THE CASE OF THE HOWLING DOG (1934)

Arthur Cartwright is angry at his neighbors the Foleys over the incessant howling of their German shepherd. He goes to attorney Perry Mason (Warren William), not to complain about the dog, but to draw up a new will because he thinks the howling dog is an omen of death. Oddly, though Cartwright is married, he wants to leave everything to Evelyn Foley, the wife of his neighbor, whom he says is not actually Foley's wife. Mason goes to investigate and can't find evidence that the dog was howling—the only other witness is Foley's nearly deaf maid. But he notes that Foley is having a new garage built on his property, a detail that may become important later. Next, Mason is told that Cartwright has run off with Evelyn, and that Evelyn was actually Cartwright's wife all along. Then Bessie Foley, Foley's real wife arrives. She is seen arriving at Foley's house; she argues with Foley, the dog attacks her, and it appears that she shoots and kills both the dog and Foley, though our view of the incident is not clear. And, as if things hadn't already been complicated, they get even more so from here as Mason, despite the evidence, decides to take Bessie on as a client, and tries to get to the bottom of the Cartwright/Foley tangle.

This is the first of six Perry Mason movies made by Warner Bros. in the 1930s. I've reviewed a few others in the past including The Case of the Stuttering Bishop and The Case of the Curious Bride, so I won't rehash the background of the movies and the TV show. Suffice to say that William plays him as suave and stylish, and somewhat surprisingly, with a loose sense of morality, especially in terms of the outcome of the case, an ending that I'm surprised made it past the Code censors (the Code had become the "law," so to speak, just a couple of months before this movie was released). Helen Trenholme, who only made two movies, is fine as his attractive secretary Della Street who gets to play investigator briefly. Mary Astor is OK if a bit bland as Bessie, a relatively small but important part; she could have used a bit of the jolt she gives Bridget O'Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon. Grant Mitchell is the D.A., Gordon Westcott is Cartwright, and Dorothy Tree is a character named Lucy Benton who is Foley's maid, or is she? It’s fun to see Allen Jenkins with a mustache (which completely changes his look) as a cop, pictured at left with William. Mason's firm is depicted in the opening scene as a huge and apparently wildly successful operation with a dozen or more lawyers and investigators working for him, and Mason himself has a big and well appointed office. I have to admit that the plot got a bit too complex for me, and at the end I wasn't 100% sure of what happened, but nevertheless it was a satisfying ending. [TCM]