Columbo: “Agenda for Murder” (Levinson-Link Productions, Universal, 1990)

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

Last night at 11 p.m. Charles and I watched a Sundance Channel rerun of a Columbo episode from 1990, relatively late in the show’s history and when they’d extended the running time from 90 minutes to two hours, which meant that the scripts often seem padded. The extra time was usually taken up by more scenes of Lt. Columbo (Peter Falk) annoying the principal suspect until he finally breaks down and confesses – ironically a strategy detectives in 1940’s Universal movies had been using pretty much ever since Thomas Gomez’s character in the 1944 Phantom Lady. This episode was called “Agenda for Murder” and dealt with Oscar Finch (Patrick McGoohan from the 1960’s shows Secret Agent and The Prisoner – he was actually the third name on the short list to play James Bond in the original films, after Sean Connery and Roger Moore, but unlike them he never actually got to play 007, though his Secret Agent character was a pretty obvious Bond ripoff), campaign manager for California Congressmember Paul Mackey (Denis Arndt, a quite impressive screen presence in his own right) who’s up for consideration as the running mate for a Presidential candidate named Montgomery – whom we never actually see but becomes a sort of godlike presence off-screen.

The problem is that Finch once did a favor back in 1969 for Frank Staplin (Lou is Zorich) – the last name, by the way, is pronounced with a long “A” like “stapler,” not a short one like “Chaplin” – that involved getting Mackey, then a very junior assistant in the district attorney’s office, to shred a key document that would have revealed Staplin as a crook and led to his conviction. (Well, it’s as good a MacGuffin as any.) Now Staplin is once again in legal trouble – he’s facing a federal indictment and is likely to be arrested in a week – and Staplin wants to fire his attorneys and hire super-lawyer Finch to replace them. Only Finch has no desire to quit a political campaign that’s going very well for him and his candidate to represent an obviously guilty defendant in a hopeless case. But when he tells this to Staplin, Staplin threatens to reveal the favor Finch and Mackey did for him 21 years before, which will ruin both their careers. So Finch hatches an elaborate murder plot to kill Staplin and make it look like suicide, which involves two squares of tin foil, a cigar which he shreds in Staplin’s ashtray, and a gun from which he extracts some of the powder and carries it with him to the crime scene so he can plant gunpowder on Staplin’s body to bolster the illusion that he killed himself. Only midway through the show the cops realize that Staplin didn’t commit suicide – the night he was killed he had just faxed his wife, who was vacationing without him in Hawai’i, a dirty joke about Jews (a Jewish woman gets flashed by the archetypal man in a raincoat with nothing on under it, and when she gets a look at him she says, “You call that a lining?”) and another dirty joke about Irish people which he never got around to faxing because Finch shot him first.

The cops figure that Staplin wasn’t in a frame of mind to take his own life if the last thing he did before he died was fax his wife a dirty joke. (One of the nice parts of watching shows of this vintage is that you get to see technologies that at the time were cutting-edge and now have pretty much gone the way of the Model “T” – the cops make a big deal out of fax machines and also the elaborate phone Finch uses, which can actually store numbers for speed-dial so you don’t have to punch all the buttons to call someone you phone frequently and the call-waiting feature on Finch’s phone so he can take two calls without having to hang up on call one so the phone rings again for call two. All these things are depicted here as incredible technological marvels.) Lt. Columbo goes on the merry way he’d established long before on this series – it’s not for nothing that when Mad magazine parodied this series, they named it Cobumble – making himself a nuisance as the California primary campaign goes into its home stretch and Montgomery seems headed for a big victory, which will enhance the chances for the Californian Mackey to be his running mate. (The conceit that California’s June primary could actually decide a Presidential nomination contest is yet another aspect of Jeffrey Bloom’s script that seems ridiculously dated.)

Eventually the climax occurs on the night of the primary, in which Montgomery wins easily and Finch is arrested in the middle of the headquarters celebration and party (which features an unseen Dixieland jazz band playing songs like “When the Saints Go Marching In” and “Bye, Bye, Blackbird”), though at least Columbo escorts him into a private room at the hotel where the celebration is taking place so – unlike the cops in the 1929 movie Say It With Songs (in which Al Jolson is arrested for manslaughter just after he’s finished the song “I’m in Seventh Heaven” about how wonderfully his life is going) or the ones in Law and Order, a show which made a virtual fetish of having its cops arrest the perps at the most embarrassing possible moment (a CEO in the middle of a board meeting or a celebrity while on camera doing a live TV show). This Columbo was quite engaging, and one of the nicest things about the series was that they followed Alfred Hitchcock’s practice of letting the audience in from the get-go on what was really going on and who the murderer was, and building the suspense out of how the characters would find out and what would happen to them when they did. (HItchcock did a whodunit in his early years – the 1930 film Murder! – but decided never again, and Columbo creators Richard Levinson and William Link once did a whodunit episode and got it special promotion in TV Guide because that wasn’t how this show usually worked.)

By far the best part of this show was Patrick McGoohan’s performance as the villain – even though, with his white hair and bushy moustache, it looked like he was auditioning for a biopic of Boris Karloff – at a time when celebrities were fighting each other for the honor of being cast as a killer on Columbo, McGoohan’s performance strikes me as a perfect rendition of the utterly amoral attorney and politician, and his total self-absorption and utter disinterest in anyone else except as he can use them to further his ends (he boasts several times that if he can get Congressmember Mackey elected vice-president it’ll be only a matter of time before he becomes President – what’s he planning to do, knock off Montgomery so he can put his man in the White House and win himself a Cabinet appointment out of the deal?) marks him as a creature of our time even if other aspects of this show seem pretty dated. One can easily imagine him in the Trump administration as one of at least seven close associates of the President who’ve been arrested for felony charges (the latest being longtime Trump friend and chair of his inaugural committee, Tom Barrack, who’s so fabulously rich he was held on a $250 million bail and made it!), even though I was a bit disappointed that writer Bloom didn’t make the villain an actual Presidential candidate – the idea of someone trying to enact an elaborate murder plot while in the world’s biggest fishbowl would have been fascinating!