Day 258: Columbo, Columbo and the Murder of a Rock Star

Show: Columbo

Episode Particulars: S10EP3, “Columbo and the Murder of a Rock Star”, original airdate April 29^th, 1991.

 Summary: Former rock star Marcy (Cheryl Paris) has been in a long-term relationship with lawyer Hugh Creighton (Dabney Coleman). However, both of them have been up to shady dealings; Creighton is corrupt and Marcy’s having an affair with her old drummer, Neddy Malcolm (Julian Stone). In an attempt to make things easier for himself, Creighton drugs some champagne, arranges for Malcolm to drink it and fall unconscious, then kills Marcy and tries to make it look like Malcolm did it. I can’t even pretend to say it’s a perfect crime this time around, especially since his legal associate Trish Fairbanks (Shera Danese) puts two and two together almost immediately. As for Columbo, he takes a little longer to figure it out, but given all the mistakes Creighton made, a conviction is inevitable.

Standalone Thoughts: This episode strikes me as really, really messy. It’s not as frustrating or annoying to watch as some of the other episodes (“Last Salute to the Commodore” immediately springs to mind), but there are all these disparate elements that don’t fit together very well. And to make matters worse, it’s not just a case of padding that might have worked in other circumstances, because a lot of the material directly related to the case has issues too.

The problems actually start with the title. You would assume, based off the title, that the story would have something to do with rock music, maybe a band member killing another member who’s threatening to go solo, or something to do with a rival band. You can almost see the culture clash as Columbo investigates the loud, boisterous rock scene, and maybe even starts to get into the music a bit. Instead, while Marcy was apparently a rock star some time back, it barely ties into the plot. Other than an establishing shot panning over her awards, several throwaway mentions, and a cameo by the singer Little Richard, rock music has practically nothing to do with the plot. A title that revolved around champagne would have fit much better, because I think discussion of the champagne corks comes up more often than Marcy’s career does.

Next, Creighton’s actions don’t make a great deal of sense. In fact, they make so little sense that I’ll have to mark the rest of the paragraph as SPOILERS just so I can talk about them properly. Creighton makes two huge mistakes and one baffling choice, all of which come back to bite him and feel vaguely contrived when they’re all piled together. One, he borrows the truck from his gardener while said gardener is working on another house. It makes sense so Creighton can come and go without suspicion. But then, instead of putting the truck back in its original place or somewhere close by, he parks it two blocks away, just so he can immediately get to his own car. There were ways you could make this work, but two blocks away just snaps my suspension of disbelief. Two, Creighton uses champagne from his own private stock to make it look like two bottles were drunk and to hide the evidence of the drugs he used. Unfortunately for him, while the champagne he uses and the champagne Marcy uses are the same brand, Creighton’s champagne is a little fancier and therefore has different corks/labels, which Creighton doesn’t immediately notice. But when Creighton snuck into the house to drug the champagne, he saw there were lots of champagne bottles in there. Why dip into his own stock when he could just open an untampered bottle of champagne that was already available? And three, we find out later (although it’s hinted at early on) that Creighton was using Fairbanks to establish his alibi, which allowed her to get suspicious. Given what he was asking her to do (wear a mask with his face on it and deliberately speed), what possible explanation could he have given her to try to justify it? He obviously didn’t tell her the truth because she blackmails him later on. It’s not an important fact in the grand scheme of things, but it’s so bizarre that not having an explanation just makes it feel like Admiral Plot Device was at play.

SPOILERS OVER. Then there are the plot elements that could work, but aren’t given the attention they deserve. Fairbanks deduces fairly early on that Creighton murdered Marcy, and decides to use that to her advantage. In another episode, this could have been an interesting subplot, or maybe even the cause of a second murder. Here, Creighton just seems to accept it and does nothing about it. Or there’s the bit where Columbo and the sergeant assigned to the case, Huback (Sondra Currie) try to track down Malcolm. When Malcolm realizes it’s the cops, he bolts out the back way while Huback gives chase, in a scene straight out of your average police procedural. Columbo, meanwhile, calmly examines the scene and uses the information he finds to catch Malcolm in a roundabout way. This could have been a funny subversion of the usual police media tropes, but the bit goes on far too long and involves Columbo resorting to (in my eyes) questionable actions. In fact, Columbo seems a bit off numerous times this episode in several different ways, so now I’m wondering if the problem was on Falk’s end or the script’s. Though given everything else I’ve just outlined, I’m pretty sure it was the script.

Although I’ll admit that the last act has stuck with me ever since I saw it, the episode as a whole is definitely lower tier Columbo. There’s too much going on, way too much use of coincidence, and quite a lot that seems lifted from previous episodes (including a bit from “Murder Under Glass” that would have been the perfect place to slip in a continuity nod). The end result is something that feels mostly unoriginal and incohesive, and definitely one I won’t be rewatching very often, if at all. It’s not completely worth skipping, but I’d definitely watch a fair bit of early Columbo before you took a look at this one.

Number of “Columbo-isms”: 5/6. Columbo’s car is semi-important to the story, he mentions his wife twice (though one of them is used to lead in to discussing his nephew, who’s related to the episode’s running gag), there’s a bit of fumbling (plus an unprompted offering of a pen), “This Old Man” appears on the soundtrack, and Columbo kind of has a double “Just one more thing” at one point. Plus, Columbo ditches the raincoat for one scene and puts the top down on his car, both of which are rare enough that they’re worth mentioning.

Other: *Right from the start, we learn that Creighton hired a private detective (John Martin) to investigate Marcy to see if she was having an affair. Said detective wears a suit and fedora, and when we get a glimpse of his office, it looks like it would be right at home in a noir, minus the video recording technology. Oh, and the detective’s name? Sam Marlowe. I love a good noir homage, but this was ridiculously out of place.

*While I love cats in general and can always appreciate a good lion statue, I have to say the ones that flank Creighton’s house aren’t the greatest;

The longer you look at it, the more undignified the expression on the lion’s face gets. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if that was an emoticon face somewhere.

*The interactions between Columbo and Sergeant Huback are kind of interesting to me, albeit for the wrong reasons. There’s an easy banter between them, which is nice, but it almost feels a bit flirtatious at times (especially on Columbo’s end). Given that the first name we see after the episode’s title is Shera Danese, Falk’s wife, I actually thought she was playing Huback, and we were getting a bit of a meta moment, especially when Columbo started to talk about champagne and romance. Then I realized Danese was playing Fairbanks instead, and I was just left confused. Maybe she originally was supposed to play Huback and there was a change at the last minute…?

*When Columbo comes to investigate the scene of the crime later on, he’s wearing a baseball cap with NFI written on it. Not only is it weird to see Columbo in a hat, I have no idea what those letters are supposed to stand for. It doesn’t seem to be either sports or police related. If anyone knows the meaning of it, feel free to let me know.

Would This Hold Up in Court?: Hard to say. It’s acknowledged earlier in the episode that Columbo needs stronger evidence to convict Creighton, and while what he ends up with still doesn’t seem like incredibly strong evidence to me, at least he’s got something (though it’s a massive coincidence that seems to have come about thanks to Admiral Plot Device). What’s more, Columbo got all his evidence without resorting to trickery, which is a bit of a minor miracle, really.