More Tips For Junior Murderers.

1. If you're going to commit murder in Los Angeles, don't do it on Columbo's watch. Don't do it when an episode of Columbo is being filmed, or rather when the action of an episode is taking place in the fictional world.

2. If you're going to be on an episode of Columbo, don't kill anyone. Be a bit role. Be a waiter or a barman or a secretary or a construction site stalwart. Live out your life peaceably.

3. If you absolutely must commit the terrible sin of murder, kill somebody poor or irrelevant. Middle class even. Columbo don't care one damned hoot about blue collar stiffs.

4. It should be noted that Columbo is a fictional character. But perhaps the illusion of Columbo reduces homicides in LA among the fratres ignorantes, the sorts of people – and surprising their number – who believe Sherlock Holmes was an actual historical figure too.

Crime Detection Tips.

For all his canny and uncanny intuitions, Phil Columbo could solve the crimes a lot easier than people think.* Any and every time a murder occurs, he interviews those eccentric individuals who happen to be close to the victim. Strange satellites orbiting the corpse. As soon as Columbo finds his investigation being unduly challenged or perversely obstructed, even hindered, by one of those people close to the deceased, he has his man –– or woman.

Oftentimes it's a woman.

Who in real life would enthusiastically challenge the assumptions of the homicide detective on duty? Who would painstakingly try to lead the bumbling slewfoot agley? If you were innocent you'd stay  out of it wouldn't you. You wouldn't want to take up valuable time out of your life getting involved in morbidity. You'd get on with the job of living life.  If Columbo asked you something requiring your personal conjecture about the circumstances of the crime, you would shrug and say "I dunno. Whaddaya want. Christ sake you're the cop not me babe." You would not go to unusual lengths to conspicuously try to lead the police detective lieutenant off on a wild goose chase inducing him to believe a particular, often quite far-fetched, hypothesis. The only person who would waste time and energy doing that would be a very guilty person with a stake in the game. I mean a very obvious, singularly self-interested person, that is to say, the killer.

Crimes-olving [sic] is easy when you follow this simple Dick Tracy set-up.

* There is a legend, albeit it is a disgusting hoax, that Columbo's first name is "Philip." Incidentally, Columbo revealed to no less than Frank Sinatra his wife's first name in the course of a televised roast. Mrs. Columbo's first name, he said, is Rose.

Speaking of Frank, somebody on IMDB claims that the name "Frank" is "clearly visible" on Columbo's ID in two early episodes.

Has anybody commented on the irrefragable fact that Morse stole shamelessly from Columbo the motif of the slew foot with the unrevealed (forbidden) forename?

"A Heist is Not a Prison Escape." Or, "Open Letter to Governor Cuomo."

I read a piece in the Times of London about the two murderers who cunningly escaped from a prison in upstate New York, that so-called "Little Siberia". It had a remark by Andrew Cuomo who made a rudimentary error when he commented how "It could have been a plot from a movie... if there was a pot of money at the end of the rainbow."

Guy's fudging movie genres.
Guy's fucking up royally –– and doing so publicly.

Let me explain something to you, Governor Cuomo. A little Kinema 101 let us call it.

These are two separate genres you're talking about: heist movies and prison break movies. Perhaps they are similar, perhaps they are favoured by certain primo noir directors particularly from Hollywood and France, but they are separate nonetheless. In heist movies, a group of guys, regular "Johnsons" perhaps or "Yeggs" equally, determine to rob some joint (race track, bank, jeweller's) and it usually fucks up in some tragic way. Sterling Hayden collapsing in the field with the horse in, or having the meltdown at the airport. Bob Ryan and Harry Belafonte blowing each other up in Hudson, NY. You ever see that great movie, Odds Against Tomorrow? Well then perhaps you also seen Bob Le Flambeur, Kansas City Confidential, Le Doulos, The Killing, The Asphalt Jungle and Le Cercle Rouge. Becker's totally chouette Touchez Pas Au Grisbi concerns the sequel to a heist. They put on a heist season at Film Forum a few years back and it was one of the best things to happen ever, and I must have attended nearly every film I could have, but still even they neglected to include the magnificent Big Deal on Madonna Street, and that's a heist film too. Some of my favourite films are heist movies and some of yours are too.

Ditto prison escape movies, but they're diffunt is my thesis. A Man Escaped (Bresson), Le Trou (Becker), and less successful in my view, Jules Dassin's Brute Force. Something dumb about the end of that movie but I can't remember what now.

One is about escape, the other is about trying to get money without working for it, at least not in a conventional legal way. Oftentimes there is a lot of mental acumen and ingenuity exhibited by the heisters, which almost makes you think, "Ah fuck it, they deserve the cash after coming up with such a beautiful graceful scheme to rob the bank. And who loses after all, why it's just the taxman." But after all who pays the taxman? You and I!

I said to my dad in the car today, "I been engaging the taxman in an intricate dance of my own devising for a very long time now."

The same goes for the prison escapees. These are disgusting criminals, but in another sense we are rooting for them to beat the system and get out of there! It's an existential analogy and again they evidence some canny thinking when they plan the escape.

Like the killers on Columbo. You have to admire them for their creativity and thoroughness, even though murder is a horrible sin, but Columbo always catches them out somehow.

Criminals plan heists, and criminals escape from prison. In both cases they show great invention and originality and pluck and spunk and derring-do. Yet still a heist movie is not a prison break movie. Two different things, Governor Cuomo. People could fumble a heist, get sent to the hoosegow, and then escape that same hoosegow, and they'd have done a heist and then a prison break, but show me the movie where both things happen sequentially. It's one or it's the other. Yet Governor Cuomo has them all happen in one movie in his addled brain. These two guys escape "Little Siberia" and then promptly engage in a heist.

Cuomo went on to compound his sin of film ignorance by remarking that it was like The Shawshank Redemption except that the hero of that shitty film was a great guy and these guys were not so. These guys were cold-blooded criminals.

That may be so, but it's a boring thing to say!

Boring comment to make!

Plus this guy Cuomo emails me about on average at least once a week, even though it's been a year since I lived in the great city of New York.

Has it really been a year?

Columbo: "If Thine Eye Offend Thee."

You know what's great about Phil Columbo, he's never a bum to a working stiff.
Blue-collar guys, some of them anyway, come up to him and try to exercise their feeble impotent superiority on him because they assume wrongly that he's one of the few microorganisms inferior to them. He's got a fake eyeball and a dirty trench-coat. Then he reveals to them that he's a homicide lieutenant, but he always does so gently. He doesn't crow. He doesn't lord it over them. He doesn't trumpet uproariously like Chanticleer in the revelation. He is like the Buddha or Odin, walking down the country road dressed as a degenerate, a vagrant.

NB and uncoincidentally Odin also only had one eye.

I was talking about it to Pricey. About Columbo's modesty and majesty.
I said, "He's like Zatoichi. That rare thing, a humble hero."

(Zatoichi had no eyes –– or rather he had two eyes, but neither one worked a lick since childhood.)

"Columbo's Progress." Or, "Tips For Junior G-Men."

I do not intend to detract from the stellar sleuthmanship of COLUMBO, not an iota. However, every crime he's ever solved with great subtlety and ingenuity could actually be solved in less time in a more banal manner. By a three day old child.

Every week, Columbo comes upon the murder scene to investigate, and while he is doing so, one person in particular with some connection to the deceased takes a particular, you might say peculiar, interest in Columbo's progress.

Men cluster to me like moths around a flame

But if their wings burn I know I'm not to blame.

The killers fall fatally into a protracted, although (absurdly) ostensibly casual, dialogue about the murder and how it was done. The killer always tries with pronounced vigour to discount each of Columbo's ideas, and to convince him that his hypotheses are wrong. They very reluctantly concede his point finally, and pull an obviously thwarted expression.

Why doesn't anyone ever have the good sense to shut up and act uninterested? Or don't talk to Columbo at all for fear of incriminating yourself with hubris? Go take a vacation. But they must stick around. They are drawn to Columbo. They must argue it.  The vanity of the assassin! The brass neck of the psychopath.

Columbo should by now be able to identify the killer as the person who invariably takes an inordinate interest in the progress of the case, who tries to argue over every conjecture with him, who soon gets "frustrated," now peeved, finally accuses him of harassment and threatens to call his superiors.

To all this, Columbo would sagely nod and remind me: you need motive you need proof and you need opportunity.

Self-Fashioning in Columbo.

Given that Columbo is formulaic to (or past) the point of perversity, and given that Columbo –– unlike every other detective series –– forfeits the prick-teasing withholding of the killer's identity until the end of the show, you might think that Columbo was a hard sell. To continue with my vulgar figure, choosing Columbo over Inspector Morse (for instance) is like favoring premature ejaculation over delayed gratification. It is like continuing to leaf through a pornographic magazine after the "money-shot" has been and gone. It flies in the face of Aristotle, who remarked that man is the only animal to experience sadness after the sexual act. It defies the tantric logic of Sting and Trudie Styler who must postpone the event eternally –– how they jealously fetishize withholding pleasure from each other!

However, I seem to be drifting from my subject and along the way I have summoned up some grotesque images.

One reason why the strictly formulaic aspect of Columbo is irrelevant to the pleasure derived from the viewing experience is the calibre and the variety of the guest stars. This has been said before. However a further variable, I have started to perceive, particularly as the seasons progress, is the personality of Columbo. This can veer all over the place. It is subject to frequent self-fashioning, as they say all too frequently in the academy. Self-fashioning or auteur-fashioning. It is said that Falk was his own man though and I believe it.

In the early seasons, I thought Columbo is like Zatoichi. There is a similarity in that both men are seemingly shamblers, they are humble, they bow their heads and do not swagger or rear up, and yet they are unsurpassed in their respective cosmic roles: the first a homicide detective, the latter a roaming swordsman. They are, from an exterior perspective, unimpressive, yet they contain within them the gold and jewels of exceptional abilities. Zatoichi is blind (although Katsu Shintaro obviously was not). Peter Falk was half-blind. It is to be assumed, although so far as I have seen it has not been commented on, that Columbo also has a fake eyeball. That's interesting but it has little bearing on the case.

Columbo, however, shows more personality variance from episode to episode than Zatoichi does. I do not say categorically that this is preferable –– I like that Zatoichi's shining goodness is an eternal in a dark, foul world. We need Zatoichi like we need Emerson –– to guide us through the last days before the crack of doom.

Columbo's personality zig-zags are interesting rather as Louis C.K.'s purposeful lack of continuity is. (There was the excellent episode of Louis with Seinfeld [playing himself as a consummate jerk] where Louis ends up having to pay the wealthy family of the girl he punched when she tickled him in bed several million dollars in installments for the rest of his life. We do not presume that in each subsequent episode of Louis Louis actually has to maintain these payments –– the event happened and then left continuity, like a dream subsiding.) In one episode Columbo is tugging his forelock and coughing. In another he is subdued. In another he is reeling about, bleary-eyed, half-insane. He craves coffee. He is in his pajamas. He has his dick half out at a bar-mitzvah.  He is usually star-struck, even while he is poised to send that same "star" to the hoosegow or the death chamber. He blunders at social events. He frequently upsets the "help". Did you see the one where he nearly drove the snobbish elderly female retainer to a breakdown with rage. Other times he is severe, angry, even vengeful. The Biblical God. In the third of the great Jack Cassidy episodes he pursues Cassidy's ex-Nazi stage magician doggedly like one of the Eumenides –– Alecto, say. In the superb "Last Salute to The Commodore" he is more like Jerry Lewis.

And there I thought, They should have had an episode with Jerry Lewis as the killer.

 "Last Salute to The Commodore" is understandably a divisive episode in the bustling Columbo community. A casual survey I made after watching it turned up no end of dismay. A few people declared it a work of brilliance. More of them were writing to their Congressman and demanding a government inquiry into how this thing came to be made. I'd by and large side with the former. Some of it is magnificent; for instance, the avant-garde aspects, when Falk is channeling in equal parts his friend Timothy Carey, Antonin Artaud at his fist-biting best and also the Buddha in his rub my belly for luck aspect. Conversely, it is unusually conventional in its climax –– the seeming tribute to Agatha Christie. Whither Ustinov in his white suit. Problems include: the frazzled, soused daughter of the Commodore. She spends the whole episode in a drunken stupor, and over time this palls. The viewer finds that he wants to administer a cold bucket of water over her head. You want to say: Sober up. Join a club. Make friends. Get laid. Get a new hobby. Like the girl doing the Transcendental Meditation. Both of them were good looking by the way. The lush and the TM girl.*

There are several sublime scenes in it. The much-discussed, and protracted, scene where Columbo gets everybody to pile into his car and then sits in Robert Vaughn's lap and musses with his hair. He does this again later, on board the yacht ("yawl"). In this version, Columbo seems to favour crude, omnivorous sexual harassment as a key crime-solving technique. Let it be noted that Dick Tracy never did that. Also commendable is the endless, mirthful scrutiny of the terminology peculiar to the maritime community. How it makes us lubbers chuckle. "That's the mizzen mast jibe?" There is the scene on the docks where everything is shouted over the sound of a nearby drill. Falk visibly weeps with laughter in this scene. The viewer has a certain wistful consciousness of not being entirely in on the joke.

In this episode Columbo also has a young double, with a Polish surname, who inexplicably asks that he be known as "Mac". Columbo promptly, and gamely, does so. "Ya got any Irish blood in ya Mac?" He asks Mac this several times. "Ya sure ya haven't got any Irish blood in ya Mac?" Mac is a doppelganger of sorts –– the chief loves him, and he loves Columbo. He even buys a raincoat (NB, "mac") like Columbo's which shows up (again, inexplicably) in the middle of the denouement. Columbo picks it up from the back of a chair and absently asks, "Whose is this?"

The episode is hilarious and disturbing. The Columbo myth is fraying at the parameter –– the comforts of the formula have vanished as soon as it is discovered that Robert Vaughn was not the killer after all. The Columbo convention is disrupted, Columbo is virtually unrecognisable and anything could happen now. A lot of diehard viewers resent that Columbo is somewhat arrogant, wisecracking and winking in this episode. One commentator (that rare thing, an admirer of the episode) is certain that cast and crew had all ingested LSD before filming even began.

In fact, in the previous episode to this one, the also-amazing "Now You See Him" with Jack Cassidy as the Nazi legerdemain performer, Columbo is already in a new mode of existence. I said that he is vengeful (I compared him floridly to Alecto from the Aeneid). He is also, once again, arrogant and sadistic to another admirer, Bob Dishy reprising Sgt. Wilson. In this episode Columbo's wife has crucially bought him a new coat, a nice coat that looked good on him. It's a good coat. I remember thinking, If only Columbo would wear the new coat. But no, Columbo spends the episode trying to lose the coat. Wilson keeps finding it again for him. Cue muffled laughter. But my point is that Columbo's identity is in flux. His irritation with Wilson eventually turns into admiration when Wilson distinguishes himself as a slewfoot in his own right (knowing that rare article, what Columbo does not, about the typewriter) and contributes to solving the crime.

The recurrence of murderer-actors such as Jack Cassidy, Patrick McGoohan and Robert Culp is, like Louis's changing array of wives and small details, a subtle disruption of the sacred continuity traditionalists insist upon. How can Jack Cassidy now be a bad novelist, now a free man again in the guise of a publisher, now a legerdemain man? He is always Jack Cassidy after all. (In the third iteration, much is made of Cassidy's character's shifting identity –– he emerges blood-besmattered from the deathcamps of Germany to posing as a Hungarian end man, to posing as an Englishman, to posing as an American.)

"Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, and I shall repay."

Are we, each season, deposited in an alternate universe, where the same people (Cassidy, McGoohan, Culp) have different occupations? And yet they are always killers, and they are always thwarted by Columbo, albeit each Columbo is also slightly different? I am reminded of the Borges line from "Death and the Compass" (I last used this quotation quite shamelessly in reference to an episode of Dog the Bounty Hunter):

"The next time I kill you," said Scharlach, "I promise you the labyrinth made of the single straight line which is invisible and everlasting."

(When did I become the man with the Borges quotation?)

(Why am I still not employed by a university?)

That being said, Columbo scotches my thesis, because several times he has recalled past cases from previous seasons in tedious detail. He recalls the entire story in an incidental anecdote. This is peculiar, because when that motif –– an old adventure recalled in brief –– is usually employed artistically, it refers to an adventure that has not actually been delineated before; it is employed as a teaser, a story that has never actually been set down, like a fictional book within a fictional book. 

I once dreamt that I was reading a book by Proust, one that is not in any of the Proust bibliographies I am certain. 

(Idea for a bibliography category: "Dreamt Books by the Author.")

It was only at the end of this magnificent story, anyway, when Columbo is rowing off towards Japan to meet his wife at the yacht club, that it was revealed that the director of this minor masterpiece was that expert at brilliant stories with mystical not to say deeply unsatisfying conclusions, Patrick McGoohan. I saw the name –– I had what Oprah rather sickeningly calls my "aha moment". 

It is well-established that The Prisoner ended unsatisfactorily and as the result of events which occurred off-camera which precipitated a distinct compromise. McGoohan elected to leave England to live in sunny California, and so he rushed out (for Lew Grade's sake) a nonsensical ending to a job he had grown bored of. "Number Six", who was formerly known as John Drake ("Danger Man") eventually shows up in California as "Nelson Brenner" in the Columbo episode pointedly titled "Identity Crisis"(directed by Patrick McGoohan). Brenner dresses at one point in a blazer intended expressly to recall Number Six. 

As one commentator on IMDB sagely observes, "he even has the nerve to deliver the line 'Be Seeing You' repeatedly... What a star!" Interestingly, this excellent episode is also marred by McGoohan's regrettable signature, his Achilles heel: vagueness of intent and lack of proper closure. I don't have a clue why Nelson Brenner is secretly posing as an aging Eastern European who is apparently #1 on the CIA's Most Wanted list unless the answer is existential ennui. 

Vagueness of intent and lack of proper closure.

Yes.

[* I say nothing here of TM or its present messiah, Mr. DAVID LYNCH; see earlier writings elsewhere.]

"Columbo: Klaus Kinski is Still The King."

Columbo. That game of cat and mouse... where the cat always loses!
Badly!
The cat gets sent to the electric chair!

I have been watching Columbo, and I thought it only proper and right to mention this one episode that had the short German from Jules et Jim in it as the killer. 

I'm waiting for Klaus Kinski to show up in an episode as a backgammon grandmaster posing as a snaggletoothed harelipped drifter. 

Klaus Kinski as a bug-eyed bozo from Jabba's sail barge or the cantina scene. 

Klaus Kinski as Greedo. 

[In the ravaged voice of TRAILER GUY:] Klaus Kinski is: Bossk. A twelve-foot tall surly alien bounty hunter the color and consistency of peanut-butter diarrhea with all the personality of that universally-reviled medium. Who killed Han Solo? Who framed Jabba? Leave it to Columbo to work it out in his inimitable bumbling fucking way! 

Another episode you could have Jean-Louis Trintignant. 
(Did you ever see him with Kinski in The Great Silence?) 
Lino Ventura. 
Robert Ryan. 
Gabin. 
Delon. 
Phillipe Noiret. 
Pier Paolo Pasolini.
Michael Lonsdale playing Boyd Rice.

[TRAILER GUY:] "Peg Bundy" is Lisa Carver in a Hallmark miniseries: The Suckdog Story. 

There was a Columbo with Vincent Price on it in which he wasn't even the killer. Like in Laura. Imagine that, having Vincent Price and then you have the supreme dandyish audacity, or perversity, or luxurious airiness, to not have him be the killer. 
The Producer goes, "We just keep him around for the lurid local color." 
"We kind of like to keep him around for various reasons mostly pertaining to variously yucks and chuckles." 

Like Patrick McNee in that episode that took place on the cruise ship. The killer that week was Robert Vaughn from The Man From UNCLE. "Pat" was just there to enjoy the cruise I think and pop on the captain's cap when needed and put in the odd scene of support acting ("mentoring") when required. He was there, I think, to steer the ship through the "narrows".

This episode I'm watching now has acclaimed nutburger and indomitable scenery-destroyer-and-devourer, and did I mention that he is a magnificent marvelous thespian, THE LATE JACK CASSIDY, as an ex-Nazi stormtrooper, a stage magician and BTW the killer. 

This man was David Cassidy's outhouse rat of a father. Great classic dissipated Hollywood type. Terrific delineator of dissipated outhouse rats.  Look up his online bio sometime for a transient experience of shapeless, aimless ("shameless") shambling pleasure. It could be it's the greatest story ever told. Guy's that rare thing a great actor. 

He once played the role of the even greater (y mas muy loco) JACK BARRYMORE, A.K.A. "The Profile". He (JACK CASSIDY) was himself in turn portrayed by the sometimes-great (sometimes not) MALCOLM McDOWELL in a made-for-TV Hallmark movie about the life of (no not Lisa Suckdog) his son DAVID CASSIDY. Those must have been the lean years, the desolate years of hard-fought alimonies, for McDowell. Before Entourage. Before he got to share screen time with Jeremy Piven. 

PIVEN that large wig with a small man underneath it!
PIVEN that swaggering toupee, that large false aegis over a pee-wee personality.
JERMEY PIVEN says: "It's not a toupee. It's really not. It's plugs. I had mercury poisoning. My life was at stake and I got plugs."