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Uneasy Lies the Crown
Russian title: Берегите свои зубы · Russian version
A dentist murders his wife's lover with a poisoned crown, and does it so precisely that the death looks like a heart attack days later. A quiet, clinical episode with one of the better late-period methods.
Editor’s rating — 7 out of 10.
- Number
- 54 of 69
- Aired
- April 28, 1990
- Running time
- 92 min
- Director
- Alan J. Levi
- Writer
- Steven Bochco
The case
- The killer
- James Read as Wesley Corman
- The victim
- Marshall R. Teague as Adam Evans
- Guest cast
- James Read, Ron Cey, Dick Sargent, Paul Burke, Jo Anderson, Nancy Walker
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
Dr Wesley Corman is a dentist with gambling debts and a wife whose family money he needs. Her lover, Adam Evans, is an actor who is about to take her away, and with her the only thing keeping Corman solvent.
The murder is dental. Corman fits Evans with a crown loaded with a slow-acting poison, so that the man dies later, elsewhere, in front of witnesses, from what appears to be a cardiac event. There is no scene, no weapon and no moment at which the dentist is present.
It is a good plan undermined by the killer's own carelessness about debt — the motive is documented in the ledgers of people who lend money to dentists.
Corman's problem is arithmetic. His gambling losses are documented with people who keep careful records, his practice does not cover them, and his wife's family money is the only thing standing between him and ruin — money that leaves with her.
Adam Evans is an actor and, by the standards of this series, no better than the man who kills him: he is sleeping with Corman's wife and enjoying it. The film is careful not to make him sympathetic, which changes the tone of the whole thing.
The dental work is done in advance, and the poison is timed to act days later. Corman is not in the room, the city or the story when Evans collapses at a party in front of thirty people.
How Columbo gets him
Columbo's route in is the autopsy, and the episode is unusually procedural: what a heart attack looks like, what it does not, and why a healthy man's teeth are worth examining.
Corman is nervous rather than arrogant, which changes the dynamic. He is not enjoying the duel and does not believe he will win it, and Falk plays the lieutenant with slightly less mercy as a result.
The gambling debts do most of the work. Once the money is traced, the question stops being how and becomes why nobody looked at the dentist first.
Columbo arrives at a death nobody has questioned, and the first half of the film is about persuading people that there is a case at all. The dentist's own confidence is what draws attention: he is helpful in a way that a man with no involvement would not bother to be.
The medical route requires patience and a second opinion. A cardiac event in a healthy man is unusual enough to justify looking, and the toxicology only means anything once someone thinks to examine the mouth.
The debts do the rest. Once the ledgers are open, the motive is not an inference but a number.
Worth knowing
- James Read plays Corman; the character's mounting panic is the most sustained nervousness of any Columbo killer.
- The method was checked with dental consultants and is, in principle, possible.
- Directed by Alan J. Levi, who made three of the later films.
- James Read is best known for North and South; this is his only Columbo appearance.
- The method was verified with dental consultants during pre-production and is, in principle, medically possible.
- Broadcast in April 1990.
Verdict
A modest, competent episode with a genuinely original murder. Nothing about it is memorable except the method, which is enough.
It also has one of the run's rare unsympathetic victims — the actor is no better than the man who kills him, and the film does not pretend otherwise.
The murder is the reason to watch: a killing delivered on a delay, by a man who was never present for it. Very few episodes attempt anything so indirect.
Corman himself is the weak link — a nervous man rather than a formidable one — which makes the duel one-sided from the first scene.
What the people who made it said
The best on-set story in the archive, and it comes from a scene in a dentist’s chair that did nothing for the plot. On “cut”, the actor playing the dentist collapsed on the floor and the director thought he was having a heart attack. He was helpless with laughter: for the whole scene he had watched Falk’s glass eye drift slowly sideways from a foot away — while Falk stayed in character.
“Now I yell cut and the dentist falls straight onto the ground. I thought he had a heart attack. He is laughing so hard, he cannot stop.”
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.
- Steven Gilborn as George 4 episodes also in Columbo Goes to College, Caution: Murder Can Be Hazardous to Your Health, Columbo and the Murder of a Rock Star
- Morgan Jones as Lab Technician 3 episodes also in Columbo Cries Wolf, Columbo Goes to College
Cast data from TMDB, including uncredited bit parts. All the familiar faces →