"Timothy Carey Was On Gunsmoke."

                            

Timothy Carey was on Gunsmoke.

The episode is called "The Gentleman."

I recommend you watch it if you are at all what you claim to be, id est, a discerning follower of culture.

Marshal Matt Dillon peremptorily kicked Carey out of Dodge, but not before Carey voiced the wildcat vow to come back. He was like Ezra Pound, who used to say, "I cease not to yowl."

Next scene, in walked Jack Cassidy.

Amazing cast this episode has!

Jack Cassidy was instantly spoiling for a fight with Timothy Carey. He happened to see the first scene in which Carey menaced the "working girl" with a heart of gold (VIRGINIA BAKER). Cassidy's character, a raffish gambler with a lopsided smile not to say a slantacular take on life, had a fatal heart condition, went to see the Doc, but he must revenge himself on the man who mistreated his lady love, the homely hooker (VIRGINIA BAKER), before he up and expires.

She was not exactly a pretty woman but Jack Cassidy was just moonstruck like a teenage polecat and declared her the best-looking women he ever seed.

"You can't have been looking very hard," I said to the TV at that point.

                           

The whole episode was a build-up to a showdown between these two classic character actors. These two Dick Tracy, spaghetti western grotesques.

Lovers of thespianism and cinema everywhere and for all eternity were robbed of any joy by Marshal Matt Dillon, who coolly subverted the destined meeting between the two. He punched Jack Cassidy out, rendered him unconscious with a single blow, slung him over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes and threw him into a post-chaise leaving Dodge post-haste.

Off it went stage right and then in came Timothy Carey, stage left, running after the departing stage. Matt Dillon punched him unconscious too. That was that. Deprived of the scene all refined lovers of the craft desired by that lowbrow (but brilliant) two-fisted lawman MATT DILLON!

(It is to be noted that both Timothy Carey and Jack Cassidy would later show up on multiple episodes of Columbo, but never together.  Carey never played the killer, he used to be a character who slung hash in a greasy spoon and made a bowl of chili that Columbo particularly liked. I think he was meant to be a recurring character and then he drifted away. He never did get to have that scene with Jack Cassidy.)

"Vladimir Putin Was On Charlie Rose."

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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.