Raymond Burr and everybody thought I was out of my mind," Burr told Tom Shales of "The Washington Post". "But it wasn't the large sum of money. It was the fact that, first of all, I kind of liked 'Godzilla,' and where do you get the opportunity to play yourself 30 years later? So I said yes to both of them." He agreed to do the Mason movie if Barbara Hale returned to reprise her role as Della Street. Hale agreed, and when "Perry Mason Returns" aired in December 1985, her character became the defendant. The rest of the principal cast had
Raymond Burr Religion. Burr's performance as the loyal friend of the imprisoned protagonist led to a contract with RKO Radio Pictures. Burr appeared in more than 50 feature films between 1946 and 1957, creating an array of villains that established him as an icon of film noir. Film historian Alain Silver concluded that Burr's most significant work in the genre is in these ten films: "Desperate" (1947), "Sleep, My Love" (1948), "Raw Deal" (1948), "Pitfall" (1948), "Abandoned" (1949), "Red Light" (1950), "M" (1951), "His Kind of Woman" (1951), "The Blue Gardenia" (1953) and "Crime of Passion" (1957). Silver described Burr's private detective