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Grand Deceptions
Russian title: Большие манёвры · Russian version
A retired colonel murders the caretaker who has found out he is skimming from his employer's estate, and hides it inside a war game played with toy soldiers. The episode where an evidence bag reads 'Frank Columbo'.
Editor’s rating — 6.5 out of 10.
- Number
- 49 of 69
- Aired
- May 1, 1989
- Running time
- 90 min
- Director
- Sam Wanamaker
- Writer
- Sy Salkowitz
The case
- The killer
- Robert Foxworth as Frank Brailie
- The victim
- Andy Romano as Lester Keegan
- Guest cast
- Robert Foxworth, Janet Eilber, Stephen Elliott, Milt Kogan, Andy Romano, Michael McManus
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
Colonel Frank Brailie manages the estate of a wealthy general who stages elaborate historical battle re-enactments on his grounds. Brailie has been stealing steadily from the accounts, and the estate's caretaker has the paperwork to prove it.
He kills him during a re-enactment, when the grounds are full of costumed men firing blanks and nobody can distinguish one bang from another. The body is left where a stray accident might plausibly have put it.
The war game is both the cover and the flaw: an event that elaborate has organisers, schedules and dozens of people whose movements are documented.
The estate is the point of the episode. General Padget's grounds exist to host historical re-enactments, staffed by enthusiasts in period uniform, and Brailie has spent years running the place and quietly draining it. The theft is not dramatic; it is the accumulated pilfering of a man who believes he is owed.
The caretaker who found out is killed during a mock battle, in a field full of men firing blanks. The choice of moment is the only genuinely clever thing Brailie does, and even that is less a plan than a piece of opportunism dressed up as one.
How Columbo gets him
The re-enactment gives the episode its best material — Columbo wandering through a mock battlefield asking men in period uniform whether they saw anything, and being answered in character.
Brailie is a military man of the same broad type as Rumford in By Dawn's Early Light, but smaller: a fraud rather than a fanatic, and much easier to rattle.
The lieutenant's route in is the money. Once he establishes what the caretaker knew, the list of people who needed him quiet is one name long.
The re-enactment gives Falk an unusually rich playground: he interviews men who will not break character, is offered a musket to hold, and treats the entire enterprise with the polite bafflement of a man whose own hobbies are bowling and pool.
The investigative work is financial before it is physical. Columbo asks to see the estate's books, does not understand them, and asks somebody who does — the series' standard and most effective move.
Brailie's collapse is quick once the money is traced. Unlike the colonels and generals the show has used before, he has no principle to retreat behind, only an explanation that stops working.
Worth knowing
- An evidence bag in this episode is labelled 'Frank Columbo', the second on-screen appearance of the name the writers insist does not exist.
- Robert Foxworth plays Brailie, and the episode gives him one of the more abrupt collapses in the run.
- The battle sequences used a genuine re-enactment society as extras.
- The 'Frank Columbo' evidence bag visible here is the second of three on-screen appearances of the accidental first name, after the badge in Dead Weight.
- The general is played by Stephen Elliott, and the household staff subplot was expanded during filming.
- It aired in May 1989, the fourth and final film of the first ABC season.
Verdict
Middling. The setting is more interesting than the plot, and the murderer is not in the same class as the men he resembles.
Worth it for the atmosphere of the war game and for the second sighting of the accidental first name.
The comparison with By Dawn's Early Light is unavoidable and unkind: both are about military men and institutional decay, and only one has a murderer worth ninety minutes.
Still, the setting earns its keep. Few episodes give Columbo a world this specific to wander through, and the re-enactors are treated with affection rather than mockery.
Familiar faces
Actors who turn up in the series more than once — sometimes in very different parts.
- Milt Kogan as Medical Examiner 3 episodes also in Make Me a Perfect Murder, Columbo Goes to the Guillotine
- Stephen Elliott as General Padget 2 episodes also in A Deadly State of Mind
Cast data from TMDB, including uncredited bit parts. All the familiar faces →