The series "Perry Mason" began airing on HBO on June 22, and is based on the stories of Eric Stanley Gardner, whose main character is a defense attorney and investigator, who was extremely popular on American television in the sixties. "Perry Mason" is now a noir story about a detective with war trauma, who solves crimes during the Great Depression in America.
"No body, no crime", the detectives would say, but if there was no crime we would be deprived of the most popular film and television genres. Today, detective films and court dramas dominate the production of streaming services and are among the most watched content. Long before "Columbus" and the mustachioed Belgian detective "Poirot", Perry Mason was the main character of the first one-hour television series produced in Hollywood. The series aired once a week, and the defense investigator was played by Raymond Burr.
Aired on CBS from 1957 to 1966, the series laid the foundations of the courtroom drama and detective series and is the reason why audiences have been wanting to explore mysterious crimes and the dark secrets of the human psyche from their armchairs for decades. Intriguing stories full of twists and turns were written by Eric Stanley Gardner, who was a lawyer by profession, so the cases were faithfully depicted, and the plot followed court proceedings precisely.
In the new HBO version, Perry Mason (Matthew Rhys) lives in a kind of paralysis and alienation from the rest of the world, until he is entrusted with a case that will change his life. He enters the gray area of justice and chooses unusual methods to prove that his accused client is not guilty, mainly of the murder he is charged with. In the XNUMXs in America, the police are drowning in corruption and violence, and Perry is an investigator and works for a lawyer. He is a man with the trauma of the First World War, trying to find justice in a corrupt and confused value system.
And while the rest of America is suffocating in the Great Depression, in 1931 Los Angeles is in euphoria over the organization of the Olympic Games and the expansion of the film industry. One child abduction will go wrong, and the case will be entrusted to Perry, whose search for the truth will also be the path to his own redemption.
During the period of the Great Depression that reigned in American society after the stock market crash of 1929, the Hollywood industry flourished with grandiose titles, dominated by monsters such as King Kong, Dracula and Frankenstein on the one hand, and the romantic titles "The Wizard of Oz" and the unforgettable the hit "Gone with the Wind" on the other hand. The social moment in America during those years is best described by Chaplin's film "Modern Times" (1936), in which an unemployed worker seeks work in an automated everyday life, which is increasingly being taken over by machines.
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