Picked up the first season of 'Columbo ' at the local thrift shop and have been enjoying it. What a character , a great detective. I was thinking about various episodes over the course of the show and one of my favourites is in the first season called ' Murder By The Book ' which was directed by Steven Spielberg and starred the great Jack Cassidy as the murderer. Cassidy went on to play two more murderers on the show and is probably the penultimate killer in the series. Your faves?
My favorite episode is probably "A Friend In Deed", where Columbo matches wits against the police commissioner himself* *Yes I know he's technically the deputy commissioner. But that's just for legal protection. As far as I'm concerned, he's the Big Kahuna.
Jack Cassidy and Patrick McGoohan were the perfect villains for Columbo. It’s no surprise they made multiple appearances. Columbo still remains one of the greatest characters ever. Just wonderful!
Add Robert Culp to the mix of multiple appearances. I wish he would have done a guest spot in the 90s as the villian. He did appear in one of the later episodes playing the father of the murderer. Culp and Leonard Nimoy were both active actors in the 1990s and could have done a Columbo.
I remember that one. Richard Kiley was Another fave episode is where Robert Culp is the head of an investigation agency where he kills a client's wife and is so desparate to get Columbo off his back he offers him a job.
The colors on that show were so deep, like dark cherry wood furniture- oh wait that's what it was. DIE RUMPLED
I remember one where a girl was hypnotized into thinking the concrete below her was a cool pool, so she strips and jumps off her tenth floor balcony. He carries one of her heels around in his pocket like a perv (it was that little link that always starts him thinking).
The batting average is extraordinary. Other than some that have been mentioned already, I've great affection for: Requiem for a Falling Star (Anne Baxter) By Dawn's Early Light (Patrick McGoohan) Troubled Waters (Robert Vaughn)
'Troubled Waters' is a great episode.If Columbo's wife hadn' t won those cruise tickets, Robert Vaughan would have got away with murder.
As much as I love those early Columbo episodes I do have a small beef . Oftentimes Columbo was on the murderer' s case too quickly. He ' d meet the killer and almost immediately be suspicious for no apparent reason.
It seems like it's everyone's least favorite episode, but I really like Last Salute to the Commodore, with Robert Vaughn. It's an actual who-dunnit, where it's ambiguous who committed the multiple crimes until the end. It's a departure from the Columbo formula, which is kinda why I like it. Also, it's just *weird* The whole episode has a strange feel to it. It's really quiet. The way Columbo bumbles around is just strange. And I think that's why I like it. Directed by Patick McGoohan, it was a later episode in the regular series, and I think he was pushing what he could get away with. I guess it was heavily promoted as an actual mystery movie, and people despised it when it came out.
Double Exposure. I remember watching it back in the early 90s and Columbo started to become a favourite TV programme of mine from then.
Robert Culp was the killer (again) in Double Exposure. I meant I started watching the 70s Columbo when it was repeated around 1990 or whenever it was.
This never struck me as so weird, for four reasons: (1) Columbo “played the percentages.” For example, if a wife died, odds were, it was probably the husband who killed her. (2) He had a keen eye for facts that didn’t fit. (3) The killer was usually like Raskolnikov in “Crime and Punishment.” He or she would behave unnaturally, and tip Columbo off. (4) Columbo was a professional who’d done his job well for a long time. That gave him what seemed like a “sixth sense” in identifying suspects, but in truth it was the rapid, logical synthesis of dozens of variables, almost subconsciously.
My favs were the ones with Patrick McGoohan. He brought a sharpness and nervous energy to his portrayals that worked perfectly.
In one episode (I think with Culp) he tells the murderer something like, "Some cases it takes me awhile to sort things out, others I never have a clue... But I think I knew it was you from the beginning." So we only see his most successful cases...
Oh ! My mistake. I thought that was the one where Van Dyke was a famous photographer. But I know the one you're talking about.