Columbo: "Murder Under Glass" (Levinson-Link Productions, Universal Television, 1978)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I watched a Sundance Channel Columbo rerun from 1978 called “Murder Under Glass” which, though it dealt quite extensively with the world of fine dining, did not feature any dish actually being served under glass. The central character is Paul Gerard, played by former The Paradine Case and Gigi star Louis Jourdan at a time when Columbo had become so fashionable that quite a few stars with heavy-duty movie cred campaigned to get roles on Columbo as the principal villain whom Columbo would force to confess to some dastardly murder plot. In this one Paul Gerard has artfully combined an old-style protection racket (“Nice little restaurant you’ve got here; it would be a shame if anything happened to it”) with a far-reaching power as a restaurant critic and foodie TV personality with the reach and absolute power of Burt Lancaster’s character, J. J. Hunsaker, in Sweet Smell of Success.

He’s organized a front group called the “Restaurant Development Association” and charges aspiring restaurateurs 25 percent of their proceeds in exchange for super-favorable coverage -- with the promise of utter destruction of their reputation and their business if they stop paying up. In the opening scene Gerard is being comped to a fabulous private dinner at the Italian restaurant owned by Vittorlo Rossi (Michael V. Gazzo) when Vittorio serves notice on Gerard that he’s no longer going to pay him. But Gerard has already planned ahead: he’s extracted the toxin from fugu, a rare Japanese fish (also known as a puffer fish or a blowfish) which for some reason has become a gourmet delicacy for fine diners who are literally putting their lives in their sushi chef’s hands. The trick in preparing fugu is to cut away all the toxic parts and serve only the bits that are safe to eat -- and according to Robert Van Scoyk’s script, fugu chefs are actually licensed by the Japanese Department of Health and most fugu-related deaths are caused by people who think they can fix it themselves and don’t really know what they’re doing.

Gerard has extracted fugu toxin and put it in a medical ampule, from which he extracts it with a hypodermic syringe and contaminates the business end of one of those high-tech corkscrews that inject gas into the wine bottle and thus extract the cork by pressure without having to shred it in the process. He seems to have picked this unusually baroque murder method (the Columbo creators, Richard Levinson and William Link, seem to have worshiped at the shrine of St. Agatha Christie in coming up with insanely complicated murder schemes) not only because it ties in with his self-image as the world’s arbiter of fine dining but because fugu poison is not the sort of toxin that turns up on police toxicology tests.

The script overall is a pretty typical Columbo episode in which Peter Falk’s detective character not only displays some unexpected and previously ignored talents -- when Mario DeLuca (Antony Alda), Vittorlo’s nephew and a key witness, turns out to know almost no English, Columbo is able to question him in Italian, and later in the show he’s depicted cooking his old family’s recipe for veal scallopini and doing so well enough he attracts the admiration of Paul Gerard himself -- but also his basic one of solving his cases by annoying the principal suspect into confessing. The show was directed by Jonathan Demme and has some of the demented quirkiness of his feature films, and there’s a plot gimmick straight out of one of the controversies surrounding Howard Hughes. Demme directed a film called Melvin and Howard in which an old Nevada drifter ostensibly discovers Howard Hughes in the desert and gets him out to safety -- and for this was rewarded with a one-sixteenth share of the entire Hughes estate, though the will was later established to be a forgery.

“Murder Under Glass” directly references another famous Hughes forgery, in which author Clifford Irving had his girlfriend Nina von Pallandt (Irving had a wife and a girlfriend, and I can hear my husband Charles’ clucks of disapproval now!) deposit the checks McGraw-Hill and Time-Life were paying him for his fake “autobiography” of Howard Hughes and do so under the name “Helga R. Hughes.” In “Murder Under Glass” Gerard has his typical blonde-bimbo girlfriend Eve Plummer (Shera Danese) do the banking for his scheme in Europe under an assumed name -- only Columbo finds out her disguise by calling her by the pseudonym, and of course she answers to it. The final scene is a cat-and-mouse game between Columbo -- wearing a chef’s hat that gives him a stronger-than-usual resemblance to Chico Marx (another Jew who became internationally famous for playing an Italian!) -- and Gerard at Vittorio’s restaurant (the key scenes take place there on Monday since that’s the night the restaurant is closed to the public) in which Columbo ticks off detail after detail that convinced him Gerard was Vittorio’s murderer.

Like most of the Columbo shows, this one was nice light entertainment, and the elaborateness of the murder plot (which Gerard tries to duplicate on Columbo, of course unsuccessfully, in the final scene) was key to the formula even though as I’ve grown older and more familiar both with mystery fiction and real crime I’ve gained more respect for Raymond Chandler’s statement that real homicide detectives had told him the easiest murders to solve were the ones in which the killers got fancy with these elaborate preparations both for committing the crime and covering it up, while the hardest murders to solve were the ones in which killer and victim were buddy-buddy until just seconds before one killed the other.