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The case

The killer

Patrick McGoohan as Nelson Brenner

The victim

Leslie Nielsen as A.J. "Geronimo" Henderson

Guest cast

Patrick McGoohan, Paul Gleason, Val Avery, Carmen Argenziano, David White, Bruce Kirby

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.

7:58

The murder

Nelson Brenner is a public relations man in Los Angeles and, simultaneously, an agent of a government service that does not acknowledge him. A. J. Henderson, an old colleague, knows the second job and has been extracting money for his silence.

Brenner kills him on a beach and then does what his training tells him to do: he makes the death untidy in a way that suggests an ordinary robbery, and constructs an alibi from an evening's worth of documented public appearances.

His advantage is structural. Every time Columbo gets close to establishing where Brenner was, the answer becomes classified. His profession is a cover story that other people are legally obliged to maintain for him.

Brenner's double life is the plot and the theme. To Los Angeles he is a public relations consultant with a good address; to a government agency he is an operative whose existence is officially denied. Both identities are maintained with equal care.

A. J. Henderson knows about the second one because they worked together, and has been taking money for years. Blackmail between spies is a technical problem rather than a moral one, and Brenner solves it technically.

The killing on the beach is made to read as a robbery, and the alibi is assembled from a recorded conversation and a public evening. Brenner's advantage is that any attempt to check where he really was runs into people who are legally obliged to say nothing.

How Columbo gets him

McGoohan directs as well as stars, and the episode is visually the strangest of the run: long silences, odd angles, a recurring joke about a recorded voice that turns out to matter.

Columbo's difficulty is that he is being lied to by institutions rather than by a person. Brenner does not need to deceive him; other people do it on his behalf, politely and with paperwork.

The break comes through a recording. Brenner used a taped conversation as part of his alibi, and the tape contains something that could not have been in the room at the time it was supposedly made — a background detail that dates it.

McGoohan's direction is the most distinctive thing about the film: long static takes, conversations shot from odd distances, and a recurring joke involving a recorded voice that turns out to carry the case.

Columbo spends much of the episode being politely obstructed by institutions rather than by a person, which frustrates him more visibly than any individual murderer ever has.

The recording is the crack. Brenner used a tape to place himself in a conversation at a particular hour, and tapes capture more than the words on them — background, room tone, and in this case a sound that belongs to a different day.

8:42

Worth knowing

• McGoohan directed under his own name and gave himself very little conventional coverage; several scenes play out in single wide takes.
• The episode reveals, almost in passing, that a listening device in Columbo's home has told the intelligence service that Mrs Columbo's favourite music is Madame Butterfly.
• Leslie Nielsen appears in a straight dramatic role, five years before Airplane!.
• The listening device in Columbo's house — through which the agency learns that Mrs Columbo likes Madame Butterfly — is one of the most-cited pieces of evidence for her existence.
• Leslie Nielsen appears in a wholly serious role, five years before Airplane! redefined his career.
• Broadcast in November 1975, McGoohan's second appearance as a murderer and his first as director.

Verdict

Divisive, and deliberately so. The pace is slower than the format usually allows and the plot is more opaque, but McGoohan and Falk together are always worth watching.

It is also the most conceptually apt murder in the run: a man whose entire professional life is a constructed alibi, undone by constructing one too many.

Slow, opaque and divisive — and one of the few Columbo films that rewards a second viewing, because the direction is doing more than it first appears.

Thematically it is the sharpest match of murderer to method in the series: a man whose profession is the manufacture of alibis, undone by manufacturing one too many.

What the people who made it said

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.

• Bruce Kirby as Sergeant Kramer8 episodesalso in Lovely But Lethal, By Dawn’s Early Light, A Deadly State of Mind, Last Salute to the Commodore, Make Me a Perfect Murder and 2 more
• Vito Scotti as Salvatore De Fonte6 episodesalso in Any Old Port in a Storm, Candidate for Crime, Swan Song, Negative Reaction, Murder, A Self Portrait
• Patrick McGoohan as Nelson Brenner4 episodesalso in By Dawn’s Early Light, Agenda for Murder, Ashes to Ashes
• Val Avery as Ralph Dobbs4 episodesalso in Dead Weight, The Most Crucial Game, A Friend in Deed
• Cliff Carnell as Photo Shop Man3 episodesalso in Blueprint for Murder, The Most Crucial Game
• Leslie Nielsen as A.J. Henderson2 episodesalso in Lady in Waiting
• Barbara Rhoades as Joyce2 episodesalso in Lady in Waiting

Cast data from TMDB, including uncredited bit parts. All the familiar faces →