Day 255: Columbo, Murder in Malibu

Show: Columbo

Episode Particulars: S9EP6, “Murder in Malibu”, original airdate May 14^th, 1990.

 Summary: Wayne Jennings (Andrew Stevens) is a handsome man who has no job but very expensive tastes, which he seems to fund by seducing women. His current conquest is romance novel author Theresa Goren (Janet Margolin), who he’s actually proposed to, to the disapproval of Goren’s sister Jess McCann (Brenda Vaccaro). On the very night she accepts his proposal, Jennings, who was sleeping with another woman in Palm Springs, gets an angry phone call from Goren, saying she’s changed her mind and hates him. Angry, he drives back to her house, and shortly thereafter, we see him standing in the doorway of the living room, firing a gun, before we cut to see her body lying on the floor. But just as you suspect a person isn’t really dead if you don’t see a body in a horror movie, if you don’t see the victim actually die in a Columbo episode, there’s a good chance there’s something else going on…

Standalone Thoughts: On the one hand, I applaud this episode for trying something different. On the other hand, they’ve tried this particular technique before, and the result was the episode that I still consider the worst Columbo episode, “Last Salute to the Commodore”. Columbo just doesn’t work as well if it follows the conventional mystery formula where you don’t know who did it. This episode is significantly better than “Commodore”, thanks to the acting being generally good and things mostly following the traditional Columbo formula, but it’s still more flat than earlier episodes from this season.

Other than the plot, there are two things I want to mention, though unfortunately neither of them are good. One, I hate the twist that comes near the end of the episode. I suppose I should have seen it coming, but it’s incredibly cliché and adds nothing to the plot, since it comes so close to the end. Secondly, I feel like there’s something off about Stevens’ performance. His line readings, especially early on, just felt very stilted and more like “acting”. Given that Jennings is supposed to be a gold-digging slacker, though, I’m not sure if that was Stevens’ problem or if he was deliberately playing Jennings as sort of vacuous. Either way, it doesn’t always work for the character, and can therefore be distracting.

On the whole, I’d say this episode is mediocre. Falk is fine, but the material surrounding him just doesn’t quite hold together. I wouldn’t avoid this episode, but I wouldn’t necessarily seek it out, either. Which is a bit wishy-washy of me, but kind of sums things up.

                                          

Number of “Columbo-isms”: 4/6. There’s one or two mentions of his wife, his car pops up here and there, you can hear “This Old Man” on the soundtrack, and while he never seems to do it while leaving a room like he normally does, he definitely says versions of “Just One More Thing” at least three times. Relatively standard, all things considered.

Other: *The first man at the scene, Lieutenant Schultz (Floyd Levine), seems to know of Columbo by reputation, because he apologizes for moving Goren’s body by saying “I didn’t know that you’d be here”. Two things struck me as odd about this. First, Schultz seems impatient when Columbo lingers over minor details, when it seemed from that earlier exchange that he knew how Columbo operates. Secondly, why wouldn’t they move the body, especially if they’d taken photographs and done all they could by observing it at the scene of the crime? I suppose he meant that he would have held off if he’d known Columbo was coming so Columbo could see it for himself, but the way he said it made it sound like this was a Columbo-specific thing. Or maybe I’m reading too much into this.

*Season wrapup: This season was half-good, half-average. It frontloaded its best episodes, and while it was trying to do interesting things with the other three, I don’t think they quite managed to pull them off successfully. While “Rest in Peace, Mrs. Columbo” is somewhat memorable, I had no recollection of the other two, and they’ll probably fade from my memory again relatively quickly. They aren’t as bad as things like “Last Salute to the Commodore” or “Grand Deceptions”, but they aren’t the best episodes to end a season on. Still, the first three ensure that this season ranks fairly high overall, so it wasn’t a total loss.

Would This Hold Up in Court?: Despite everybody acting like Columbo’s clinching proof is damning evidence, I’m going to say no. It’s one of the flimsiest suppositions I’ve ever heard, and I highly doubt that it’s an error “only a man could make”. Maybe it’s just me, but something about this particular gotcha seems incredibly ridiculous, and I’m not entirely sure why. Maybe because it hinges on something so inconsequential. If anybody disagrees with me, I’d be more than happy to hear why. Maybe it’ll put things in perspective for me.