Raymond Burr spent a decade as the heavy in other people's films before television made him the most dependable defence lawyer on the screen. He is best when he does least, and Rear Window is where he does least of all.
Fi1m perspective
The thing to notice about Raymond Burr is how little he moves. In Rear Window (1954) he is Lars Thorwald, the neighbour across the courtyard whom James Stewart cannot stop watching, and for most of the film we see him as Stewart does: at a distance, through glass, a big man in a small flat going about business we cannot hear. He does almost nothing, and we found him frightening for exactly that reason. Another actor would have offered a twitch or a sideways look to help us along. Burr offers his bulk and his patience and lets us do the worrying.
He had come to films in 1946 from theatre and radio, and he spent the next eleven years as the heavy, in noir above all; Rick Coyle in Raw Deal (1948) is the type. "I was just a fat heavy," he said later, a man in his twenties playing much older men, and the deep voice and the stillness did the ageing for him. The better of those parts let something sadder show through the menace. In A Place in the Sun (1951) George Stevens put him on the right side of the law as District Attorney R. Frank Marlowe, and he is louder than anything around him, in a film whose method is to keep quiet and let the camera look; the stretch he is in is the most conventional in the picture. It is also said to be the performance that helped get him Perry Mason.
Perry Mason ran from 1957 to 1966, 271 episodes, and it made him. He was stiff at first, too solemn, and then he settled, and once settled he stayed the same for nine years: the level stare, the low voice, the underplaying that turned theatrical when the courtroom required it. Barbara Hale, William Talman and William Hopper were there for every one of those episodes, and much of the pleasure is that none of the four ever changes. The formula was complained about, chiefly because Mason nearly always won. Nobody watched to find out whether he would.
Burr himself came to resent it. In 1991 he said the one thing he would not do over again was the show, or at least not for so many years, and it is easy to hear why: it fixed him in the public mind as the ideal defence attorney and left little room for anything else. Ironside (1967–1975) gave him a chief of detectives in a wheelchair, a part that asked him to carry a series while moving even less, and he did. He went back to Mason for 26 television films between 1985 and 1993, the year he died.
Start with Rear Window, where he shows what he could do with distance and silence. Then try an hour of Perry Mason, which is the same stillness in a courtroom. Save A Place in the Sun for Clift and Taylor; Burr is there, and you will hear him coming.
Biography
Raymond Burr was a Canadian actor known for his work in film and television. He appeared in numerous films in the 1940s and 1950s, often in supporting roles, including as Lars Thorwald in Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954), the district attorney in A Place in the Sun (1951), and Steve Martin in Godzilla, King of the Monsters! (1956).
Burr achieved major success on television as the defence lawyer Perry Mason in the CBS series that ran from 1957 to 1966, winning Emmy Awards for the role in 1959 and 1961. He later starred as the wheelchair-using detective Robert T. Ironside in the NBC series that ran from 1967 to 1975. He reprised the role of Perry Mason in a series of television films between 1985 and 1993.
