Columbo Goes to the Guillotine/Murder, Smoke and Shadows

In 1978, after an astonishingly successful run on NBC, Lieutenant Columbo finally hung up his crumpled raincoat for good. Or so it seemed. But it was not the end after all. In 1989 Columbo returned in a series of TV movies, this time on ABC, which continued intermittently until 2003. I approached this later incarnation with trepidation, fearing that it would be a disappointment.

It actually gets off to a pretty good start with an ambitious locked-room mystery, Columbo Goes to the Guillotine. It combines stage magic (always a winner in my book), psychic phenomena and some delightful mockery of the CIA.

We have to wait a long time for Columbo to make his entrance but the setup for the murder is extremely clever, genuinely puzzling and thoroughly entertaining. Elliott Blake (Anthony Andrews) is a psychic and he’s being studied at the Anneman Institute for Psychic Research. This time they’re convinced they have a real psychic on their hands and they’re very excited. The Pentagon and the CIA are excited as well - this will give them a vital weapon against the commies (the episode went to air in early 1989 when the Soviet Union still existed).

However the CIA wants to be sure. And what better way to be sure than getting renowned magician and sceptic Max Dyson (Anthony Zerbe) to try to debunk Blake. Dyson has exposed countless fraudulent psychics and phoney mediums and if Blake is using trickery then he’s the man to uncover that trickery. Of course you can see how tis might lead to murder, and it does. And it’s a wonderfully ingenious murder.

The way in which Columbo unravels the mystery is entirely satisfying. The vital clues are provided by a fifteen-year-old aspiring magician named Tommy. Introducing a precocious kid is always a risk but in this case it works. Tommy’s most important contribution comes when he tells Columbo that it’s not that difficult to figure out how a trick is done as long as you always keep in mind that it is a trick.

The murder is almost a perfect murder but there are a couple of tiny details that to Columbo’s mind just don’t quite fit. The plot is excellent, combining intricacy with the expected battle of wits between Columbo and the suspect.

Anthony Andrews is pretty good as the suspect constantly dogged by the rumpled homicide lieutenant. Pretty good, but I can’t help thinking this episode might have worked better with the two major supporting rôles reversed. Anthony Zerbe is a more colourful actor than Andrews and might have been a more formidable opponent for Columbo. Zerbe is an absolute delight as Max.

Oddly enough the one minor weakness in this episode is Peter Falk whose performance seems a bit mannered and a bit overdone. It had been eleven years since he’d played the part and he doesn’t seem entirely convincing. In the 1970s episodes Columbo was an outrageous but believable character, a very smart cop who was a bit eccentric but who carefully played up his eccentricities to put suspects off-guard. In this 1989 incarnation he just seems too obviously an actor. It’s almost as if he’s forgotten how he used to play the rôle and he’s trying too hard.

The magic stuff is terrific and the explanations of how the tricks were worked are fascinating.

All in all Columbo Goes to the Guillotine is surprisingly successful. Maybe not quite equal to the very best of the earlier episodes but still very good and very enjoyable.

Murder, Smoke and Shadows went to air in late February 1989. Once again there’s an attempt to make the setting as colourful, and as artificial, as possible. This time it’s the world of movies. Whizz-kid film director Alex Brady has a problem. A few years earlier when he and his friends Lenny Fisher and Buddy Coates were aspiring film-makers still making ultra low budget movies Lenny’s sister Jenny was killed when a stunt went wrong.  Alex panicked and left her to die. Lenny didn’t know about this but he does now and he’s arrived in Hollywood to wreck Alex’s career. Alex isn’t going to let that happen.

As in Columbo Goes to the Guillotine the murder is devious and ingenious. Alex’s attempts to cover his tracks are less clever. He knows a lot about making movies but as a murderer he’s at best a gifted amateur.

It just hasn’t occurred to Alex that the police are professionals at this sort of thing and they have vast resources. The ability of the police in general and Columbo in particular to piece together the story of a murder is as impressive as Alex’s ability to tell a story on film.

It’s another clever plot even if the theatricality is overdone at times. The ending is very theatrical indeed but it’s in keeping with the feel of the story.

Again Peter Falk’s performance seems not quite right. He just isn’t relaxing into the part they way he used to. Columbo’s malicious glee when he nails his suspect also seems a bit out of character.

A Columbo story depends a lot on the quality of the villain. Fisher Stevens as Alex is quite good but there is one big problem. At twenty-five Stevens was ridiculously young to be playing the part of a film director so well established that books have been written about his films. He looks even younger than twenty-five and comes across as being more like a precocious high school kid than a seasoned Hollywood veteran. Setting so much of the episode in Alex’s private little “boys’ club” hideaway with its train sets and pinball machines and soda fountain just makes him seem even younger. If only Stevens had been ten years older his performance might have worked splendidly - he certainly plays Alex as the kind of self-centred manipulative narcissist you’d expect to find in Hollywood.

Alex is also a Columbo villain who loses his cool quickly and seems cocky in a teenaged way rather than the type of smooth confident murderer who might present a real challenge to Lieutenant Columbo.

Steven Hill plays a small rôle as a ruthless producer whom Alex has made the mistake of crossing and Hill's assured performance, while very entertaining, also serves to make Alex seem like a naughty schoolboy.

So this episode has some problems. It does have its strengths however. The film studio setting is used very effectively and the story is basically excellent. So it’s a mixed bag but still enjoyable.

Was it a good idea to resurrect Columbo? Probably not. Both these episodes are brave attempts and they’re reasonably successful but the magic is not quite there.

Columbo - Try and Catch Me (1977)

Try and Catch Me was the first episode of the seventh season of Columbo. It went to air on NBC in November 1977. And it’s a great way to kick off the season.

As usual we know the identity of the murderer right from the start. Abigail Mitchell (Ruth Gordon) is a very rich and very successful mystery writer. The only person she ever really cared about was her niece. She’s fairly sure that her niece was murdered by her husband Edmund. There was a boating accident, the body was never found and while the police were perhaps not entirely satisfied it was accepted as a case of accidental death. But Abigail wasn’t satisfied and she intends to get revenge, and she intends to get away with it. Since she’s planned thirty-two very successful fictional murders she’s confident that she can outsmart any police detective.

Her plan is, as you might expect, rather complicated. The complicated bit is setting up her alibi. She also has to bait the trap, which she does by letting Edmund know that she’s going to make him her heir. Give that Abigail is very old that means he stands to inherit a very great deal of money fairly soon. All she has to do is persuade him to walk into her safe (it’s actually a vault rather than a safe).

Another standard part of the Columbo formula is that we get to see the important clues even before Lieutenant Columbo does. Some of the clues are very straightforward. Some are quite fiendish in their obscurity and deviousness. This is a mystery that hinges on a dying clue, and this is a rather extravagant example of that particular trope.

In most episodes Columbo has a pretty fair idea very early on as to the identity of the murderer and how it was done. His problem is to prove it. This one is interesting because he doesn’t figure out the dying clue until the very end. Or perhaps he does - with Columbo you can never be sure. Considering that he apparently has no actual evidence he seems very confident of getting his murderer so perhaps he actually had figured it out and was simply leading her up the garden path, which is the sort of thing he was quite capable of doing.

This series always worked best when Columbo had to engage in a battle of wits with a truly formidable adversary and Abigail Mitchell is pretty formidable. Even more to the point the series was at its absolute best when Peter Falk had a charismatic guest star. Rich Gordon was always a strange actress but she was undeniably fascinating and she and Falk make a sparkling combination.

Abigail is almost a sympathetic murderer (and Columbo did feature somewhat sympathetic killers from time to time) but there are a couple of things that count against that. For one thing, her chosen murder method was exceptionally cruel. For another, we can’t be absolutely certain that Edmund really did kill Abigail’s niece. One of the really clever things about this story is that his guilt is very strongly implied but we are never given cast-iron evidence. Abigail believes he was guilty, Columbo thinks he was probably guilty, but that’s not a sufficient justification for setting yourself up as judge, jury and executioner. This very slight doubt makes things more interesting because it highlights the crucial contrast between Abigail and Columbo - it’s not enough for Columbo to be certain in his own mind of a suspect’s guilt. He has to be able to prove it.

There's also a subplot involving Abigail's secretary Veronica. The subplot doesn't really go anywhere but it adds a bit of spice and uncertainty. In fact the writers are to be commended by not taking it in the obvious and much too cliché direction.

In this story we also get to see Columbo’s dog, who hadn’t put in an appearance for quite a while.

This was director James Frawley's first Columbo. He directed two more season seven episodes plus three episodes of the later revived series.

There’s the very clever dying clue, there’s the wonderful verbal sparring between Columbo and Abigail, there’s an interesting murder method. It all adds up to a superior episode. Very highly recommended.

Columbo - The Bye-Bye Sky High I.Q. Murder Case

The Bye-Bye Sky High I.Q. Murder Case was the third and final instalment of the truncated sixth season of Columbo. It went to air in May 1977.

As the title suggests this is a very light-hearted Columbo mystery. It’s a case of murder at the Sigma Club. The Sigma Club is a kind of social club for very high I.Q. people. The joke is that they’re all hopeless misfits and totally socially inept. They have nothing in common and don’t seem to like each other very much but without the Sigma Club they’d have no social lives at all.

Two of the members of the club are partners in a very large accounting firm. One of them, Oliver Brandt (Theodore Bikel) has been embezzling funds. The other, Bertie Hastings, has discovered the embezzlement so naturally he has to be murdered. These are of course not spoilers since, as in every Columbo episode, we know the identity of the killer right from the start. The murder method is the sort of thing that a very intelligent but very arrogant person might come up with - it’s incredibly ingenious but ludicrously over-complicated. It does involve some wonderful contraptions though.

As usual we get a battle of wits between the murderer and Columbo but the irony is that despite the killer’s high I.Q. we never believe he has a chance of winning - it just never occurs to him that policemen might actually know their jobs.

Much of the fun comes from the other members of the club who come up with their own theories to explain the murder. They naturally assume that a mere policeman could never solve such a difficult case and it’s amusing to see their discomfiture when Columbo has to break it to them gently that their theories have already been thought of by the police and dismissed as unworkable.

In this episode Peter Falk doesn’t have a major star to play off but Theodore Bikel does a fine job. His gradual psychological unravelling is so convincing that we feel kind of sorry for him.

Kenneth Mars is surprisingly restrained and doesn’t get very much to do which is a pity since his character, a welder with a genius-level I.Q., might have had potential.

Samantha Eggar is very good as Brandt’s wife, a woman who just assumes her husband will provide her with unlimited spending money and seems genuinely puzzled when he blames her for the mess he’s in. It’s impossible to conceive of a more shallow and selfish woman but what makes this performance interesting is that she is entirely unaware of her character flaws. She’s not conniving or deceitful or vindictive - she’s more like someone who simply hasn’t developed any adult emotions. She’s actually more interesting than the murderer.

Look out for Jamie Lee Curtis in a small but amusing part as a waitress. Carol Jones is excellent as a geeky 14-year-old girl genius. The two bitchy male secretaries are fun also.

The ending is perhaps a bit contrived.

This is not perhaps a Columbo episode of the first rank but it’s sufficiently witty and amusing that its minor flaws can be overlooked. Recommended.

It’s hard to make a judgment on the sixth season as a whole since there were only three episodes. The DVD release, quite reasonably, combines the sixth and seventh seasons in a single boxed set.

Columbo, Now You See Him / Last Salute to the Commodore (1976)

The final two episodes of Columbo season five, screened in 1976, were the excellent Now You See Him and the controversial Last Salute to the Commodore.

I’m particularly enamoured of murder mysteries that involve stage magic. Magic and murder just seem to go so well together. Now You See Him is a very good example of this sub-genre.

The celebrated illusionist the Great Santini (Jack Cassidy) has a pretty good alibi for the murder of his business associate Jesse Jerome. At the time of the murder Santini was locked in a metal trunk suspended in a tank of water. That’s pretty much the ultimate alibi. Except that, as Santini cheerfully admits, how much store is anyone going to put in an alibi for an illusionist. Maybe he was in the trunk during the trick. Maybe he wasn’t. He’s an illusionist, so really he could have been anywhere!

In fact the method by which the trick is worked is a fiercely guarded secret. Apart from Santini himself his daughter Della (Cynthia Sikes) knows the answer. And neither of them has any intention of revealing the secret. So Columbo has a suspect who may or may not have an airtight alibi.

Jack Cassidy was an extraordinary larger-than-life style of actor and in this episode he gives a particularly extravagant performance. Which of course is exactly as it should be. Santini is a very smart guy, his professional career (and a very successful career it has been) has been based on his ability to fool people and he has also been able to guard some very deep and dark personal secrets. He’s exactly the type of hyper-confident and fiendishly clever suspect that we love to see matching wits against Columbo.

The magic tricks are not there just to provide an exotic background. They’re an integral part of the plot. Michael Sloan’s script works perfectly. Everything in this story works perfectly. Now You See Him is a delight.

Last Salute to the Commodore wraps up the fifth season. Commodore Otis Swanson (John Dehner) owns a boat yard. A very big boat yard. He is a celebrated yacht designer and his business is worth a very great deal of money. His son-in-law Charlie Clay (Robert Vaughn) takes care of the day-to-day running of the business but increasingly the Commodore and Charlie have not been seeing eye to eye. Charlie may be on the way out. In fact the Commodore has had just about enough of his whole family, including his permanently drunk daughter Joanna (married to Charlie Clay). The Commodore seems to have been contemplating some major changes that would have been rather disagreeable to almost everyone.

It’s not a great surprise that the Commodore meets with an accident. It’s one of those accidents that you can kind of see coming.

Both Columbo and the audience learn quite a few things about yachts in this episode. Things like self-steering vanes and gybing. Gybing was probably the cause of the tragic accident that cost the Commodore his life. Assuming of course that it was an accident, and Lieutenant Columbo assumes no such thing.

Patrick McGoohan directed this episode and it’s definitely an attempt to do something different with the established Columbo formula. It’s stylistically different, with some eccentric framing and some offbeat pacing and some odd acting performances. There’s a subtle difference in the tone - a bit more edgy and a bit more histrionic.


This is also a departure from the usual formula in that Columbo is given a sidekick. In fact he’s given two sidekicks! A sergeant plus a young up-and-coming detective who is imposed on Columbo by someone very senior in the department.

There’s also a great deal of humour. Some of the humour works very well, some doesn’t.

The differences are not just stylistic although I can’t say anything more than that.

This is a rather controversial episode that is strongly disliked by most Columbo fans. In fact it’s strongly disliked by almost everyone. The script was written by Jackson Gillis but I’m inclined to think that the episode’s peculiarities were mostly the work of Patrick McGoohan. It really does have McGoohan’s fingerprints all over it. This is the McGoohan who was responsible for The Prisoner and it has so many of the characteristics that distinguished The Prisoner - the same anarchic quality, the uneasy mixing of black humour and drama, the odd pacing, the very experimental feel, the touches of self-conscious artiness, the hints of the surreal (very strange in a Columbo episode), the wilful and deliberate eccentricity, the staginess, the bizarre acting performances.

It’s a risky approach and you can’t help expecting that at any moment it’s going to crash and burn. And that’s exactly what happens. It really is very much like the less successful episodes of The Prisoner, especially the disastrous later episodes of that series. It’s a slow-moving trainwreck but it’s a fascinating trainwreck. It’s not all bad. It’s a mixture of very bad ideas and very good ideas. McGoohan was a genius but he was a very flawed genius. It has to be said that he never lacked the courage to push things to an extreme. Having decided to do a very different kind of Columbo episode he can’t be accused of half-measures.

The fifth season really did have some strange moments. Some superb episodes and quite a few that were intriguingly offbeat. There was obviously a feeling that steps needed to be taken to keep things fresh. It’s an uneven season but overall it’s surprisingly strong. Highly recommended.

Columbo, Forgotten Lady / A Case of Immunity

The fifth season of Columbo went to air in late 1975 and early 1976.

Forgotten Lady kicks off season five and it does so in a slightly surprising way. Normally there is no need to worry about spoilers when discussing Columbo since the killer’s identity is always known right from the start. Forgotten Lady is one of the rare exceptions - there is a vital aspect to the case that is only revealed gradually and there is a crucial late twist and to reveal these things really would lessen their impact and spoil the episode.

What’s important is that these are things that Columbo is not initially aware of and it’s important that the viewer, like Columbo, should not learn them too early.

This is also a rare Columbo episode with a surprise ending, and it is very surprising - it’s not at all what we expect from Lieutenant Columbo. It could have been gimmicky but it works due to the great performances by Peter Falk and by the two guest stars, Janet Leigh and John Payne.

Janet Leigh is Grace Wheeler, a forgotten star from the great era of Hollywood musicals. She intends to make a comeback and has persuaded her old co-star, Ned Diamond (John Payne), to help her. But first she will need to get rid of her husband.

A major bonus for classic movie fans is that Grace Wheeler spends much of her time watching her old movies which means we get to see Janet Leigh watching footage of herself in classic musical roles.

This is an episode that could have been shipwrecked by sentimentality but that peril is avoided, largely by Leigh’s intense and sometimes prickly performance. The last thing Grace Wheeler wants is pity and Leigh manages to give a very moving performance without any self-pity. In fact the character, as played by Leigh, simply does not have the capacity for self-pity. John Payne is every bit as good.

Judging by the first two episodes there does seem to have been an attempt to do something just a little different in season five. Forgotten Lady had unexpected plot twists while A Case of Immunity has an unusual setting. The murder takes place within the legation of the Kingdom of Suari. Which of course means that technically the murder did not take place on U.S. soil. A further complication is that Columbo knows from the start that the murderer must have been a member of the legation and would therefore have diplomatic immunity. Columbo will have to tread very very carefully.

It’s not that Hassan Salah (Hector Elizondo) is necessarily any cleverer than the average murderer. His plan is ingenious but flawed. He is however very much aware that he has diplomatic immunity so he is very confident indeed that even the annoyingly persistent Lieutenant Columbo poses no threat to him.

It really looks like this case might be a failure for Columbo, that he may solve the puzzle but be unable to make an arrest.

Columbo season 4 (part two)

This is a follow-on from my earlier post dealing with the first part of the fourth season of Columbo.

Playback, written by David P. Lewis and Booker Bradshaw,  is notable for being an early disappearance of what would become a popular trope in both mysteries and spy thrillers - the use of videotape to create a false alibi. There’s also lots of fun mid-70s high-tech stuff. The perpetrator is a genius inventor and he’s used the family mansion as a kind of showcase for his security and surveillance gadgetry.

Oskar Werner makes a fun villain, a basically nice enough guy who has been pushed around by his family. Now he’s to be eased out of his position as head of the family’s electronics company and he’s had enough. Murder seems to be the only solution to his problems.

He’s a convincing and gently amusing tech geek type who loves his gadgets more than he loves anything else.

The vital clue in this case is very ingenious.

Watched today this episode loses a little of its impact since the central idea has been used in other movies and TV shows but it’s still pretty solid.

A Deadly State of Mind, written by Peter S. Fischer, deals with one of my favourite subjects - evil psychiatrists. In this case the psychiatrist is Dr Mark Collier (George Hamilton) and he’s having an affair with a female patient, Nadina Donner (Lesley Ann Warren). Naturally she’s married and her husband Carl finds out. The husband threatens to ruin Dr Collier and it’s no idle threat - Carl Donner not only knows about the affair (and of course having sex with a patient is highly unethical) he also knows about Dr Collier’s treatment methods (which are even more unethical). Not altogether surprisingly Carl Donner ends up dead.

Speaking of unethical, Columbo sails a bit close to the wind in his final confrontation with the suspect. It’s just as well that suspects on television shows are usually too cocky to have a lawyer present when being questioned by the police.

In this episode the usual battle of wills between Columbo and his chief suspect is a little different, being conducted somewhat indirectly.

To my way of thinking there’s only one thing better than an evil psychiatrist story and that’s an evil psychiatrist story that involves hypnosis so this episode ticks all the right boxes for me.

One odd thing is that this is one of the very few episodes in which we don’t see Columbo’s Peugeot 403, even though the fact that he drives a Peugeot turns out to be important.

A Deadly State of Mind is another good episode.

So overall the fourth season of Columbo is pretty satisfying. Definitely recommended.

Columbo season 4 (part one)

The Columbo formula worked right from the very first episode and the producers wisely stuck to it. Season four is more of the same, which is no problem at all as far as I’m concerned.

An Exercise in Fatality is the season opener. Milo Janus runs a string of health clubs. He sells franchises but once they’ve signed up and paid the franchisees discover that Milo is cheating them.  It’s difficult to prove but one franchisee, Gene Stafford, is getting very close to finding the evidence for fraud. Not surprisingly Mr Stafford meets with a fatal accident. At least it looks like an accident, but Columbo is worried about a few things, especially the scuff marks on the newly waxed floor.

Proving murder in this case isn’t easy since if it was murder it was very well planned. The trouble with well-planned murders is that they’re complicated and those complications are the things that bring the killers undone. There’s the usual battle of wits with Robert Conrad being wonderfully combative as Milo.

The clues are cleverly arranged and as so often it’s Columbo’s knack for noticing tiny details that proves to be crucial. A very good episode.

In Negative Reaction a photographer has finally had enough of being controlled by his wife. His plan to get rid of her is exceptionally ingenious and well thought out. Since he’s a photographer it’s not surprising that photography plays a role in his plan. And it’s also not surprising that photographic evidence plays a crucial (and extremely clever) part in Lieutenant Columbo’s solution of the case. This episode is delightfully well plotted.

There’s plenty of humour here as well, with the scene in the homeless men’s shelter being particularly good. Larry Storch contributes a wonderful comedic turn as a very nervous and uptight driving examiner whose evidence may be vital.

Dick van Dyke is (to me at least) an oddly colourless villain but that’s the only weakness in this otherwise excellent episode. And he’s by no means bad, just not quite lively enough.

By Dawn's Early Light marks the first of Patrick McGoohan’s four guest-starring appearances in the series and what a bravura performance he gives. He plays Colonel Rumford, the commandant of the Haynes Military Academy. Rumford’s problem is that the latest member of the Haynes family to control the purse-strings, William Haynes, hates him and hates the military academy. William wants to turn the place into a co-ed junior college. Girls running loose in the sacred precincts of the academy! It’s too awful even to contemplate. And of course if the Haynes Military Academy goes then America is doomed to communist takeover. William Haynes has to be stopped and Rumford comes up with one of the more spectacular murder methods you’re likely to see in order to accomplish this.

Rumford’s plan was ingenious. The one flaw in the plan was something he could not foresee.

Everyone at the academy, including the staff, is terrified of Rumford. He’s not just a martinet. He’s clearly fighting a constant battle to maintain some degree of mental stability and he has a Captain Queeg-like obsession with small details. He’s a very unsympathetic character on the whole but perversely this makes him slightly sympathetic to the viewer. As much as we are appalled by him we can’t help feeling sorry for a man fighting a one-man war against the modern world.

It’s a good episode and worth seeing for McGoohan’s scenery-chewing.

Troubled Waters takes Columbo onto the high seas. He’s on vacation but you won’t be surprised to hear that within a day of leaving port he’s investigating a murder. Used car mogul Hayden Danziger (Robert Vaughn) has to dispose of an inconvenient mistress and he has a plan to frame loser musician Lloyd Harrington (Dean Stockwell) for her murder. The evidence against Harrington seems overwhelming but there’s one tiny clue left behind by the killer that puts Columbo on the right track.

Robert Vaughn is a splendidly smooth villain, just the type of murderer with whom Columbo can engage in the kind of battle of wits that always delighted fans of the series. Jane Greer is excellent as his wife Sylvia, a woman who is unlikely to forgive a straying husband. Dean Stockwell is as creepy as usual. A major highlight for cult TV fans is Patrick Macnee as the ship’s captain, a slightly stiff no-nonsense chap who is not at all happy about murders taking place on his ship. Upsets the passengers you know.

The murder method has a few interesting touches and there’s a fairly clever alibi involved.

Columbo is on the cruise with his wife but of course we never actually see her. Other characters do however see her so at least we know she really does exist!

Add in good performances from the entire cast and you have fine entertainment.

All in all the first half of season four is pretty impressive.

Columbo season 3 (1973)

I’m now working my way through the third season of Columbo. I probably saw them all many years ago but the great thing is it was so long ago I’ve totally forgotten them so now they all seem new to me!

Lovely But Lethal kicks off the season and it’s worth it for Vincent Price’s performance. It’s an engagingly outrageous story centring on a miracle cosmetic formula.

Next up is Any Old Port in a Storm. This is a great episode with Donald Pleasence as a boutique winery owner. I love the clue relating to the sports car. The fencing between Donald Pleasence and Peter Falk is superb. Falk’s great strength as an actor was his ability to play off other actors and the better the guest star the better Falk’s performances were. It has a terrific (and oddly poignant) ending as Columbo shows off his newly acquired knowledge of fine wines. 

Candidate for Crime is also excellent. It’s politics mixes with murder. Great stuff with a clever (if unavailing) attempt at an absolutely unbreakable alibi.

Double Exposure guest stars Robert Culp as an advertising and motivational guru who sets up not one but two unbreakable alibis. The golf course scene as Columbo wears the murderer down by ruining his golf game while simultaneously beginning to tighten the noose is classic Columbo. Usually in a Columbo story the murderer remains fairly cool but in this one it’s fun to watch Robert Culp getting closer and closer to exploding in rage and frustration.

The stuff about subliminal advertising (which had been the subject of some controversy back in the 60s) adds to the fun.

In Publish or Perish a publisher murders a writer about to desert him for another publisher. The writer is played by Mickey Spillane, the real-life author of the MIke Hammer novels. This is another episode where the murderer really start to lose his cool under Columbo’s constant pressure. It’s typical Columbo. It’s a case that seems straightforward except for a couple of very minor details that don’t quite fit.

In Mind Over Mayhem Columbo investigates a murder at a high-tech research institute. The work of the institute includes computer modeling of nuclear war and it also includes robots. The robot in this case looks like a robot straight out of a 1950s sci-fi movie (mostly because it is a robot straight out of a 1950s sci-fi movie) but since Columbo is a series that   never bothers much with tawdry realism it doesn’t matter and it adds some fun. 

Swan Song features country music legend Johnny Cash as the murderer. It does help if you’re a fan of the Man in Black since you get to hear him singing rather a lot. It also boasts the great Ida Lupino as his wife. She has a hold over her husband and is able to divert most of the money the successful singer makes into building a $5 million tabernacle. He’s less than happy about this, and he’s also less than happy that she also stops him chasing his young female backup singers. As an actor Johnny Cash is a great singer but he does have the right presence for the role.

Columbo has to enlist the help of an air crash investigator to unravel this puzzle. The murder method is far-fetched but it’s fun.

A Friend in Deed has a wonderfully elaborate plot which owes a very great deal indeed to a certain very well-known Hitchcock movie. A series of burglaries is being carried out by a professional and very skillful burglar who has now turned to murder. Of course we know that the burglar didn’t actually commit the murder. The murderer turns to an old friend for help but he finds himself mixed up in a whole lot more trouble that he hadn’t anticipated. To solve the case Columbo will have to match wits with the Police Commissioner himself. It all hinges, as usual, on a couple of puzzling clues. In this case it’s not fingerprints that bother Columbo, it’s the lack of fingerprints. It’s a delightfully far-fetched but very cleverly worked out plot.

Columbo was unusual for a 70s cop show in being so strongly plot-focused, and even more unusual in that so many of the plots work so well. At a time when crime fiction and crime movies were starting to focus to an excessive degree (in my opinion) on psychology, action and sordid realism it was like a throwback to the golden age of crime fiction when a detective story was intended to be entertainment. Entertainment of a somewhat intellectual  kind with its emphasis on puzzle-solving but still entertainment.

Columbo is squarely in the tradition of the detective fiction of the interwar years, the so-called golden age, in that it quite deliberately does not attempt to mirror reality. This is a kind of parallel universe in which rich successful famous people murder each other constantly. A real-life homicide cop would mostly deal with open-and-shut cases in which depressingly ordinary people murder each other for depressingly ordinary reasons, or obscure losers kill other obscure losers for five dollars in loose change. However every case that Lieutenant Columbo investigates deals with very smart people committing complex and ingenious murders for often incredibly esoteric motives. 

This is of course precisely the appeal of golden age detective fiction and it’s precisely the appeal of Columbo. Who wants to watch a TV show about boringly everyday crimes? Viewers want killers who are glamorous and also clever enough to provide Columbo with a real challenge in every episode. A battle of wits is no fun unless the combatants are evenly matched. Of course we know that Columbo will win the battle of wits but that’s no reflection on the intelligence of the murderers. The odds are stacked against murderers - they only have to make one tiny mistake and they’re undone - but the audience wants to feel that Columbo really has to use every ounce of his experience and his skill if he’s going to solve the case.

There’s nothing wrong with cop shows that aim at realism, but there’s also absolutely nothing wrong with mystery series like Columbo that ignore reality and concentrate on enjoyable intellectual puzzles that take place in a fantasy world of glamour and glitz. Personally my preference is for the approach taken by Columbo.

The series relied heavily on the quality of the guest stars and on the whole the producers were remarkably successful in finding just the right guest stars.

The third season maintains the very high standard set by the earlier seasons. Highly recommended.

a 1972 Columbo theatrical double-header

I love murder stories with theatrical or movie studio backgrounds and the second season of Columbo provides two such tales which makes these two episodes a perfect double feature for me.

The fourth season two episode Dagger of the Mind could have been called Columbo Goes to London. Never have I seen so much gratuitous use of travelogue-type footage of the tourist spots of London. This is also a very under-appreciated episode - there are several very important elements that many people seem to overlook in this story.

Everyone’s favourite shabby detective is in London, as a guest of Scotland Yard, to address a police conference. He finds himself caught up in a theatrical murder.

Fading stars Nicholas Frame (Richard Basehart) and his wife Lillian Stanhope (Honor Blackman) are about to open in Macbeth in the West End when the wealthy aristocrat putting up the money for the play is killed. Since this is Columbo and the murderer is always revealed right at the start there’s no harm in revealing that our two has-been actors are involved. The murder has been arranged to look like an accident but Columbo just happens to be on the scene and he’s immediately suspicious.

What follows is the usual battle of wills as Columbo tries to persuade the killers to make a mistake so he can prove his case.

The first important thing to note is that Frame and his wife are appearing in Macbeth. Just like the protagonists in the play the protagonists of Dagger of the Mind find that ambition has its price and it’s a price that keeps on increasing. There is one plot point that has attracted criticism but once you remember the Macbeth connection it makes sense - once you decide that ambition overrides everything else you have jumped aboard a roller coaster that you can’t get off.

Another point sometimes overlooked relates to Richard Basehart’s performance. He is not supposed to be playing a great Shakespearian actor. He is playing an ageing ham who thinks he is a great Shakespearian actor and thinks he sees his opportunity to prove it, and to prove his critics wrong. In fact both Nicholas and Lillian are well past their prime and this production is their last chance to rekindle their fading careers. With this in mind it’s clear that Basehart knows exactly what he’s doing with his performance and he nails Nicholas Frame’s character superbly. Blackman is equally good and the two of them chew every piece of scenery they can get their teeth into.

Adding to the fun is the great Wilfred Hyde-White as the butler Tanner.

The fifth episode, Requiem for a Falling Star, can be seen as a kind of follow-up to Dagger of the Mind dealing as it does with murder in Hollywood. Another link between the two episodes is that both deal with stars whose careers are on the downslide. 

Fading star Nora Chandler (Anne Baxter) is the murderess but she kills the wrong person. She meant to kill sleazy gossip columnist Jerry Parks (Mel Ferrer) who is blackmailing but by mistake she kills her faithful secretary and friend Jean Davis (Pippa Scott). Lieutenant Columbo happens to be one of Nora’s biggest fans and he hates to think she might be a murderess but the evidence seems to point that way.

This is a rather untypical Columbo episode. As usual it’s an inverted detective story but with several very interesting variations (I won’t spilt the episode by giving any hints as the nature of these variations).

Like all Columbo episodes it’s pretty scrupulously fair play. We see all the same clues that Columbo sees although of course we might not always interpret them correctly.

Anne Baxter gives a spirited performance as the formidable Nora. 

Columbo never pretended to be a realistic cop show and always works best when Columbo is up against formidable adversaries played by actors who are willing to go over-the-top. These two episodes qualify on both counts. Dagger of the Mind is more fun thanks to the extraordinary overacting of Richard Basehart and Honor Blackman but Requiem for a Falling Star is more ambitious and demonstrates what could be achieved when the basic formula of the series was tweaked just a little. Both episodes are fine entertainment.

Columbo, season one (1971)

At the beginning of the 1970s NBC launched the first “wheel series” - the idea was that rather than making a single series for a particular timeslot they would make three different series which would screen on a three-week rotation in the same timeslot under the umbrella title The NBC Mystery Movie. The three series would comprise feature-length episodes made in conjunction with Universal. The three series were Columbo, McCloud and McMillan and Wife. The network was either very lucky or they displayed remarkably good judgment in selecting these three series - all three turned out to be major hits. 

Columbo was a very big hit indeed, running from 1971 to 1978 and then being revived (on the ABC network) from 1989 to 2003.

The character of Lieutenant Columbo was actually created as early as 1960, in an episode of The Chevy Mystery Show written by William Link and Richard Levinson. Columbo was played by Bert Freed. A couple of years later Link and Levinson used the character again in a play called Prescription: Murder, with Thomas Mitchell as Columbo. The play was turned into a TV movie for NBC in 1968. Mitchell had passed away by that time and although the character had been written as a much older man Peter Falk landed the role this time. The TV movie was successful enough that in 1971 NBC authorised a pilot episode for a possible series. The series materialised later that same year.

In Prescription: Murder Columbo matches wits with a psychiatrist (played by Gene Barry) who has murdered his wife. What makes things really interesting is that Lieutenant Columbo is at this stage more or less the Columbo who would become so familiar to viewers, but not quite. His distinctive methods are already in place - he tries to appear more foolish and more absent-minded than he really is in order to lull the suspects into a false sense of security and he wears them down with an annoying but apparently friendly persistence. On the other hand he’s more abrasive and more aggressive, even becoming quite intimidating to a witness at one point. He’s closer to being the typical cop than he would ever be in the series proper.

The first episode of the series proper, Murder by the Book, was directed by some guy named Steven Spielberg. I wonder whatever happened to him? It sets the tone for the series. Not only does the series take its inspiration from the golden age of mystery fiction - this episode is about a murder committed by a writer of that very type of fiction! There are obviously lots of opportunities for detective fiction in-jokes.

Columbo is easier to write about than most mystery series since virtually every episode is an inverted detective story, a form invented by R. Austin Freeman in the early years of the 20th century in which the killer’s identity is revealed right at the outset. The interest of the story lies in the way in which the detective unravels the mystery and finds enough evidence to make an arrest. Since the audience knows who the murderer is right from the start there is no need to worry about revealing spoilers!

That format was only ever going to work if the murderers were clever and ruthless enough to prove worthy adversaries for the shabby but brilliant detective, and if the guest stars were of sufficient calibre to carry a feature-length episode. Gene Barry as the psychiatrist in Prescription: Murder had certainly met both criteria. In the series pilot, Ransom for a Dead Man, Columbo comes up against a murder suspect every bit as formidable in the person of one of the country’s top trial lawyers, played by the very capable Lee Grant. The plot was equally clever and the series was given the green light.

Big name guest stars continued to be a feature of the series, with Eddie Albert, Ida Lupino, Roddy McDowall and Anne Francis all making appearances in season one, along with cult TV notables like Robert Culp (from I Spy) and Ross Martin (from The Wild Wild West).

By the early 1970s cop movies and TV cop shows were changing - the trend was towards harder-edged series with tough-guy maverick cops who break all the rules battling pimps, drug dealers, vicious hoodlums on the mean streets of the big city. The levels of violence and sleaze steadily rose, and this was accompanied by an unhealthy obsession with psychos, serial killers and sex crimes. The creators of Columbo, William Link and Richard Levinson, decided to turn their backs on these pernicious trends. Columbo would recreate the feel and the tone of the classic detective stories of the past. There would be no mean streets in Columbo. The emphasis is on the psychological duel between detective and suspect, with (mercifully) no interest in social commentary and few concessions to the “realism” that would become more and more of a fetish in TV cop shows during the course of the 70s. This is pure entertainment and it’s all the better for it.

Another interesting feature of this series is that we know very little definite about the hero. This is a little odd since Columbo tends to talk incessantly about his wife and various family members. We get the strong suspicion however that this is merely part of his unusual approach to crime-solving - that it’s more than possible that Columbo says whatever he thinks is likely to provoke the reactions he wants from witnesses. Some of these family members may not even exist - it’s even just barely possible that Mrs Columbo doesn’t exist! And, famously, Columbo’s first name is never mentioned at any time. Aside from all this it’s equally possible that the entire persona he presents when on duty is just a mask. We know he’s a lot smarter than he pretends to be and even the notorious absent-mindedness might well be feigned, or (more probably) wildly exaggerated. We don’t really know how much the real Columbo actually resembles the persona he adopts, or how much is carefully calculated. That might seem like a potential weakness but in practice it makes the series more interesting since it’s Columbo the detective who matters, not Columbo the man, and part of the fun is seeing just how useful his carefully crafted professional persona is to him.

By the time we get to episode 4, Suitable for Framing, the formula has become more or less set - the murder will take place among the rich and famous, the killer will be a clever psychopath, despite his cleverness Columbo will be convinced of his guilt, the suspect will use his influence to try to get the annoying detective taken off the case and the case will come down to a psychological struggle between detective and suspect. The surprising thing is that despite the rigidity of the formula it works extremely well. Much of the credit for this is due to Peter Falk - he really is a joy to watch. The consistently high production values don’t hurt either.

The Region 1 season one boxed set includes both the earlier Prescription: Murder and the later pilot Ransom for a Dead Man. There are no extras but the transfers are good.

Columbo is an interesting throwback to an age when murder was civilised entertainment. It’s enormous fun. Highly recommended.