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The case

The killer

George Wendt as Graham McVeigh

The victim

Jeff Yagher as Teddy McVeigh and Jay Acovone as Bruno Romano

Guest cast

George Wendt, Rod Steiger, Jeff Yagher, Jay Acovone, John Finnegan, Don Calfa

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.

5:55

The murder

Graham McVeigh runs a racing stable with his brother Teddy, who has been losing enormous sums to a bookmaker connected to organised crime — money that comes out of the stable and threatens everything Graham has built.

He shoots Teddy and arranges it to look like the mob collecting a debt, which is plausible enough that the police have a ready-made explanation and the actual creditors have a reason to stay quiet.

The complication is Vincenzo Fortelli, the mafia figure whose organisation is being blamed. He is not interested in justice, but he is extremely interested in not being convicted of something he did not do.

Teddy's debts are the sort that do not stay private: the bookmaker's people have already visited the stable once, and everyone in racing knows the brothers are in trouble. That visibility is what makes the plan possible — Graham does not have to invent a threat, only to borrow one that already exists.

He shoots his brother in the stable yard, leaves the scene rough rather than staged, and lets the obvious inference do the work. There is no clever timing and no alibi to speak of, which is unusual for the series and is also the reason the film has somewhere to go.

How Columbo gets him

The three-way dynamic is the episode's best idea: Columbo, the murderer, and a criminal who is helping the investigation for entirely self-serving reasons. Fortelli is more dangerous to Graham than the police are.

The racing world provides the texture — stables, trainers, the economics of a horse — and the lieutenant's questions about feed schedules and vet visits turn out to matter.

The physical case is about the gun and the staging, both of which are slightly wrong in the way that things arranged by an amateur usually are.

Columbo's problem is that the wrong explanation is the plausible one. A man with mob debts is found shot; nobody needs a detective to construct a theory. The lieutenant's whole task is to keep asking why the obvious answer is slightly the wrong shape.

Fortelli is the pressure that makes it move. He wants the killing solved because being blamed for it is worse for business than the debt was, and his methods are considerably faster than the LAPD's. Columbo spends part of the film trying to reach Graham before the mob does — which is the only time the format has produced anything resembling a race.

Worth knowing

• George Wendt, universally known as Norm from Cheers, plays the killer, and the casting is the most surprising of the later run.
• Rod Steiger plays Fortelli, giving the episode two heavyweight guest performances.
• Directed by Vincent McEveety.
• Rod Steiger's Fortelli was written after the casting, and several of his scenes were expanded during production.
• The racing sequences were shot at Santa Anita Park, and the horse used in the plot belonged to a working stable.
• It was the first Columbo film broadcast in 1995, and one of only two that year.

Verdict

Better than expected, mostly because of the mob subplot: having a third party who wants the truth for the wrong reasons injects some genuine tension.

Wendt is not a natural villain, and the film works around it by making Graham panicky rather than calculating.

It also quietly restates the series' politics from an odd angle. The professional criminal is more straightforward to deal with than the respectable brother, and everybody in the film knows it.

Familiar faces

Actors who turn up in the series more than once — sometimes in very different parts.

• John Finnegan as Barney12 episodesalso in Blueprint for Murder, The Most Dangerous Match, Lovely But Lethal, A Friend in Deed, Last Salute to the Commodore and 6 more
• Bruce Kirby as Phil Brindle8 episodesalso in Lovely But Lethal, By Dawn’s Early Light, A Deadly State of Mind, Identity Crisis, Last Salute to the Commodore and 2 more
• Ed McCready as Man in Bar5 episodesalso in Rest in Peace, Mrs. Columbo, Death Hits the Jackpot, A Bird in the Hand…, It's All in the Game
• Gerry Okuneff as Walter Sterling4 episodesalso in Death Hits the Jackpot, A Bird in the Hand…, It's All in the Game
• Don Calfa as Rudy2 episodesalso in Rest in Peace, Mrs. Columbo

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