Perry Mason (TV film series) Raymond Burr starred as Los Angeles criminal defense lawyer Perry Mason, a character created by American author and attorney Erle Stanley Gardner. Television producer Dean Hargrove resurrected the Perry Mason character in a series of television films for NBC beginning in 1985. Dean Hargrove was able to bring back the two then-surviving major stars, Raymond Burr and Barbara Hale (reprising their roles as Mason and Della Street) for the first telefilm, "Perry Mason Returns", in which Mason resigns his position as an appellate court judge to defend Street on a murder charge. William Katt, Hale's own son, was cast as
Raymond Burr in "Pitfall" as "both reprehensible and pathetic", a characterization also cited by film historian Richard Schickel as a prototype of film noir, in contrast with the appealing television characters for which Burr later became famous. "He tried to make you see the psychosis below the surface, even when the parts weren't huge," said film historian James Ursini. "He was able to bring such complexity and different levels to those characters, and create sympathy for his characters even though they were doing reprehensible things." Other titles in Burr's film noir legacy include "Walk a Crooked Mile" (1948), "Borderline" (1950), "Unmasked" (1950),