The heady, bewitching pleasures of a film noir Perry Mason

Intoxicating and compulsive, Perry Mason is a heady crime drama that fully leans into its film noir seductions.

Perry Mason returns for its second season.

Perry Mason is looking for justice.

The gumshoe-turned-lawyer wants to believe in something better, he wants to believe that the deserving will be made good, and the corrupt will be punished.

It’s not an optimism he sings from the rafters, but it’s there. Otherwise, he wouldn’t even be trying. It’s true of every soul, everyone who declares themselves a pessimist or nihilistic but is secretly holding out for a better world.

But is there justice to be found in 1930s Los Angeles? That venal city of crime, self-interest and a near-complete disregard for anyone’s humanity. People are disposable. The only things that matter here are power and money.

Even the city’s district attorney, the lawman elected to uphold righteous ideals, says without a hint of equivocation, “There is no true justice, only the illusion of justice”.

The HBO series returns for its second season after almost three years away and the heady evocations of time and place is like an intoxicating, bewitching brew.

A heady film-noir crime drama. Picture: HBO

It’s like being thrust into a sweaty speak-easy where pleasures are easy to come by, but just under the grimy surface is a shady core of immorality. Perry Mason is almost distressingly successful at conjuring all that indecency and more.

You might even need to take a shower afterwards.

If you didn’t catch the first season, the series is an origin story of Erle Stanley Gardner’s iconic character, most famously from the 1950s and 1960s legal drama starring Raymond Burr.

In this prequel, Mason (the marvellous Matthew Rhys) is a war veteran trying to eke out a living as a private dick before he found himself defending a young woman accused of killing her baby. That case ran the whole of the first season, which ended with Mason setting up his own law firm with the aid of Della Street (Juliet Rylance), the secretary to his old mentor, and Paul Drake (Chris Chalk), a former cop.

In the new episodes, Mason has given up criminal defence work, still haunted by the traumas and emotional burden of his first case. Instead, he’s only taking on civil cases, including acting for a supermarket owner (Sean Astin) who’s suing a former employee.

But even here, there is no reprieve from the ugliness of people driven only by greed and by winning.

When two young Mexican men are arrested by the police for the murder of a prominent Los Angeleno – no saint, for sure – Mason is compelled back in that gritty world, which, of course, he never left.

Legal eagle Perry Mason. Picture: HBO

Perry Mason plays at the intersection of the moneyed privileged in the city and the marginalised, Depression-hit communities they exploit. The racism, sexism and classism of the city has an unbearable stench, made worse by the metallic smell of all that spilt blood.

This new instalment leans fully into the film noir aesthetic it merely teased three years ago, contrasting saturated daylight scenes with the moody shadows of the night. What’s lurking at the edges can be as literal as it is metaphorical. Everyone has secrets and everyone is vulnerable.

Noir aficionados will soak up the sultry jazz, femme fatales and institutional rot, and lovers of a legal drama will appreciate the more time spent in the courtroom.

But, above all, Perry Mason will captivate with its evocative world-building of a thoroughly imperfect time and place, and those still optimistic and foolhardy enough to fight for justice.

Perry Mason is streaming now on Foxtel On Demand and Binge, with new episodes available on Tuesdays

*Foxtel and Binge are majority owned by News Corp, publisher of this website