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How to Dial a Murder
Russian title: Как совершить убийство · Russian version
A psychologist trains his own dogs to kill on a spoken command and uses them to murder the colleague who is sleeping with his wife. The most unpleasant murder method in the series, and one of the best last acts.
Editor’s rating — 8.5 out of 10.
- Number
- 44 of 69
- Aired
- April 15, 1978
- Running time
- 73 min
- Director
- James Frawley
The case
- The killer
- Nicol Williamson as Eric Mason
- The victim
- Joel Fabiani as Charlie Hunter
- Guest cast
- Nicol Williamson, Tricia O'Neil, Kim Cattrall, Joel Fabiani, Frank Aletter, Ed Begley Jr.
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
Dr Eric Mason is a radio psychologist with a large audience and a private laboratory in which he studies conditioned response. His colleague and friend Charlie Hunter has been having an affair with Mason's wife, who is now dead in circumstances Mason has never explained.
The murder is conditioning. Mason has trained two Dobermans to attack on a specific phrase, and he arranges for Hunter to be alone in the house and to say it — reading aloud from a paper Mason has prepared. The dogs do the killing; their owner is on air, live, in front of an audience of thousands.
It is the coldest use of an animal in the run, and the most calculated: Mason has effectively built a murder weapon out of two creatures who trust him.
Dr Eric Mason broadcasts psychological advice to a large audience and studies conditioned response in a private laboratory. The gap between the two — public reassurance, private experiment — is the character in one sentence.
His wife is dead in circumstances he has never satisfactorily explained, and Charlie Hunter, his friend and colleague, had been sleeping with her. The motive is old and personal, and Mason has had time to design something appropriate.
The murder is conditioning. Two Dobermans have been trained to attack on a phrase; Mason arranges for Hunter to be alone in the house and to read that phrase aloud from a paper. The dogs kill him while their owner is live on air in front of thousands of listeners.
How Columbo gets him
Mason is arrogant in the specific way of a man who believes behaviour is a mechanism he understands and other people do not. He explains conditioning to Columbo at length, which is a mistake, because the lieutenant listens.
The dogs are the evidence and the problem. They cannot testify, and they are not guilty, and Columbo — visibly fond of them — spends much of the film working out how to prove what they were made to do without harming them.
The solution is the finest thing in the episode. Columbo takes the dogs, and by kindness and repetition breaks the conditioning: he retrains them so that the killing phrase produces affection instead of attack. Then he says the phrase in front of Mason.
Mason lectures Columbo on behaviour at length, which is a mistake — the lieutenant listens carefully to people who enjoy explaining things.
The dogs are both the evidence and the difficulty. They cannot testify and they are not guilty, and Falk plays the scenes with them as genuine affection rather than procedure.
The resolution is the best thing in the episode and possibly the best thing the character ever does. Columbo takes the animals, and by patience and repetition breaks the conditioning: he retrains them so that the killing phrase produces affection. Then he says it in front of Mason.
Worth knowing
- Nicol Williamson, a major stage actor, plays Mason with a clipped precision that makes the cruelty worse.
- The final scene is regularly cited as Falk's warmest moment in the entire run — the man who does not carry a gun defeats a murderer by being nice to his dogs.
- This was the last episode of the original NBC run; the series would not return for eleven years.
- Nicol Williamson, a major stage actor, plays Mason with a clipped precision that makes the cruelty worse.
- This was the last episode of the original NBC run to be produced; the series would not return for eleven years.
- The dogs were trained for the production, and the final scene was shot in a single long take.
Verdict
A strong close to the classic era. The method is horrible, the villain is genuinely detestable, and the resolution is pure Columbo: patience applied to a problem everyone else would have solved with force.
Knowing it was the last of the original run gives the ending an extra weight it was not designed to carry.
A strong close to the classic era. The method is genuinely horrible, the villain is detestable without being camp, and the resolution is pure Columbo — patience applied where anyone else would use force.
The man who does not carry a gun defeats a murderer by being kind to his dogs. As a summary of thirty-five years, it is hard to improve on.
What the people who made it said
Here Begley had a tiny part — a couple of lines and some dogs. Sixteen years later he would come back as a killer; this time he was hired almost in passing.
“I had two or three lines and handled some dogs in a dog kennel kind of a situation. I remember Peter, the great Peter Falk, was quite friendly to me right away because he knew my dad a bit.”
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 Begley Jr. as Officer Stein 2 episodes also in Undercover
Cast data from TMDB, including uncredited bit parts. All the familiar faces →