The Case of the Curious Bride

Having handed the district attorney another defeat, Perry Mason plans a holiday in China, until Rhoda, an old flame, meets him in a restaurant. Her husband Moxley, thought dead for four years, is alive and demanding money now that she has married into wealth. Then Moxley’s body is found and the police arrest her. Michael Curtiz directed this, the second of four films with Warren William as Perry Mason; Erle Stanley Gardner’s lawyer detective is played not as a solemn man but as a fast, joking one. What the film is most remembered for now is something else: it was the first American picture of Errol Flynn, newly arrived in Hollywood from Australia by way of England, who appears first as a corpse in silhouette and then in a short flashback at the end. Curtiz made Captain Blood with him the same year.