Captivating movie !

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

. . . as it dispenses with the tedious courtroom climax, which was already a hackneyed film convention by the mid-1930s. But THE CASE OF THE CURIOUS BRIDE introduces racist Asian and Native American stereotyping, shows Mr. Mason to be just as cavalier when his former lover's neck is on the line as he had been with a stranger chick on the hot seat in THE CASE OF THE HOWLING DOG, and reduces Errol Flynn's role to about four seconds of saying nothing while giving up the ghost (a performance that could have been phoned in by any nameless extra on Warner's lot). Add to that a complicated murder scene as crowded as Union Station due to happenstance on top of odd congruence compounded by simultaneous coincidences, and this tale seems stuffed tighter with artificial contrivance than a goose with Foie Gras. THE CASE OF THE CURIOUS BRIDE is not even aptly titled, as the bride obviously did not have a curious bone in her body. What newlywed would allow her groom to die by sudden illness and get buried in a closed casket, without a look-see by herself or anyone she knew?! And what serial bigamist goes to the trouble of wedding a couple hundred poor chicks, with a plan that ONE of them can be blackmailed five or ten years later when she remarries a billionaire?! These sort of con artists crave instant gratification, targeting the Rich and Stupid, and breaking their banks before tying any wedding knots!

A bland script makes THE CASE OF THE CURIOUS BRIDE more of a curiosity rather than a good Perry Mason film. WARREN WILLIAM is the famous sleuth and CLAIRE DODD is a blond Della Street, the secretary always one step ahead of her boss. This time the action centers on the mysterious death of a man called Gregory Moxley (ERROL FLYNN in what amounts to a bit role). He is talked about but not seen until the last few minutes when the mystery is wrapped up.MARGARET LINDSAY is the damsel in distress who calls upon Mason to help solve the mystery.What makes this curious is why they didn't write the Moxley role into the script, given that they had Flynn under contract and would soon be grooming him for stardom. He makes his debut as a corpse lying on the floor beneath a sheet! DONALD WOODS has the leading supporting role, but the story is never involving enough to maintain suspense. ALLEN JENKINS overplays his Paul Drake role.Surprisingly, Michael Curtiz was the man behind the camera--but the script is the real problem.

(There are Spoilers) After making headlines by getting an hatchet murderer off in the courtroom defense attorney Perry Mason, Warren Williams,is planning to sail off to China and check out some new recipes to add this his collection of exotic Chinese foods for him to cook up. It's at Luigi's Restaurant on San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf that Perrys traveling plans suffer a major setback when he runs into an old flame of his Rhoda Montaine, Margaret Lindsey.Rhoda is very upset in the fact that her late husband is very much alive and blackmailing her in threatening her marriage to multi-millionaire C. Philip Montaine, Charles Richman, son Carl, Donald Woods,to be annulled. It in fact turns out that Rhoda's late husband Gregory Moxly, Errol Flynn, is indeed very much alive when he's reported spotted on a San Francisco street. Moxly's coffin is exhumed and it's found that he had a wooden Indian replace him in the pine box. Perry getting a telegram, with the senders name mysterious ripped off, to where Moxly could be found finds him dead with a stab wound in his back and his client Rhoda, who's keys were found at the scene, as the prime suspect in his murder.In an effort to save Rhoda from being both indited and convicted in her now late-late husbands murder Perry has her turn herself over to the custody of the local newspaper "The Enquirer" until he can get all the fact together in the case. Rhoda not listening to Parry in keeping absolutely quite to the D.A and police is later tricked by the District Attorney Stacey, Henry Kolker, into signing a statement that she was at the scene of her husbands murder thinking that it will help her case but in effect put her one step away from being convicted.Perry Mason now having his hands full uses all his skills as a defense attorney as well as private investigator to get to the bottom of Moxly's murder. Perry finds out that Moxly has been pulling this sort of underhanded stunt, faking his death and later blackmailing them, for years to some half dozen women that he married. Moxly married women whom he tricked into thinking that he later died and then when they remarried a rich new husband he suddenly popped up blackmailing them into not revealing himself as their legal husband thus keeping their marriage as well as husbands money from being legal!The ending is a bit of a letdown****SPOILERS**** in the fact that Moxly's death was not really a murder with almost everyone in the cast, who's suspected of killing him, at the scene of his demise. This all makes Perry a bit reluctantly take on the person who was there with Moxly at the time of his accidental death as a client. Instead of cooking his signature classic seafood dish "Crab A'la Bordeaux" and ignoring Rhoda back at Luigi's Perry has not only postponed his trip to China but is now committed to stay in San Francisco for at least another year in the new criminal case he unwittingly picked up there at the restaurant. P.S There's also the fact that by the time the case that Perry is to take on is over a trip to China wouldn't be such a great idea in the first place with the China/Japanese war about to break out with the Marco Polo Bridge incident in July 1937.

This is the only Warren William Perry Mason movie I've seen so far, and I thought it was a lot of fun! It gallops along at a breakneck pace, partly thanks to its super-kinetic (and rather disorienting) editing. William and Dodd bring a really delicious tongue-in-cheek camaraderie to the roles of Perry and Della, while Mayo Methot (was she already married to Bogart?)has a lot of fun with the small part of Florabelle. The coroner is not to be missed, by the way!It is fascinating to see what a different interpretation of the character of Perry Mason William gives; he seems to be drawing as much on his previous performance as Philo Vance as on anything in the books. Naturally, this makes him nothing at all like Raymond Burr's Mason. (And he's in San Francisco, by the way, not Los Angeles.) I certainly missed the gravitas and moral authority that Burr gave the part, but William is hilarious and highly professional, pulling off a performance not unlike that of a drunken tightrope walker working without a net with aplomb and smooth daring-do.The murder (of Errol Flynn, no less!) is incidental.