An Australian bishop visits Perry Mason with an unusual challenge: Meet the people involved in a years-old manslaughter case, investigate the facts—and then try and find the bishop when it's time to go to court.Intrigued, Mason looks into the case, and the plot thickens when a rich old man is shot in his car on a dark night by a woman in a white raincoat. Who did it? Was the granddaughter involved? And which granddaughter—the real heir or the fake?A solid cast manages fairly well with a script that's passable but not great. Donald Woods is quite good as Perry-Mason-with-a-mustache; Ann Dvorak is a rather restrained Della Street; Joseph Crehan is hard-boiled, loyal Paul Drake. Tom Kennedy is also on the team as hotel detective Magooney—part comic relief, part assistant investigator.It's fast-paced and very smooth, but somehow the picture doesn't have the spark of the best of these movies. It's entertaining—but a little bland. For example, this exchange between Perry and Della:"Della, I cannot tell a lie. I got away from Ida's apartment this morning with the law so close it was breathing down my neck." "Chief, if you don't stop these crazy stunts...." I guess that's okay dialog—but it ain't great.A neat courtroom montage does make for a neat climactic segment. And the cast of pros is certainly easy to watch. Maybe it's not the best of its series, but it would be sort of silly to complain.

. . . Perry Mason's movie career in the 1930s, as its hard-to-follow convoluted plot bears no scrutiny whatsoever. A synopsis of this story might read something like this: Two Australian moms with look-alike daughters the same age run across each other in Salt Lake City, and decide to live together. When Mom A lets slip that her daughter's estranged grandpa is an L.A. millionaire, Mom B immediately hires a detective agency to plant HER OWN DAUGHTER in the Rich Guy's house as a second grandchild. Since this impostor's kind of cute, Gramps instantly announces plans to give 75% of his grandson's inheritance to the stranger girl. Mom A's wedding minister arrives from another continent to inform Mom A of this nefarious plot. Mom A goes to meet her adopted-out grown daughter and her estranged father-in-law, not realizing that Mom B has stolen her registered gun in order to off the Rich Guy before her own daughter is exposed as an impostor. Mom B shoots the millionaire four times, but that's okay, since the Real Killer is one of the Private Eyes with whom she's in cahoots. He shoves the Death Car into the Bay, drowning Mr. Money Bags before he can bleed to death from Mom B's bullets. At best, THE CASE OF THE STUTTERING BISHOP is an argument against gun registration.

I missed the beginning of this movie. I enjoyed Perry Mason with Raymond Burr while growing up, so I was fan of enchanted to stumble upon this movie, which I also learned is part of a series that I will now look for. I watched this on TCM. Missing the beginning scenes might be why I was left confused & missed the point of the title. One really needs to pay close attention or you'll not be able to follow it very well & I sure missed something as I was left wondering where the real Janice was - or did the fake Janice also turn out to be the real one?But one thing I didn't miss was was a production goof in which the courtroom chairs & defendant's table are suddenly empty in the midst of Mason's cross of Brownings grandson! As the camera pans back & forth from Perry to the grandson, those chairs & table are filled with people, only to become empty, then fill up again! And that scene lasts for several seconds. Quite funny!

**SPOILER*** Despite the excellent portrayal of Perry Mason by Donald Woods, considered to be the closest to the actual Perry Mason character of the Earl Stanley Gardner books, the overly complicated storyline sinks the movie before it even leaves the harbor.Perry is contacted by this sputtering Bishop from Sidney Australia Bishop Mallory,Edward McWead about an event that happened some twenty years ago. This Bishop tells an amused Perry Mason, since when does a Bishop stutter, that he can prove that the heir to the Philip Brownley, Gordon Oliver, fortune his granddaughter Janice, Ann Nagel,is an impostor and the real Janice is actually the daughter of a woman who gave her up to him for adoption back in 1915.After getting involved in a DWI, one of the first on record, where a man was killed Ida Gilbert, Mira McKinney,was kicked out of the Brownley mansion despite her being married to Philip Brownley's son. Alone and destitute with an infant, young Brownley's, daughter Janice the girl was later given, by the stuttering Bishop Mallory's church, to the Seaton family in Salt Lake city to raise as their own. Now some twenty years later this impostor, as Bishop Mallory calls her, Janice Alma Brownley is in line to getting the old man's, who doesn't have that long to go, money.Murder deception as well as a number of surprises, in who did what to whom and why, keeps you as well as Perry Mason in a state of confusion during the entire movie. Brownley is told to go to the city docks by the real Jancie's, his granddaughter, mother Ida Gilbert where she'll show him a watch belonging to his son proving that her, not the fake Janice, daughter is in fact his biological offspring. Brownley ends up both shot with his car, with him in it, dumped down at the bottom of the bay with Ida Gilbert, wearing a light colored raincoat, being seen running from the murder scene.The movie then just goes overboard in trying to fit all the clues together where the parade of murder suspects, real or imagined, in Brownleys death never seems to end. In fact when the film is finally over your still not quite sure what exactly happened since even Perry Mason is completely side-whacked in the courtroom during his famous cross-examination scene of the murder, of Old Man Brownley, suspect. ***SPOILER ALERT***Just when you, and Perry, think the the "killer" is going to break down and admit his, or her, guilt someone completely out of the blue in the audience bursts out and admits to Brownley's murder!If that, the big and emotional outburst by the so called murderer, isn't enough to get you to go outside to the nearest bar and get yourself a stiff drink it turns out the the person who just admitted murdering Brownley didn't in fact murder him at all! In pops Bishop Mallory, with his head bandaged up and not stuttering anymore, who was supposed to be back in his native Australia after he was worked over by two hired hoods, who were to keep him from exposing the fake Janice Brownley, in his hotel room. The what seems like omnipresent Bishop Mallory also turns out to be an eye witness to who actually killed Old Man Brownley; the person who ran Mallory down on the docks with Brownley's car and left him for dead. On top of all that Brownleys killer just happens to be in the courtroom where he can easily be arrested and later booked for his crimes! Talk about surprise endings!