Undercover
Russian title: Маскарад · Russian version
Columbo goes undercover — badly, and repeatedly — to recover a stolen fortune connected to an old insurance case. The least Columbo-like episode of the entire run.
Editor’s rating — 6.5 out of 10.
- Number
- 64 of 69
- Aired
- May 2, 1994
- Running time
- 89 min
- Director
- Vincent McEveety
- Writer
- Ed McBain / Gerry Day
The case
- The killer
- Ed Begley Jr. as Irving Krutch (Jon Beshara and an uncredited actor also portray two characters who kill each other)
- The victim
- Burt Young as Mo Weinberg and Shera Danese as Geraldine Ferguson
- Guest cast
- Ed Begley Jr., Burt Young, Harrison Page, Shera Danese, Edward Hibbert, Kristin Bauer
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
The plot concerns a decade-old robbery, a set of photographs that show where the money is hidden, and a chain of people willing to kill for them. Bodies accumulate; the structure is a caper rather than an inverted mystery.
There is no single murderer presented at the start and no duel with a wealthy antagonist. The film is closer to a 1970s crime thriller than to anything the series normally does.
Ed Begley Jr.'s character sits at the centre of the scheme, but the identity of who did what is withheld in the manner of a conventional whodunit.
The mechanics are convoluted even by caper standards: an insurance investigation from a decade earlier, a set of photographs cut into pieces and distributed, and a series of people who each hold a fragment and none of whom trusts the others. Deaths follow from the arithmetic rather than from any single decision.
What is missing is the thing every other Columbo film has: one person who decided to kill someone and then had to live with a policeman asking about it. Without that, there is no centre for the lieutenant to circle.
How Columbo gets him
Columbo spends much of the film in disguise, which is the single most out-of-character thing the series ever asks him to do. The man whose entire method is being underestimated as himself puts on costumes.
The plot mechanics — photographs, safe deposit boxes, a hidden fortune — are entirely disconnected from the show's usual interest in a single relationship between detective and killer.
What survives is Falk, who plays each disguise with visible discomfort, as though the character is embarrassed to be doing it.
The disguises are the sticking point for most viewers, and they are worth being precise about. Columbo's method has always been a disguise — the coat, the notebook, the apologies are a costume he wears deliberately. What he has never needed is a false name and a wig, because the point of the act is that it is him.
The film does give him a few scenes that work: a conversation about the old robbery with a man who has been waiting years for someone to ask, and a long sequence of ordinary door-to-door work. In those stretches it remembers what it is.
Worth knowing
- Based on an Ed McBain novel, like No Time to Die, and adapted with even less regard for the Columbo format.
- It is consistently ranked at or near the bottom of every fan poll of the full run.
- Directed by Vincent McEveety.
- Ed McBain's novel Jigsaw was adapted with the lieutenant inserted into an existing plot, which is why the structure fits him so badly.
- Burt Young, later of the Rocky films, appears in a supporting role.
- It aired in May 1994, between two considerably better films, which is why its reputation stands out so sharply.
Verdict
The weakest film in the series. Everything that defines Columbo is absent: no inverted structure, no wealthy antagonist, no duel, and a lieutenant who spends the film pretending to be other people.
Watch it last, if at all, and only to be able to say you have seen all sixty-nine.
There is a lesson buried in it about the format's limits. Columbo does not work as a plot-driven thriller because the plots were never the attraction: sixty-eight other films are about one relationship examined for ninety minutes, and this one has nobody at the other end of the table.
What the people who made it said
Daly worked with Falk twice: first as the killer in A Bird in the Hand, then in a tiny part here — a woman gone to drink, two scenes shot in a day. That day, she says, earned her a distinction nobody else in the series has.
“I have the distinction of being the only woman on Columbo that Columbo kissed. His longtime producer said: but Columbo doesn't do that.”
The lead in this one came from Falk himself — before the casting office had got round to calling.
“This was a straight job offer, there was no audition for that role. Peter wanted me to play that part and he called me about it even before the casting people did.”
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.
- Shera Danese as Geraldine Ferguson 6 episodes also in Fade in to Murder, Murder Under Glass, Murder, A Self Portrait, Columbo and the Murder of a Rock Star, A Trace of Murder
- Robert Donner as Zeke Rivers 3 episodes also in Any Old Port in a Storm, Caution: Murder Can Be Hazardous to Your Health
- Ed Begley Jr. as Irving Krutch 2 episodes also in How to Dial a Murder
- Tyne Daly as Dorothea McNally 2 episodes also in A Bird in the Hand…
- Penny Santon as Lucia 2 episodes also in Death Hits the Jackpot
Cast data from TMDB, including uncredited bit parts. All the familiar faces →