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Columbo Goes to the Guillotine
Russian title: Коломбо идёт на гильотину · Russian version
The series returns after eleven years. A stage magician kills the psychic he has been debunking, using a guillotine illusion — and the lieutenant, greyer and slower, is exactly the same man.
Editor’s rating — 7.5 out of 10.
- Number
- 46 of 69
- Aired
- February 6, 1989
- Running time
- 88 min
- Director
- Leo Penn
- Writer
- William Read Woodfield
The case
- The killer
- Anthony Andrews as Elliott Blake
- The victim
- Anthony Zerbe as Max Dyson
- Guest cast
- Anthony Andrews, Karen Austin, Anthony Zerbe, James Greene, Robert Costanzo, Alan Fudge
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
Elliot Blake is a magician who has spent years exposing frauds, and Max Dyson is a psychic being tested by a military research programme. Blake has agreed to help run the test; Dyson has agreed to be tested. Both of them are cheating.
The murder uses Blake's own illusion. He rigs a guillotine designed to be survivable so that it is not, and Dyson dies during a demonstration in front of witnesses who believe they have watched an accident with a stage prop.
The motive is old business: Dyson exposed Blake years earlier and ruined him, and the return of the series brings back a murderer with a grievance that predates the episode.
The history between the two men is what gives the film its motive. Years earlier Dyson exposed Blake as a fraud in front of an audience, and the magician's career never recovered — he spent the intervening time working small rooms abroad while the psychic prospered.
The military research programme brings them together again, and Blake is invited precisely because a magician knows how a psychic cheats. He agrees, and then uses the position to prepare the guillotine that Dyson will demonstrate his powers with.
The illusion is designed to be survivable; Blake makes it lethal by altering the release, so that the blade falls properly for the first time in front of witnesses who are expecting a trick.
How Columbo gets him
The eleven-year gap shows immediately, and the film is unbothered by it. Falk is older, the coat is the same, and the manner has not changed at all — the first scene establishes that the character survived intact.
Columbo's interest in the illusion is genuine and useful. He wants to know how a guillotine that does not cut is built, which means he wants to know exactly what has to be changed to make it cut.
The mechanism narrows the suspects to people who could work the prop, and the timing narrows it further to the one who was alone with it.
The first exchange between Falk and Anthony Andrews establishes that eleven years have changed nothing: Columbo admires the props, asks how they work, apologises for taking up time, and is already three steps into the case.
The mechanical question is narrow — who could modify the guillotine, when, and with what — and it produces a very short list. Blake's mistake is not the modification but the cleaning: the prop is spotless when the police arrive, which no performer would bother with after a fatal accident.
The film also gives Columbo a rare moment of open anger, when he works out that Dyson himself was defrauding the research programme and that both men were liars.
Worth knowing
- The first ABC episode, broadcast February 1989, and the beginning of the second run.
- Anthony Andrews plays Blake, and the episode was directed by Leo Penn, father of Sean Penn.
- Falk had turned down several earlier attempts to revive the series and agreed to this one partly because the scripts came with fewer network conditions.
- The first ABC film, broadcast 6 February 1989, eleven years after the NBC run ended.
- ABC had approached Falk repeatedly through the 1980s; he agreed once the format was guaranteed to stay a two-hour film rather than a weekly series.
- Anthony Andrews was cast for his Brideshead Revisited profile, and the part was rewritten as English after he was hired.
Verdict
A solid, unshowy return. The plot is conventional, the running time is longer than the classic films needed, and none of that matters much — the point of the episode is that the character came back unchanged.
The guillotine finale is a good use of the format's favourite ending: the murderer's own trick, running one more time with him inside it.
As a mystery it is ordinary; as a return it is exactly right. The film's job was to prove the character had survived the gap intact, and it does that in the first five minutes.
The later ABC films would be better and worse, but none of them had to answer the question this one did.
Familiar faces
Actors who turn up in the series more than once — sometimes in very different parts.
- Alan Fudge as Mr. Harrow 3 episodes also in Publish or Perish, Columbo Goes to College
- Milt Kogan as Medical Examiner 3 episodes also in Make Me a Perfect Murder, Grand Deceptions
- Lenny Hicks as Eddie 2 episodes also in Murder, A Self Portrait
Cast data from TMDB, including uncredited bit parts. All the familiar faces →