If you are prone to motion sickness, take some Dramamine before watching The Case of the Glittering Goldfish, because you are in for some very abrupt and constant camera motion - in particular, some rather intense close-ups. But before the dramatic direction goes into full effect, we are shown a monumental innovation: the cure for gill fever! Tom Wyatt has spent the better part of his recent years perfecting the formula. What he doesn't know is that, in order to fund the experiments, his employer (Gage Clarke as Frederick Rollins) has sold the fish store to a man named Huxley.
Huxley's purchase made him sole owner of Wyatt's cure for gill fever, because it was done in Huxley's store with Huxley's lab equipment. As you can imagine, both Wyatt and Rollins are pretty cheesed with Huxley and they do the intelligent thing by consulting Perry Mason, who promises to look over the contract and find a loophole that will restore ownership of the fish medicine to Wyatt and Rollins. Unfortunately, Wyatt's blood is found all over the scene of the crime when Huxley's corpse is found- he's been poisoned with morphine. Wyatt is arrested and the search for the killer begins, a search complicated by the fact that everybody hated Huxley. Including Huxley's wife.
Cecil Kellaway plays Huxley's drunken scientist (Darrell Metcalf), assigned to break down the formula for the gill fever cure. Kellaway is hilarious as the drunken genius. One scene has Kellaway and Mason trading fish metaphors during a discussion of the murder, and even the stone-faced William Hopper can be seen trying to stop himself from laughing.
The aforementioned direction is a bit jarring and not to my taste, but it adds to the general feel of campy late-50s noir. All in all, this is not up there with the best of the Perry Mason episodes. It's corny, complicated, and predictable if you're an avid Mason fan. But Kellaway's performance is every bit as contagious as gill fever, and for that, it's a fun hour of television.