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Caution: Murder Can Be Hazardous to Your Health
Russian title: Кого убила капля никотина · Russian version
A television host murders the network executive blackmailing him over a manslaughter he covered up years earlier — and does it by exploiting the man's fear of illness. George Hamilton's second Columbo murder.
Editor’s rating — 7 out of 10.
- Number
- 57 of 69
- Aired
- February 20, 1991
- Running time
- 86 min
- Director
- Daryl Duke
- Writer
- Sonia Wolf & Patricia Ford & April Raynell
The case
- The killer
- George Hamilton as Wade Anders
- The victim
- Peter Haskell as Budd Clarke
- Guest cast
- George Hamilton, Peter Haskell, Penny Johnson Jerald, Louis Herthum, Robert Donner, Rick Najera
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.
The murder
Wade Anders presents a true-crime programme about real police cases, which gives the episode its joke: a man who makes television about criminals being investigated for murder. Budge Bulkeley, a network executive, has found a videotape proving Anders killed someone years ago and covered it up.
Bulkeley is a hypochondriac obsessed with his own health, and Anders uses that. He substitutes the man's medication, timing the dose so the death reads as natural causes in a person who was always complaining about his heart.
The murder is unusually intimate — it requires knowing the victim's habits precisely, which Anders does, because they have worked together for years.
The blackmail is the good part of the plot. Bulkeley does not want money; he wants Anders's programme, his slot and his influence, and he has a tape that proves the presenter killed a man in a hit-and-run years earlier and walked away.
Anders's answer uses everything he knows about his colleague. Bulkeley takes pills constantly, complains about his heart to anyone who will listen, and carries a supply everywhere — a man who has spent years announcing exactly how he could be killed.
The substitution is made in advance, so the death happens at a moment when Anders is demonstrably elsewhere and in public. It is the only murder in the series where the killer is not in the same building, city or hour as the victim.
How Columbo gets him
The true-crime setting gives Falk good material: Columbo watching a dramatised version of police work and being politely unimpressed by all of it.
The medical route is the way in. A natural death that arrives at a convenient moment is worth an autopsy, and the substitution shows up once someone thinks to look for it.
Anders is smooth rather than clever, and the film's most enjoyable scenes are the ones where he tries to use his television knowledge of investigations on a man who does them for a living.
Columbo's first difficulty is that nobody suspects anything. A hypochondriac with a bad heart dies of a heart problem, and the paperwork closes itself. The lieutenant's interest starts with the tape everybody is looking for and nobody will describe.
The true-crime programme gives the film its best scenes. Anders keeps offering professional insight into police work, drawn entirely from his own show, and Columbo keeps accepting it gravely.
The autopsy reopens everything, and once the substituted medication is established the timeline narrows to the small number of people with access to a man's own pill bottle.
Worth knowing
- George Hamilton also played the killer in A Deadly State of Mind fifteen years earlier, making him one of the few repeat murderers.
- The episode features Columbo's dog being groomed, with instructions relayed from Mrs Columbo — one more piece of evidence for her existence.
- Directed by Daryl Duke.
- This is George Hamilton's second Columbo murder, fifteen years after A Deadly State of Mind — one of only four actors to kill twice in the series.
- The dog-grooming scene includes instructions passed on from Mrs Columbo, another entry in the long list of second-hand evidence for her existence.
- Broadcast in February 1991.
Verdict
Middling but watchable, with a decent method and a nicely observed victim. The hypochondria is used as characterisation rather than a gimmick.
Hamilton is better here than in his first appearance, largely because the character is allowed to be frightened.
A better episode than its reputation, mostly because the method is genuinely original: a murder committed by editing somebody's medicine cabinet weeks in advance.
The satire of true-crime television has also aged into something sharper than the writers can have intended.
Familiar faces
Actors who turn up in the series more than once — sometimes in very different parts.
- Steven Gilborn as George 4 episodes also in Uneasy Lies the Crown, Columbo Goes to College, Columbo and the Murder of a Rock Star
- Charles D. Miller as Crime Scene Cop 4 episodes also in Agenda for Murder, Columbo Goes to College, Columbo and the Murder of a Rock Star
- Robert Donner as Arnie 3 episodes also in Any Old Port in a Storm, Undercover
- George Hamilton as Wade Anders 2 episodes also in A Deadly State of Mind
Cast data from TMDB, including uncredited bit parts. All the familiar faces →