Smells like a B-pic second feature. Don't ask me how I know. I just do.

Okay, I looked it up. Also, there's the matter of the title card: when you have the studio name on the same card as the name of the film and the lead actor, you're probably not talking about the flick at the top of the bill.

It was a different time than ours, my friends: the Civic Betterment Board would sponsor a contest based entirely on piecemeal objectification of femal body parts. The shame! The horror!

Number three wins, but she'll soon find out it's a scam.

You see, the promotors have an ingenious scheme: get the local businesses to toss in some money, create lots of buzz, hold a big pageant, then skip town, taking all the money! Minus expenses and hall rental and so on. At the end of the pageant, though, a previous winner from another town shows up and demands her money - why you rotten no good chiselers, and so on. Then someone ends up dead. Who did it? The promotor’s partner? The spurned woman? The jealous boyfriend of #3, who won, but humiliated everyone by exposing her legs? Who?

Good thing we have a team of wise-cracking madcap screwball detectives to investigate! There’s our lovely female star . . .

Her boss, a hard-drinking but happy-go-lucky guy with a shady style of getting around the law:

HEY HOLD ON.

HOOOLLLLLD ON.

That's right. It's Perry Mason. And if the plot sounds familiar

I knew the premise sounded familiar when I started watching it. As for who won the remake?

Yes. Number Three.

It doesn’t feel like a Perry Mason movie at all, because Warren William isn’t Raymond Burr. He plays him loose and merry, sarcastic and indifferent to the gravitas of the law. The first time we meet him, he’s passed out behind his desk, having slept in his clothes. Gets up and starts a’drinkin’. William played the role in three other movies, but his Mason is forgotten today - and perhaps justly so. Mason was defined by Burr.

By the way: Warren William was a fine actor who had another recurring role, one much better suited to his devil-may-care fallen-aristocrat persona: The Lone Wolf. It was a series of movies based on a character created many years before, and while many actors tried on the role, I have to think William was the best. He reprised the role in a light-comedy ep of “Suspense,” which you can hear here. Comes complete with Cockney sidekick!

The Poster, obviously: