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Columbo Cries Wolf
Russian title: Коломбо сеет панику · Russian version
A magazine publisher reports his business partner missing, knowing perfectly well where she is, and turns the search into a publicity campaign. One of the cleverest late-period plots, with a genuinely surprising second half.
Editor’s rating — 8.5 out of 10.
- Number
- 51 of 69
- Aired
- January 20, 1990
- Running time
- 92 min
- Director
- Daryl Duke
- Writer
- William Read Woodfield
The case
- The killer
- Ian Buchanan as Sean Brantley
- The victim
- Deidre Hall as Dian Hunter
- Guest cast
- Ian Buchanan, Rebecca Staab, Deidre Hall, Alan Scarfe, Cameron Oppenheimer, Mark Margolis
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
Sean Brantley runs a men's magazine with his partner Dian Hunter, who owns half of it and wants out. Her departure would cost him control of the company.
She disappears, and Brantley does something no murderer in the series has done before: he calls the police himself and then feeds the story to the press, turning the search for her into a circulation event. His confidence is total, because he has arranged the disappearance to be unsolvable.
The twist — which the episode is careful to earn — is that the plan is more layered than it looks, and the sequence of events the audience has been shown is not quite the sequence that happened.
Brantley's magazine is his whole standing, and Dian Hunter owns half of it. Her plan to sell out and move to England would hand control to people he cannot manage, which for a man who runs an empire of manufactured glamour is the end of everything.
The disappearance is announced by Brantley himself, which is the move nobody expects. He calls the police, gives interviews, offers a reward and turns the search into the biggest story his own magazine has ever run.
The confidence is total because the plan has a second floor: the sequence of events the audience believes it has watched is not quite the sequence that happened, and Brantley has built the misdirection into the timeline itself.
How Columbo gets him
Brantley is the most openly playful murderer of the ABC years, treating the investigation as a game he has already won and repeatedly inviting Columbo to admire the design.
The lieutenant's approach is to take the missing-person case entirely seriously while ignoring everything the publisher tells him about it. He searches the estate, the grounds and the outbuildings, and keeps returning to the parts of the property nobody has any reason to visit.
What makes the episode work is that Columbo is wrong for a while, and the film lets him be. The trap he eventually sets depends on Brantley believing the lieutenant has already lost.
The lieutenant's method here is unusually physical. He walks the estate repeatedly, measures distances, opens outbuildings, and behaves like a man conducting a search rather than an interrogation.
Brantley responds by making a game of it — inviting Columbo to the estate, feeding him theories, treating the investigation as content for the next issue. It is the most enjoyable villain performance of the ABC run.
What breaks it is patience with paperwork: delivery schedules, staff rotas and a wine order that does not match the story anyone has told.
Worth knowing
- Ian Buchanan plays Brantley, and the character was written as an English publisher to give the class comedy an extra edge.
- The episode is frequently named the best of the ABC run alongside Agenda for Murder.
- Directed by Daryl Duke, who also made the pilot of the miniseries The Thorn Birds.
- Ian Buchanan was primarily a soap actor; this remains his best-known role.
- The estate used for filming was a genuine Beverly Hills property, and the wine cellar sequence was shot in its actual cellar.
- Broadcast in January 1990; it is regularly voted the best ABC-era film after Agenda for Murder.
Verdict
Genuinely surprising, which is not something the format usually allows. The structural trick is fair and well-hidden, and Brantley is enormous fun.
Along with Agenda for Murder, this is the episode to point to when someone says the later films are not worth watching.
The structural trick is fair, well hidden and genuinely surprising, which is rare in a format that normally shows you everything in the first ten minutes.
It also demonstrates that the later years could still produce a first-class villain when the writing gave one room.
What the people who made it said
The first five films of the revival were made to look like the seventies. This is the first one allowed to look like its own decade.
“They kept the character the same, but said: let's do modern ways to tell a story, modern art direction, 1990s clothes, 1990s music. They brought Columbo kicking and screaming into the nineties — and it plays surprisingly well.”
They worried Falk would dislike the new manner. The opposite happened — helped, not least, by where and with whom it was shot.
“The murderer is patterned after Hugh Hefner, so most of the episode takes place in a knockoff of the Playboy Mansion, where Peter Falk is surrounded by Playboy bunnies in bikinis. You can tell he just had a blast shooting it.”
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.
- John Finnegan as Police Chief 12 episodes also in Blueprint for Murder, The Most Dangerous Match, Lovely But Lethal, A Friend in Deed, Last Salute to the Commodore and 6 more
- Morgan Jones as Wilson 3 episodes also in Uneasy Lies the Crown, Columbo Goes to College
- Deidre Hall as Dian Hunter 2 episodes also in Mind Over Mayhem
- Larry Grant as Reporter 2 episodes also in Murder in Malibu
- Bill Edward Rogers as Policeman 2 episodes also in Rest in Peace, Mrs. Columbo
Cast data from TMDB, including uncredited bit parts. All the familiar faces →