Columbo: “Sex and the Married Detective” (Levinson-Link Productions, Universal, NBC-TV, 1989)

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

My husband Charles and I night-capped last evening by watching a Sundance Channel rerun of a Columbo episode from April 3, 1989 – rather late in the day for this show – called “Sex and the Married Detective,” which was about a psychotherapist named Dr. Joan Allenby (Lindsay Crouse, turning in a superb villainess performance), author of a book called The Courtesan Complex whose basic premise is that in order to revivify their marriages, women should pretend to be Camille-style high-end hookers. She and her boyfriend David Kincaid (Stephen Macht) have parlayed the success of her book into a successful radio show (which writer Jerrold L. Ludwig has her broadcasting at the start of the episode so we know instantly what sort of a character she is and what her publicly aired views about sex are) and are about to cut a deal to put her on television. Only first she has to go to Chicago for a meeting of the broadcasters who are syndicating her show nationwide, but because O’Hare Airport is snowed in she can’t leave that night – so she returns to her office and in particular to the so-called “therapy room,” which is set up to look like a room in a 19th century bordello, complete with a velvet comforter on the bed, a fireplace, gilded chairs and Venetian blinds, through which (thanks to some artfully composed shots by director James Frawley and cinematographer Robert Seaman) she sees David in flagrante delicto with the other (and considerably younger and hotter) woman on her staff, Cindy (Julia Montgomery).

So she hatches an elaborate revenge plot to disguise herself in a black outfit – black top, black pants, a long black wig and a black men’s-style fedora – and pose as a high-class hooker called “Lisa.” On a night the couple was supposed to go to a music benefit at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, she changes into the disguise in the facility’s restroom (we know it’s a high-class venue because the sign on the restroom says “Ladies” instead of “Women”), lures David to a sleazy but still high-end bar called “Buckets” (in one of Hollywood»s oldest and dumbest clichés, as the locale shifts the music cuts from “πrespectable” classical to sleazy jazz) and comes on to him in courtesan drag. It’s established that he knows who she really is but no one else in the bar does – neither has ever been there before – and she takes him not to their home but to the bordello room in her office complex (which is designed, she explains later on, to inspire couples whose sex life has dwindled to rekindle it by engaging their sense of fantasy), where she insists he’s only going to be allowed to do what she says, and at the moment he’s expecting to get it on she shoots him instead with a .9 mm gun, the sort of toy gun that generally gets presented in mystery fiction as a “woman’s gun.” In fact she drills him so accurately from so far away with that teeny-tiny gun it’s a wonder she kills him with just one shot; she’d have to be either lucky or a practiced markswoman to do it.

Anyway, the case gets turned over to Our Hero, Lt. Columbo (Peter Falk), who in the course of the two-hour running time (the original Columbo episodes were 90 minutes but later NBC and Universal padded them out to two hours, mainly by adding campy little asides and weird bits of business for Falk to do) uses his usual strategy of annoying the killer into confessing. Along the way we get to see and hear Columbo play the tuba surprisingly well – during his investigation he’s walked into a tuba class at the Pavilion – and we also see him crash a bartending class (the teacher was also the bartender at Buckets the night David picked up “Lisa”) and offer therapeutic advice to all the male colleagues of Dr. Allenby, including Dr. Simon Ward (Peter Jurasik) and Dr. Walter Neff (Ken Lerner), both of which asked Columbo, of all people, to let them know when it would be appropriate for them to declare their crushes on Dr. Allenby now that their primary competition has been removed. Columbo answers with the sorts of empty things real therapists say, and writer Ludwig was obviously savoring the role reversal. By this time in its run Columbo was mostly coasting along on sheer campiness – in some ways the entire show was a throwback to the comedy-mysteries so popular in 1930’s Hollywood (of which the best examples were W. S. Van Dyke’s The Thin Man and James Whale’s Remember Last Night?; I’m also particularly fond of Stephen Roberts’ The Ex-Mrs. Bradford, in which divorced couple William Powell and Jean Arthur reconcile while teamed up to solve a murder mystery) before the 1941 version of The Maltese Falcon killed off the appetite for comedy-mysteries and launched the film noir cycle.

This one was made special by Lindsay Crouse’s performance as the killer – it was a time when celebrities fought hard to get guest shots on Columbo as the villain, and one I’d particularly like to see was one being featured on Sundance’s promos in which Johnny Cash played the killer. Though Cash rarely acted – unlike fellow Sun Records alumnus Elvis Presley, he concentrated on music (imdb.com lists 35 acting credits for him, but almost all are music videos he shot in his later career) – the few films of his I’ve seen (a surprisingly good performance as a psycho kidnapper in a silly film called Five Minutes to Live and a great performance in a quite good film called A Gunfight, in which he and Kirk Douglas play rival gunslingers and Cash holds his own with Douglas in the acting department) indicate he could have become an excellent actor (much better than Elvis!) if he’d followed that path.