Grimossfer Clever and entertaining enough to recommend even to members of the 1%

Joanna Mccarty Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

Janae Milner Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

Bessie Smyth Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

csteidler An Australian bishop visits Perry Mason with an unusual challenge: Meet the people involved in a years-old manslaughter case, investigate the facts—and then try and find the bishop when it's time to go to court.Intrigued, Mason looks into the case, and the plot thickens when a rich old man is shot in his car on a dark night by a woman in a white raincoat. Who did it? Was the granddaughter involved? And which granddaughter—the real heir or the fake?A solid cast manages fairly well with a script that's passable but not great. Donald Woods is quite good as Perry-Mason-with-a-mustache; Ann Dvorak is a rather restrained Della Street; Joseph Crehan is hard-boiled, loyal Paul Drake. Tom Kennedy is also on the team as hotel detective Magooney—part comic relief, part assistant investigator.It's fast-paced and very smooth, but somehow the picture doesn't have the spark of the best of these movies. It's entertaining—but a little bland. For example, this exchange between Perry and Della:"Della, I cannot tell a lie. I got away from Ida's apartment this morning with the law so close it was breathing down my neck." "Chief, if you don't stop these crazy stunts...." I guess that's okay dialog—but it ain't great.A neat courtroom montage does make for a neat climactic segment. And the cast of pros is certainly easy to watch. Maybe it's not the best of its series, but it would be sort of silly to complain.

tedg We had two great evolutionary paths in the 30s. One was an amazing diversity of invention to settle some basic narrative devices that have since served us well as the basic vocabulary of cinema. The other, parallel path was the pulp detective novel, a master of which was Gardner.The traditional, Holmes form is that you are linked to the detective. You discover what he does. Christie followed this form, but it is difficult to render in film. Gardner may be the first case — since common — of the novel adopting cinematic form. His formula does seem friendly to film: we see events that Mason does not, often before he gets seriously engaged. These events give us a false impression of what happened, so we as viewers start out with a deficit.Then we have the detection; Mason and company are detectives in act two. The third act is always a courtroom, which is why our detective has to be a lawyer. Courtroom conventions have their own evolution in film, and this instance is limited to what in Christie's stories has to be a contrived assembly of the suspects.This format allows for more complicated mysteries than were usual in film. My own preference for 30's detection is Philo Vance because the formula was not so strict. But this is a good one in terms of allowing complexity and surprise. We have that here in this solid instance.One of the decisions in defining the characters is how intimate to make the relationship between alpha male Mason and his pretty and competent secretary. Why this matters has to do, as Mason would say, with motive. We like the guy. He is smart, as smart as other detectives, but why he does what he does…In some renderings of the Mason format, he just likes to win. He has his own Lestrade who he likes humiliating. Justice is incidental, and truth merely a tactic. He just like to strut.In other renderings, he does what he does because he loves his team, his closest friend Drake and his lover Della. Both are profoundly loyal and true. He struts for her and we imagine passion after the obligatory Italian restaurant scene.Here, a delicate balance between the two is maintained.

GManfred While the picture was running I kept wondering why, every time the Hamilton Burger character appeared on screen, he was called Mr. Burger (soft G). It may be the only thing that sets "The Case Of The Stuttering Bishop" apart from the rest of the series. Warner Bros. kept changing the Perry Mason character, and here they settled on the lacklustre Donald Woods, perhaps the weakest of the group. In my opinion, they missed the boat with Ricardo Cortez, who played the role only once and was the best Mason.In this entry they may have the cleverest story of the series, which defies you to guess the murderer, coupled with the most uninteresting cast they could have assembled. They also kept changing Paul Drake, here played by Joseph Crehan, the best of the bunch but older and shorter than the rest of the players. Ann Dvorak, an excellent but unattractive actress, plays Della Street in a wasted role.In good 'B' mysteries time is of the essence, and this one was no different. A great deal of plot was squashed into 70 minutes, and the viewer is compelled to pay attention - no time for fridge visits with this one. In fact, I had to run it back once or twice during the climax to catch myself up with the fast-unfolding solution. This was a good, solid mystery, and I could almost overlook the crummy cast.

Henry Kujawa You can often tell when a studio is losing interest in a film series when they start replacing the entire cast. In this instance, they did it twice in 2 films-- and by the time of THE CASE OF THE STUTTERING BISHOP, we'd not only seen 3 Perry Masons in 6 films, but 5 different Della Streets! Donald Woods does his 2nd PM film, having played one of the suspects in ...THE CURIOUS BRIDE, while William Clemens directs his 2nd PM film, having already done the relatively sober ...VELVET CLAWS. Clemens would go onto quite a few series films, including a Torchy Blane, 4 Nancy Drews, a Dead Ends Kids, a Philo Vance, and 3 Falcons. There's nothing especially flashy or stylish about this film, and it starts out very confusing, but it is a solid mystery film, and gets better as it goes.For example, you have the boastful house detective who Perry winds up hiring part-time, and as the story goes on he proves to be genuinely helpful, rather than "merely" comic relief. It seems the murder takes forever to happen in this one, but once it does, the story FINALLY kicks into gear, and the courtroom sequence at the end is probably the BEST in all 6 films. Unlike when Perry rattled off confusing info nobody but HE knew in the previous installment, the quick stream of witness testimonies actually help to pull all the threads of the story together neatly. And at last, there's the patented "blurted out confession" seen in so many PM stories-- only in this case, NOT from the person being grilled on the stand.It's been said that sometimes casting actors very accurate to novels can lead to dull films. Some of the most popular versions of characters are quite unlike their literary sources-- good examples being Sean Connery's JAMES BOND and Stacy Keach's MIKE HAMMER. In this case, I find myself wishing Warren William had done more films like this one-- his version of Perry might not be thought of as so much of a joke then.