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It's All in the Game
Russian title: Всё поставлено на карту · Russian version
A woman murders her lover and then works on Columbo himself, flirting with him for most of the running time while he decides how much of her story to believe. Faye Dunaway won an Emmy for it, and the ending is unlike anything else in the run.
Editor’s rating — 8.5 out of 10.
- Number
- 62 of 69
- Aired
- October 31, 1993
- Running time
- 91 min
- Director
- Vincent McEveety
- Writer
- Peter Falk
The case
- The killer
- Faye Dunaway as Lauren Staton and Claudia Christian as Lisa Martin
- The victim
- Armando Pucci as Nick Franco
- Guest cast
- Faye Dunaway, Claudia Christian, Armando Pucci, Bill Macy, Doug Sheehan, Shelley Morrison
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
Nick Franco is a gambler and a serial seducer, involved with Lauren Staton and, simultaneously, with a much younger woman named Lisa Martin. Lauren kills him in his apartment, and the film opens with the two women covering for each other.
The relationship between them is the film's secret, and it is revealed slowly: Lisa is Lauren's daughter, and the murder is a mother's response to what Franco was doing to her.
The plan is not technical but social. Lauren's method is to charm the investigating officer — to make herself the most interesting person in the case and to steer his attention by giving him more of her company than he expected.
Nick Franco is a professional seducer with a gambling habit, and the film establishes early that he has been working through mother and daughter simultaneously without either knowing about the other.
Lauren kills him in his apartment, and Lisa arrives afterwards. From that moment the two of them are operating a joint deception, and the film's real suspense is whether Columbo will spot the relationship between them.
The plan is social rather than technical. Lauren makes herself available, interesting and slightly flirtatious, on the theory that a policeman who is enjoying her company will not look past it. It nearly works.
How Columbo gets him
The flirtation is genuine on both sides and beautifully played. Dunaway and Falk conduct half the film as a courtship, and the discomfort is that Columbo is enjoying it while knowing exactly what it is for.
The lieutenant works out the mother-daughter connection long before he says so, which reframes everything: he is no longer investigating a jealous lover but a woman protecting her child from a predator.
What he does with that is the point. Columbo makes Lauren an offer — a deal in which she confesses and her daughter is allowed to leave for Europe rather than face charges as an accessory.
Falk and Dunaway play the courtship absolutely straight, which is what makes it uncomfortable. He is flattered and he knows why he is being flattered, and both facts sit on his face in every scene.
The lieutenant works out the mother-daughter connection long before he mentions it, and the film shows the moment it lands: everything he has been told reorganises itself into a woman protecting her child.
The physical case — a clock, a fireplace, the timing of the death — is solid but almost beside the point. What he does with it is the episode.
Worth knowing
- Faye Dunaway won the Emmy for Outstanding Guest Actress, the last acting award the series received.
- This is one of only two episodes in which Columbo deliberately lets someone involved in a murder go free — the other is Forgotten Lady.
- Dunaway also has a producer credit on the film, and reportedly worked on the script with Falk.
- Faye Dunaway won the Emmy for Outstanding Guest Actress, the last acting award the series received in its thirty-five years.
- Dunaway also had a producer credit and reportedly worked on the script with Falk.
- Broadcast in October 1993.
Verdict
The best of the late ABC films and one of the most adult things the series ever did. The murder is almost beside the point; what the film is really about is two people negotiating over what justice would look like here.
Falk and Dunaway are extraordinary together, and the final deal is the clearest statement of what the character actually values.
The most adult film of the later run and one of the best in the whole series. The question it asks is not who did it but what should happen next, and Columbo answers it by making a deal.
Along with Forgotten Lady it forms the pair of episodes that define the character's actual moral position: the law is a tool he uses, not a thing he serves.
What the people who made it said
Falk not only wrote this film, he cast it. Twenty-two-year-old Claudia Christian, hired to play Faye Dunaway’s daughter, got her direction from him at the audition.
“He said: listen, you're going to have to lie about your age, and can you do something about your voice? Faye Dunaway is playing your mother.”
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 Barney 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
- Ed McCready as Detective #2 5 episodes also in Rest in Peace, Mrs. Columbo, Death Hits the Jackpot, A Bird in the Hand…, Strange Bedfellows
- Gerry Okuneff as Plainclothes Detective 4 episodes also in Death Hits the Jackpot, A Bird in the Hand…, Strange Bedfellows
- Stewart J. Zully as Investigator #3 3 episodes also in Murder, Smoke and Shadows, Sex and the Married Detective
- John Petlock as Male Guest 3 episodes also in Murder in Malibu, A Bird in the Hand…
- Michele Bernath as Cashier 2 episodes also in Murder in Malibu
- Vincent J. McEveety as Policemna 2 episodes also in A Bird in the Hand…
Cast data from TMDB, including uncredited bit parts. All the familiar faces →