This is the one with Robert Culp as the aggressive self-starting manager of a football team who murders its madcap owner, Dean Stockwell, in the swimming pool of his playboy mansion. Culp has established an alibi for himself by manipulating a taped recording, phone, wiretaps, and other such stuff, some of which lost me along the way. Culp's legerdemain places him in his office high atop the Los Angeles Coliseum at the time the murder took place, whereas he was, in fact, impersonating a Ding-Aling Ice Cream man while driving to and from the scene of the crime. Valerie Harper shows up in an amusing scene as a hooker who mistakes the visiting Columbo for a client. Dean Jagger has a small part, and James Gregory has an even smaller part. All of the performances are up to par and the direction is competent.
But -- and this must be said -- but Columbo always shows an extraordinary amount of intuition and has an abundance of good fortune in all his cases. In this case the intuition and the luck smother the plot.
Columbo, try as he might, simply cannot pin the deed on Robert Culp. There is a "loose end", so to speak. But Columbo has an epiphany in a travel bureau when a cuckoo clock announces the time. My legal responsibilities forbid me to divulge more of the plot or its solution. Oh, well, I guess I can say that Culp's motive for murdering Stockwell is not only weak but absent. Early on, Columbo mentions in passing, "The motive. That's what I don't get, the motive." It doesn't seem to occur to him that there IS no motive. If Culp stands to profit from Stockwell's death, it's never made clear why. He's not going to inherit money. He's not going to take over the ownership of the football team. He has nothing going with Stockwell's wife. So, cui bono? The rules of logic decree that Culp is unculpable.
That's neither here nor there in an episode of Columbo, of course. The emphasis is not on logic but character and the interaction of characters. And this is the episode in which Columbo puts one foot accidentally into a swimming pool, ruins his shoe, and goes about asking people out of the blue, "Where did you get those shoes?" And, "Sixty-five dollars? Is there any place you think I could get a pair of shoes that look just like them for sixteen or seventeen dollars?"
But -- and this must be said -- but Columbo always shows an extraordinary amount of intuition and has an abundance of good fortune in all his cases. In this case the intuition and the luck smother the plot.
Columbo, try as he might, simply cannot pin the deed on Robert Culp. There is a "loose end", so to speak. But Columbo has an epiphany in a travel bureau when a cuckoo clock announces the time. My legal responsibilities forbid me to divulge more of the plot or its solution. Oh, well, I guess I can say that Culp's motive for murdering Stockwell is not only weak but absent. Early on, Columbo mentions in passing, "The motive. That's what I don't get, the motive." It doesn't seem to occur to him that there IS no motive. If Culp stands to profit from Stockwell's death, it's never made clear why. He's not going to inherit money. He's not going to take over the ownership of the football team. He has nothing going with Stockwell's wife. So, cui bono? The rules of logic decree that Culp is unculpable.
That's neither here nor there in an episode of Columbo, of course. The emphasis is not on logic but character and the interaction of characters. And this is the episode in which Columbo puts one foot accidentally into a swimming pool, ruins his shoe, and goes about asking people out of the blue, "Where did you get those shoes?" And, "Sixty-five dollars? Is there any place you think I could get a pair of shoes that look just like them for sixteen or seventeen dollars?"