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The case

The killer

Tyne Daly as Dolores McCain and Greg Evigan as Harold McCain

The victim

Steve Forrest as Fred McCain, León Singer as Fernando and Greg Evigan as Harold McCain

Guest cast

Tyne Daly, Greg Evigan, Frank McRae, Don S. Davis, Steve Forrest, León Singer

Columbo is an inverted mystery: the murder opens the film and the killer is known from the first minutes. What you are watching for is how he proves it — see how the character works.

6:29

The murder

Dolores McCain intends to kill her husband Harold, a wealthy and openly unfaithful man, and she has a plan involving his car. Before she can carry it out, Harold is killed — run over in his own driveway.

Dolores did not do it, which puts her in the unusual position of being guilty of everything except the crime under investigation. She then has to protect a plan she never executed while pretending to grieve a man she was about to murder.

The actual killer is someone else in the household with a motive of their own, and the film's pleasure is in watching two separate schemes collide.

The household is the film's subject: a rich, unpleasant husband, a wife planning his death, a nephew with debts, and a groundsman who sees everything. Everyone in the house has a reason, which is precisely why the standard structure has been abandoned.

Dolores's own plan — sabotage the car, let the road do the work — is well advanced when Harold is killed in the driveway by a vehicle driven deliberately at him. She is left holding a scheme she can neither use nor explain.

The killer's motive, when it emerges, is money rather than passion, and the mechanism is the same car Dolores had been preparing. Two plans, one vehicle, and only one of them executed.

How Columbo gets him

Columbo works this one as a genuine puzzle, because for once the film has withheld enough to make the identity uncertain. The lieutenant is not confirming what the audience knows; he is closing a gap the audience also has.

The evidence is vehicular: how a car kills a man in a driveway, at what speed, and what that does to the body and the paintwork.

Tyne Daly plays Dolores as brittle and increasingly desperate, and her scenes with Falk have an edge the later films often lack — she cannot tell the truth without confessing to a different crime.

Columbo notices the wife first, because she behaves like a guilty woman — and she is, just not of this. Watching him work out that she is lying about something adjacent to the murder rather than the murder is the most interesting thread in the film.

The physical work is automotive: paint transfer, speed, the geometry of a body struck in a confined space. The evidence establishes intent long before it establishes identity.

The groundsman is the pivot, as household staff so often are in this series — the person nobody thinks to ask, who has been watching the family for years.

4:25

Worth knowing

• Tyne Daly, best known for Cagney & Lacey, gives one of the strongest guest performances of the ABC years.
• The episode is one of very few in the run where the audience does not see the murder committed.
• Directed by Vincent McEveety.
• The withheld-murderer structure had only been used once before, in Last Salute to the Commodore, and is handled far more successfully here.
• Tyne Daly won four Emmys for Cagney & Lacey; this was her only Columbo appearance.
• Broadcast in November 1992.

Verdict

Better than its reputation. The double-plot structure gives the film something to do beyond the usual, and Daly is excellent.

It also raises a question the series rarely touches: what to do with someone who intended murder and did not commit it.

One of the more interesting experiments of the later run, and proof that the format can survive losing its inverted structure when the characters are strong enough to carry it.

Daly's Dolores is also a rarity: a woman who fully intended murder, did not commit it, and is not let off the hook by the film for the distinction.

What the people who made it said

Quotes are in the speaker’s own words — from a transcript of the recording, or from the printed source. Players open at the right minute. Everything is shortened; the full version is in the source.

Familiar faces

Actors who turn up in the series more than once — sometimes in very different parts.

• Ed McCready as Ed5 episodesalso in Rest in Peace, Mrs. Columbo, Death Hits the Jackpot, It's All in the Game, Strange Bedfellows
• Gerry Okuneff as Dealer4 episodesalso in Death Hits the Jackpot, It's All in the Game, Strange Bedfellows
• John Petlock as Medical Examiner3 episodesalso in Murder in Malibu, It's All in the Game
• Tyne Daly as Dolores McCain2 episodesalso in Undercover
• Vincent J. McEveety as Policeman #22 episodesalso in It's All in the Game
• Buck Young as Guest at Wake2 episodesalso in Make Me a Perfect Murder

Cast data from TMDB, including uncredited bit parts. All the familiar faces →