The Case of the Missing Button
- Episode aired Sep 24, 1964
- 52m
IMDb RATING
7.6/10
285
YOUR RATING
Dirk Blake is in a tug of war with his wife over their daughter Button. He feels she is an unfit mother. He asked Vince Rome to obtain info to be used to fight his wife. Dirk is charged with... Read allDirk Blake is in a tug of war with his wife over their daughter Button. He feels she is an unfit mother. He asked Vince Rome to obtain info to be used to fight his wife. Dirk is charged with murdering Vince after they are seen fighting.Dirk Blake is in a tug of war with his wife over their daughter Button. He feels she is an unfit mother. He asked Vince Rome to obtain info to be used to fight his wife. Dirk is charged with murdering Vince after they are seen fighting.
Ray Collins
- Lt. Tragg
- (credit only)
- Director
- Writers
- All cast & crew
- Production, box office & more at IMDbPro
Storyline
Did you know
- TriviaNearly 20 years later, Julie Adams and Ed Nelson again played a married couple at odds when they were cast members of the CBS-TV soap opera, Capitol (1982). Adams played the deceitful agoraphobic, Paula Denning, and Nelson played her husband, Senator Mark Denning. Further connection to "Perry Mason" is that Senator Denning's long-time unrequited love was Clarissa McCandless, played by five-time Perry Mason guest cast member Constance Towers.
- GoofsIn the scene where Perry and Paul row away from the boat where Button is, it can be seen that a stand-in has taken the place of Raymond Burr, and that the stand-in's build is quite a bit lighter than Burr's.
- Quotes
[last lines]
Perry Mason: Hey, our Button's taking us to dinner.
Featured review
The case of Richard Donners lost marbles
I had been waiting for this review to appear so I could edit it somewhat. I wanted to mention how this show had changed from season one to season nine. The decade from 1957 to 1966 included a lot of changes especially in the way crime stories had moved out of the 50s film noir toward the 60s more contemporary social issues. But even during this major upheaval, it appeared that the writers for Perry Mason were struggling to find relevant stories for the early to late 60s. Each subsequent season of Perry Mason showed new styles of cars, new styles of clothing, even new styles of music. Season eight has several very good episodes, this being one of them, but you will notice that the writing style is changing even from the first episode here to the last episode of season nine. Also, we start noticing that sometimes the episodes are basically rebooted from earlier episodes of Perry Mason from seasons one and two. in some cases the reboots are improvements, in other cases, they didn't work out so well. but this episode is an original and it has a very sinister subplot going on underneath all of the other MacGuffins.
This is a fine Perry Mason episode, complete with a gangster, a hitman, kidnappers, and other unsavory types: with hidden psychological thriller built-in.
What appears to be a battle over a child named "Button" by Julie Adams (as Janice Blake) and Ed Nelson (as Dirk "Jirk" Blake), has other aspects, there is an underworld connection, there is Mike Mazurki, and there is also Stanley Adams sans Tribbles (He left them at deep space station K7), playing the Hispanic host of a resort, very well I might add.
This is where I include a small TOME(tm) about Stanley Adams playing something other than the race he was born as: This was back when actors could play other races without a whole bunch of people yelling about it, although i feel it is actually preferable to assign racial parts to actors of the appropriate races-in the 60s I think it would be accurate to say that sometimes an actor of the proper ethnic persuasion was not available, and so there were many fine character actors like Stanley that could do these ethnic parts, to me it always represented the capacity and abilities of an actor that could play something other than what he was born as, and I think the Wachowski brothers/sisters turned this whole concept on its ear when they cast "Cloud Atlas" with a small group of actors playing different races, even different genders. This is why it does not bother me in the least that Stanley Adams represents a crooked Hispanic Host in this episode.
Otto Krueger, who at one time played a Sycophantic Nazi fifth columnist in Alfred Hitchcock's "Saboteur" is the judge in this hot mess, and he is coerced into making a poor decision about the temporary placement of the child named Button (Claire Wilcox).
But seething and writhing underneath these disparate plot lines is something very threatening: "Jirk" Blake's secretary "Naomi" (Lysa D'Anjou, who has very little information about her in IMDb) is getting more and more neurotic as the episode continues and none of us noticed this, not even Perry Mason.
Will Perry be able to stop something horrible from happening before the pressure cooker lid blows off and men with white coats show up to carry away a person as they start singing "they jiggle, they jiggle" and somebody is tragically hurt?
It is interesting to look at the shots where they have boats and docks, I wonder where this was filmed. I would swear some of these locations are San Diego.
Richard Donner directs this as Richard D Donner, this surprises me greatly as I never knew Donner as being a television director although he has directed several of my favorite movies and I even liked his "Timeline" from 2003. Actually that film appears to have been his last movie other than his fine Directors cut of Superman II. But this episode here, as an early work for this director, is very noticeable and very interesting.
This is a fine Perry Mason episode, complete with a gangster, a hitman, kidnappers, and other unsavory types: with hidden psychological thriller built-in.
What appears to be a battle over a child named "Button" by Julie Adams (as Janice Blake) and Ed Nelson (as Dirk "Jirk" Blake), has other aspects, there is an underworld connection, there is Mike Mazurki, and there is also Stanley Adams sans Tribbles (He left them at deep space station K7), playing the Hispanic host of a resort, very well I might add.
This is where I include a small TOME(tm) about Stanley Adams playing something other than the race he was born as: This was back when actors could play other races without a whole bunch of people yelling about it, although i feel it is actually preferable to assign racial parts to actors of the appropriate races-in the 60s I think it would be accurate to say that sometimes an actor of the proper ethnic persuasion was not available, and so there were many fine character actors like Stanley that could do these ethnic parts, to me it always represented the capacity and abilities of an actor that could play something other than what he was born as, and I think the Wachowski brothers/sisters turned this whole concept on its ear when they cast "Cloud Atlas" with a small group of actors playing different races, even different genders. This is why it does not bother me in the least that Stanley Adams represents a crooked Hispanic Host in this episode.
Otto Krueger, who at one time played a Sycophantic Nazi fifth columnist in Alfred Hitchcock's "Saboteur" is the judge in this hot mess, and he is coerced into making a poor decision about the temporary placement of the child named Button (Claire Wilcox).
But seething and writhing underneath these disparate plot lines is something very threatening: "Jirk" Blake's secretary "Naomi" (Lysa D'Anjou, who has very little information about her in IMDb) is getting more and more neurotic as the episode continues and none of us noticed this, not even Perry Mason.
Will Perry be able to stop something horrible from happening before the pressure cooker lid blows off and men with white coats show up to carry away a person as they start singing "they jiggle, they jiggle" and somebody is tragically hurt?
It is interesting to look at the shots where they have boats and docks, I wonder where this was filmed. I would swear some of these locations are San Diego.
Richard Donner directs this as Richard D Donner, this surprises me greatly as I never knew Donner as being a television director although he has directed several of my favorite movies and I even liked his "Timeline" from 2003. Actually that film appears to have been his last movie other than his fine Directors cut of Superman II. But this episode here, as an early work for this director, is very noticeable and very interesting.
helpful•104
- XweAponX
- Sep 9, 2020
Details
- Runtime52 minutes
- Color
- Sound mix
- Aspect ratio
- 1.33 : 1
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