Columbo: “Dead Weight” (Levinson-Link Productions, Universal, 1971)

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

The Sundance Channel’s ongoing series of reruns of the 1970’s TV detective series Columbo has run its course and started over – instead of the extended two-hour episodes made towards the end of the show’s run that featured stories by noir writer Ed McBain that attempted to break (or at least bend) the Columbo formula, last night’s rerun (actually they did two but I only stayed up for one – there are limits even for obsessive people like me) was only the fourth show in the series, when they were still working out the formula and getting rid of the bumps in it. The episode was called “Dead Weight” and featured Eddie Albert, Sr. as Major General Martin J. Hollister, whose personal heroism and fearlessness in the Korean War (which was only about 20 years before this episode was made) had made him a living legend until a land mine ended his active service. He retired from the military and formed a company to make equipment for the Defense Department, only as he grew older and more affluent he also got crooked, forming a mutually profitable relationship with Col. Roger Dutton (John Kerr) in which Hollister’s company submits low bids for military contracts, Dutton signs off on them and then approves the large overpayments Hollister needs to make the contracts profitable and fund his lavish house on a West Coast beach community (though, oddly, his boat’s stern lists “Newport” as its home port, which is in Rhode Island).

Alas, their gravy train is about to be derailed by the Defense Department’s inspector general, who’s investigating the relationship between the military and Hollister’s company and has subpoenaed Dutton to testify against Hollister. Dutton drives to Hollister’s home in a brown Ford LTD (part of the thrill of watching a TV episode of this vintage is seeing the cars that were on the road back then) and announces his intention to cooperate with the investigation, and Hollister shoots him dead with the pearl-handled pistol he carried into combat all those years ago in Korea. Alas, the shooting is witnessed by Helen Stewart (Suzanne Pleshette) and her mother, Mrs. Walters (Kate Reid), who see it through the big picture window in Hollister’s home, though they are too far away to notice what the shooter or the victim look like except the shooter was wearing a bathrobe and the victim was in full military uniform. Mom insists that Helen not call the police, which she takes as a dare to do just that – and it looks like Helen is flirting with the hot young uniformed cop who takes the call. The young, hunky cop decides that actually investigating a murder is above his pay grade, so he calls in Lt. Columbo (Peter Falk) – and the moment Columbo comes in and parks his trademark ratty Peugeot convertible (which wasn’t that popular a car even in France – as I noted when Charles and I watched the 1958 French film Paris Belongs to Us, the cars on the Paris streets in that film were mostly Renaults or Citroëns), wearing his trademark raincoat and looking, as one of the characters says later, like an unmade bed.

“Dead Weight” was directed by Jack Smight (who had some important feature-film credits, notably the 1966 neo-noir Harper with Paul Newman and Lauren Bacall) from a script by John T. Dugan, who threw in at least one inventive plot twist: he has Hollister find out who the witness is against him and tries to neutralize her as a threat by romancing her. Since she’s a 30-something divorcée and he’s never been married (his excuse is the usual one – he was too busy first being a general and then starting a defense company – and he’s also way richer than she, she’s impressed and starts genuinely falling for him, Remember that when he killed Dutton she didn’t get a good look at either of them and remembered only what each of them was wearing. The show also did an early version of a gag they rather wore into the ground later on, in which Columbo parks his car in front of the Hollister home to start his investigation, and is told, “You can’t park here. It’s being reserved for the police department.” And they borrowed the old gimmick from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” (1844) of having Hollister hide the murder weapon in plain sight; early on in the action he attends a testimonial dinner for an upcoming exhibit of his memorabilia. He tells Columbo the pearl-handed pistol that’s part of the exhibit is a replica since he lost the original, but Columbo deduces it is the original because Hollister is such a pack rat he’s kept everything. So he sneaks it out of the exhibit without Hollister’s knowledge and has it tested for ballistics, it’s a match for the gun that killed Hutton, and he arrests Hollister while he’s receiving people at the exhibit honoring him. (This show anticipated the Law and Order franchise by having the culprit arrested at the most publicly embarrassing moment the writers could think of – though that had been done as early as 1929 in the Al Jolson film Say It with Songs, in which Jolson is arrested for killing his manager, who was trying to get Jolson’s wife to have sex with him, and he’s taken into custody at the radio station where he broadcasts right as he’s finishing a song, “I’m in Seventh Heaven,” about how wonderful his life is and everything is going well for him.)

All in all, this Columbo episode is quite a lot of fun, intriguing not only as entertainment in its own right but also nice in that we get to see a lot of the later Columbo formulae before they hardened into clichés – and instead of the killer so elaborately premeditating the murder that his plans include a complicated means of disposing of the body, just when we’re wondering, “What the hell did he do with the body?,” he presses a button and a secret doorway opens in his wall revealing Dutton’s body wrapped in plastic, in a shot that recalls some of Universal’s classic 1930’s horror films. (Eventually he takes the body out of his stash and takes it on board his boat to dump it at sea – hence the “Dead Weight” episode title – only it turns up a few days later and the investigation gets more serious now that the cops have proof that Dutton is dead.) I also like the business of the villain romancing the principal witness against him even though a writer from the classic film noir era of the 1940’s and early 1950’s could have done a lot more with it than John T. Dugan did – like having the bad guy try to rush her into marriage on the ground that a wife can’t testify against her husband, and/or having her come to a shocked realization of who he really is and why he’s courting her, leading to him deciding he needs to eliminate her, and the cops coming in and either arresting or killing him just as he’s about to kill her. But Dugan and the show’s creators, Richard Levinson and William Link, already knew their character wasn’t going to be an action figure (even though Peter Falk had previously played gangster roles and had shown quite a lot of action capability in them), and even this early, though Columbo figures out who the killer is, he has to bring in two younger, more buff plainclothes cops to make the actual arrest!