during the phone call. It will be up to Perry to scramble through all the evidence to reveal the true murderer. And with the last two minutes of the show everything will be summed up in a nice little package.

1 out of 1 people found the following review useful:

That's the man! That's the man!

Author: sol1218 from brooklyn NY
6 December 2012

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

***SPOILERS*** This has a first in the Perry Mason, Raymond Burr, courtroom episodes with Parry actually being physically attacked by a person he's cross examining! It was that Perry had him so tied up in knots in exposing him as the murderer of the lovely and classy blond Sibyll Pollard, Marian McCargo, that he not only lost it but broke down and confessed his crime! As we soon found out Sybyll's nutty husband Eric Pollard, Llyod Bochner, was going through some kind of mid-life crisis in feeling that Sibyll was involved romantically with another man. As it soon turned out that suspected man Roy Galen, Jason Evers, was at scene of Sybill's murder and indited for it.

Perry a good friend of Roy takes on his case and starts connecting the dots to who murdered Sybill whom he's standing trail for. It turns out that there was a major embezzling scheme going on it the firm that Eric was working for that was about to break wide open. Eric going somewhat a bit crazy didn't help matters either. But his strange and bizarre antics soon lead to his wife, who was given control of his personal and business finances, being suspected in stealing $250,000.00 from the firm that he worked for!

***SPOILERS*** In Eric always suspecting Sybill of cheating on him lead to her unfortunate murder but the person who supposedly murdered her, Roy Galen, didn't turn out to be her lover! As if that all mattered to the person that murdered her. He just did it to cover his tracks in the embezzlement and murdered Sybill just to keep her from talking! But it was Perry Mason who got him to talk in finding out what an elaborate scheme he dreamed up to frame Roy Galen. That in his using state of the art electronics, back in the early 1960's, that wouldn't pass mustard or fool even a armature junior detective today in 2012.

0 out of 1 people found the following review useful:

No explanations given

Author: bkoganbing from Buffalo, New York
25 March 2013

This episode of Perry Mason was a dud as far as I'm concerned. One important plot element was unexplained and I could see the killer a mile away. Remember it can never be Raymond Burr's client.

And in this case the client is Jason Evers who is a probation officer and who Lloyd Bochner thinks is having an affair with his wife Marian McCargo. She's actually got a nice little racket going herself. After Bochner is convicted of trying to rob a bank and hijacking Richard Reeves cab to do it, he's adjudged incompetent and she given power of attorney. Which she then proceeds to use to loot her husband's brokerage company in which he is in partnership with Gilbert Green.

McCargo winds up dead and its Evers that winds up the Mason client. But of course Burr finds the right perpetrator. It's all a matter of impeaching the medical examiner's testimony and breaking an alibi for the real killer.

What happened to Bochner in how he was framed into that alleged robbery and enabling his wife to do what she did was never adequately explained. It is a big big flaw in this Mason episode.

Marian McCargo had several sons in real life and over 20 years later one of them William R. Moses wound up as Ken Malansky in the Perry Mason movies. Most of which were better than this episode.

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