Home → Episodes → The Bye-Bye Sky-High I.Q. Murder Case
The Bye-Bye Sky-High I.Q. Murder Case
Russian title: Высокоинтеллектуальное убийство · Russian version
A member of an exclusive genius society murders the club's manager, who has discovered he has been embezzling. Theodore Bikel plays a man whose intelligence is genuine and whose life is entirely hollow.
Editor’s rating — 8.5 out of 10.
- Number
- 40 of 69
- Aired
- May 22, 1977
- Running time
- 70 min
- Director
- Sam Wanamaker
- Writer
- Robert Malcolm Young
- Music
- Bob Prince
The case
- The killer
- Theodore Bikel as Oliver Brandt
- The victim
- Sorrell Booke as Bertie Hastings
- Guest cast
- Theodore Bikel, Sorrell Booke, Kenneth Mars, Samantha Eggar, Jamie Lee Curtis, Basil Hoffman
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
Oliver Brandt is an accountant, a member of the Sigma Society — a club for people with extraordinarily high IQs — and a thief. He has been taking money from his own clients for years to fund a marriage and a lifestyle he cannot otherwise afford.
Bertie Hastings, the club's manager, has found the discrepancies and intends to report them. Brandt shoots him in the club's sound-proofed games room and constructs an alibi from a series of overlapping timings that a lesser mind would not attempt.
The plan involves a tape recorder, a gunshot heard by witnesses at the wrong moment, and Brandt himself being visible elsewhere when the sound occurs. It is the most intellectually vain murder in the run, and its author cannot stop admiring it.
The Sigma Society is a club for people with extraordinary IQ scores, and the film is quietly merciless about what that does to a person: a room full of men who have been told they are exceptional and have therefore never had to become anything else.
Oliver Brandt is the most brilliant of them and also an embezzler, funding an expensive wife and an expensive life with money taken from his own clients. Bertie Hastings, the club manager, has found the discrepancies.
The murder is a puzzle for its own sake. Brandt shoots him in the sound-proofed games room, records the shot, and plays it back later while he is demonstrably elsewhere — so that the witnesses hear a murder happening at a time when its author is in company.
How Columbo gets him
The Sigma Society gives the episode its comedy: a room full of people who have been told their whole lives that they are the cleverest person present, being questioned by a man who keeps apologising for not following.
Brandt cannot help himself. He corrects Columbo, tests him, sets him small puzzles, and treats the investigation as an intelligence contest — which means he keeps volunteering information to demonstrate superiority.
The lieutenant's counter is to be exactly as slow as Brandt believes he is. The trap, when it comes, depends on the murderer being unable to resist showing that he has spotted something.
The club gives Falk his best material of the sixth season: a room full of geniuses being interviewed by a man who keeps losing his pencil, and each of them explaining, at length, why he could not possibly be involved.
Brandt cannot resist a contest. He sets Columbo small puzzles, corrects his grammar, and treats the investigation as an examination he is invigilating — which means he keeps volunteering things nobody asked about.
The lieutenant's counter is to play down to expectations for as long as it takes. The acoustic experiment at the end is set up so that Brandt has to correct him, and correcting him is a confession.
Worth knowing
- Theodore Bikel was himself a polymath — actor, folk singer, linguist — which lends the performance an authenticity the script could not have written.
- The episode was the last of the sixth season and one of only three films made that year.
- Sorrell Booke, later Boss Hogg in The Dukes of Hazzard, plays the murdered club manager.
- Theodore Bikel was himself a linguist, folk musician and Oscar-nominated actor, which gives the character's intelligence an unusual authenticity.
- Sorrell Booke, two years before The Dukes of Hazzard, plays the murdered manager.
- Broadcast in May 1977 as the final film of the sixth season, one of only three made that year.
Verdict
A good late-classic episode with a strong central idea: a murderer whose fatal flaw is precisely the quality he is most admired for.
Bikel's final scene, in which Brandt admits how little his intelligence has actually bought him, is one of the sadder confessions in the series.
A strong late-classic film with the series' favourite structure: a murderer whose fatal flaw is precisely the quality he is admired for.
Brandt's final admission — that his intelligence has bought him nothing he actually wanted — is one of the saddest confessions in the run, and Bikel plays it without any self-pity.
What the people who made it said
The club of geniuses is modelled on Mensa, and the producer made no secret of what he thought of the original.
“I always thought Mensa was the silliest organization on earth.”
By the late seventies each film was shot slowly and carefully — a pleasure for a guest actor. About Falk, Bikel says what many co-stars said.
“I remember we had twenty-two shooting days for a ninety-minute episode. That was wonderful. Peter is not what he plays. He's much more cultured. He had a lot of artistic control and he used it to make other artists comfortable.”
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.
- Sorrell Booke as Bertie Hastings 2 episodes also in Swan Song
- George Sperdakos as Mr. Wagner 2 episodes also in Now You See Him
- Todd Martin as Sergeant Burke 2 episodes also in Murder Under Glass
Cast data from TMDB, including uncredited bit parts. All the familiar faces →