Perry Mason before He was Perry Mason meets Jessica Fletcher before She was Jessica Fletcher.

In 1956, a year before he began his nine-year run playing Perry Mason, Raymond Burr had an early opportunity to defend someone accused of murder.

In Please Murder Me, Burr plays Craig Carlson, a lawyer whose best friend is an old war buddy who once saved his life. This makes things awkward when Carlson falls in love with his buddy's wife.

The wife is played by Angela Lansbury. This is something that makes the movie fun to watch on a meta level. Two of TV's classic crime-solvers--Perry Mason and Jessica Fletcher--appear together in a murder mystery before either of them would become known for their most iconic roles.

Please Murder Me is rife with melodramatic dialogue, but skilled actors (including John Dehner and Denver Pyle) play the melodrama straight and make the film worth watching for its own sake. 

Craig's love life gets complicated when his buddy is shot to death by Myra (Lansbury). She claims self-defense, but both the cops and the D.A. think its murder. So Craig has to defend the woman he loves in court. He himself never doubts her innocence.

He gets her acquitted, but then finds evidence that she's probably guilty AND that she's actually in love with someone else entirely. Craig has been conned by a femme fatale, who was using him to get a divorce from her husband, but then had to murder her husband when he stumbled upon her scheme.

Craig is wracked with guilt about this. He's helped someone get away with murder and he's a tad bit bitter about being used by her so ruthlessly. 

But maybe--just maybe--he can set up a situation that will see that justice is served. Even if it means setting himself up to be murdered.

As I said, the dialogue is melodramatic--I think overly so. But Burr, Lansbury and the rest of the cast do a fine job and the plot is a good one with some nifty twists to it. Please Murder Me is in the public domain, which means its easy to find (I'll embed a YouTube version below), though this also means the sound track fades out a little from time to time.