Columbo: "Etude in Black" (Levinson-Link Productions, Universal, NBC-TV, aired September 17, 1972)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I was startled that the Sundance Channel started running the pair of Columbo episodes they usually show on Tuesday and Friday nights at 10 p.m. instead of 11, which gave me the chance to watch both shows they ran. Both episodes, “Etude in Black” (September 17, 1972) and “The Most Crucial Game” (November 5, 1972) were from the show’s second season, but the Columbo formula created by Richard Levinson and William Link was already solidly established: an opening sequence showing someone commit a murder and execute a carefully planned scheme to cover it up. Then Lt. Columbo (Peter Falk) shows up to investigate, somehow magically intuits who the killer is and spends the rest of the episode annoying him or her into confessing. In “Etude for Death,” for which the story was by Levinson and Link themselves but the script by the then-unknown Steven Bochco (whom I’ve cursed in these pages many times for innovating serial form into prime-time dramatic series – today just about every hour-long show worships at the shrine of the Great God SERIAL, and it was Bochco more than anyone else who was the prophet of that religion) and the killer is superstar conductor Alex Benedict (John Cassavetes, in a quite good and effective performance; later Falk would make a ton of money on Columbo and invest quite a bit of it in producing and co-starring in the independent movies Cassavetes produced and directed like A Woman Under the Influence and The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, usually with Falk in the male lead and Cassavetes’ wife, Gena Rowlands, in the female lead).

The victim is young,up-and-coming pianist Jenifer Welles (Anjanette Comer) – the spelling of her name with just none :”f” is correct (we see it on her note paper) and we’re told she was born in Kenosha, Wisconsin (an in-joke reference to actor, writer, producer and director Orson Welles, who actually was born in Kenosha, though whenever anyone kidded hm about it he would say, “Yes, but I was conceived in Paris”). She’s been having an affair with Benedict, and she wants him to divorce his wife Janice (Blythe Danner) and marry her – only he’s too dependent on his wife’s family’s money and in particular on the backing of his mother-in-law, Lizzy Fielding (Myrna Loy, who gives the proceedings a touch of old-Hollywood class and performs in a coolly authoritative way that out-classes all the younger actors and their Method affectations). Lizzy is chair of the board of the Southland Symphony Orchestra and has got Alex the job of conducting it in regular televised concerts from the Hollywood Bowl, as well as a huge mansion whose front looks like the White House – and when he’s first introduced we see him rehearsing at the Bowl with both the orchestra members and the TV crew. Then, after a long bit of business involving taking in his Jaguar sports car for allegedly necessary repairs and then sneaking it back out again (apparently he wants to make it look like he never left the Bowl all night because his wife had the family’s other car, a Rolls-Royce – a nice touch on the writers’ part to establish the difference between his wife’s old family money and his own status as an arriviste), he sneaks over to Jenifer’s apartment, chloroforms her with a rag and then puts her in her kitchen and turns the gas on in her stove (all four burners plus the oven) and leaves her there, killing not only her but her pet cockatiel. (A character named after Orson Welles would have a pet cockatiel!) He also takes a note she had started to write and puts it back in her typewriter, adding verbiage to make it read like a suicide note – which itself arouses Columbo’s suspicions because he says suicide notes are almost invariably handwritten.

There are a few red herrings, including Alex’s long-suffering Black assistant Billy Jones (James McEachin) and Paul Rifkin (tall, blond, strikingly handsome James Olson), a trumpet player in the Southland Symphony who moonlights as a Miles Davis-style jazz trumpeter and had some run-ins with the law that lead to him becoming a prime suspect for a couple of acts until the main business of a Columbo episode – Columbo successfully discovering the big hole in the killer’s elaborate cover-up scheme – occurs. This time it’s Alex’s carnation in his lapel, which fell off as he was killing Jenifer and which he did not wear during the televised Hollywood Bowl concert even though he insists he always wears a carnation in his lapel (from his wife’s garden) when he performs publicly. When he was brought back to Jenifer’s apartment after the concert (where she was actually scheduled to appear as a soloist – one would think a halfway sensible murderer would have killed her after the concert instead of arousing suspicion with her no-show) he picked up the flower from where he had dropped it near a leg of her piano, put it on and was photographed with it when a TV news crew showed up and asked him for comment on Jenifer’s death. At least Levinson, Link and Bochco allowed him to be arrested decorously off-camera – Dick Wolf and his Law and Order writers would probably have had the cops apprehend him in the middle of conducting the Southland Symphony in a televised concert at the Bowl!