Columbo's Day

Over the last two years I slowly watched every single Columbo movie/episode, from 1968's Prescription: Murder to 2003's Columbo Likes the Nightlife. Columbo was a program I knew a little about - I knew it starred Peter Falk as a slovenly detective who seemed distracted and disorganized but was always working steadily to build a case against a criminal; I knew the "one more thing..." line; I knew the format would feature the murder at the beginning so that the audience was always aware of who the killer was (as I discovered, though, there were exceptions to the format). But I'd never actually watched a Columbo until I sat down and started with Prescription: Murder, way back at the beginning.

I suppose one of the questions I had about the series was how it functioned as a mystery program when the killer was always known at the top of the drama. As I discovered, that's the key to what makes Columbo interesting to watch - to guess at what vital mistake the killer made. Particularly during 1971-76, the period where Columbo was a regularly-scheduled program (as opposed to a now-and-then TV movie), the killer was often presented as the point-of-view character, with Columbo on the fringes (often Columbo wouldn't appear until after the first half-hour). Now, not every Columbo featured a great mistake on the killer's part; the lazy path was for Lt. Columbo to simply doubt the killer's alibi because of an unusual piece of evidence and then wear him down until he confessed; the best Columbo episodes, though, had a piece of evidence that was set up at the beginning that would come back at the climax in a satisfying way. The episode "Lovely But Lethal" had a particuarly great example of that.

Because the show often followed the killer's perspective, I did find myself strangely rooting for them to outsmart Columbo, even though I knew it was impossible (it's Columbo's show, after all). There are also many, many times I noted that if the killer had simply refused to talk to Columbo or insisted on having a lawyer present, Columbo would never have obtained the information he needed to force a confession (since Columbo usually had, at best, very flimsy circumstancial evidence). In the 70s, though, usually the killer's biggest problem would arrive in the last half-hour when they'd attempt to throw Columbo off their trail by committing another crime (even another murder) that would instead backfire big time.

I found the series at its weakest when it meddled with the format; there are some - particularly in the final years - where there isn't even a murder or where the murder isn't depicted on screen, which means the viewers weren't given all the information they were normally supplied with. Falk's always great in the role, but the 1989-2003 movies are a huge step down from what had come before. I cringed particularly while watching the final movie, Columbo Likes the Nightlife, which is painfully trying to be a hip 2003 program (with a soundtrack that sounded imitative of Run, Lola, Run) and the last thing Columbo, of all programs, should ever have tried to be was "hip." It's far more dated than most of the 70s episodes.

For my money, the best episodes of Columbo were in the 70s; my favourites are: "Blueprint for Murder"; "Dagger of the Mind"; "The Most Dangerous Match"; "Any Old Port in a Storm"; "A Friend in Deed"; "Negative Reaction"; and "How to Dial a Murder."

Throughout, there were a lot of familiar names I was happy to see; it was certainly a surprise that the first actual episode of the Columbo series was written by Steven Bochco and directed by Steven Spielberg! And I enjoyed seeing actors like Patrick McGoohan, Robert Vaughn, Dean Stockwell, Robert Culp, Roddy McDowell, Ray Milland, Leonard Nimoy, Martin Landau, Donald Pleasence, Johnny Cash, Dick Van Dyke, Ida Lupino and William Shatner to say nothing of before-they-were-famous appearances by the likes of Martin Sheen and Jamie Lee Curtis. Even in the show's twilight years I appreciated seeing the likes of Robert Foxworth, George Wendt, Richard Riehle and Billy Connolly.

I found I really enjoyed the "how catch 'em" variant to the whodunnit; I'd seen it done before in the play and film of Dial 'M' for Murder (note that John Williams played a very Columbo-like detective in the Hitchcock film version; Williams was also on a Columbo episode!) but Columbo did it so well that I went looking for other examples of the format in mystery fiction. It seems as though R. Austin Freeman's stories of Dr. Thorndyke from the 1910s might be the first stories told in that manner. I also sought out the short story "Prescription: Murder" was based on ("Dear Corpus Delicti" by William Link) and the first TV movie that was made from the resulting play Enough Rope. I definitely recommend the Dr. Thorndyke stories and, even if you've seen "Prescription: Murder" you should read the original "Dear Corpus Delicti" because it's got an amazing surprise ending that's different from the Columbo version.

I'm happy I took the time to watch the entire series, it was very rewarding.