Columbo: “No Time to Die” (Levinson-Link Productions, Universal, 1992)

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

Shortly after my husband Charles got home for work I left the Sundance Channel on after the Law and Order rerun I’d just seen there and watched a rerun of a Columbo episode from 1992 – quite late in the day for this series – called “No Time to Die.” By this time Columbo creators Richard Levinson and William Link were trying to vary the formula – in the opening act or two we see someone plotting and carrying out an elaborately planned murder, and the rest of the show would be Lt. Columbo (Peter Falk) intuiting who hte killer was and essentially annoying him into confessing. This time around Levinson and Link got well-known crime thriller writer Ed McBain to do the original story – though they still filtered it through other hands in creating the actual script (the credits list McBain for story and Robert Van Scoyk for “teleplay”). McBain’s real name was Salvatore Lombino and he wrote general-interest fiction under another pseudonym, Evan Hunter – “Hunter” made his reputation with the 1953 novel The Blackboard Jungle, based on Lombino’s own experiences as an inner-city high school teacher, and “McBain” made his name shortly thereafter with the book Cop Hater in 1956, about a woman who get so tired of being married to a police officer she kills not only him but two other cops to give the police the impression that there’s a serial killer with a psychopathic obsession with murdering police officers.

There’s an amusing passage in one of the “McBain” novels in which the detectives of the 87th precinct in an unnamed city (it’s clearly based on New York but he took the five boroughs and gave them fictional names: Manhattan became “Isola” because it’s on an island) find themselves on a college campus showing The Birds as part of a retrospective on Alfred Hitchcock. The in-joke is that, as “Evan Hunter”, McBain/Hunter/Lombino wrote the script for The Birds (and also two early drafts for Hitchcock’s next film, Marnie, until Hitchcock decided that a film about the psychology of a female character needed a woman author, so he brought in Jay Presson Allen). Though the actual script was done by someone else, McBain’s “touch” is all over “No Time to Die” and in particular in the character of the villain, a psycho whose father, a doctor, murdered his wife and then himself with a scalpel. This, of course, permanently warped the mind of their son, Donald Strassa (Daniel McDonald, appealingly cute and boyish in the mold of Anthony Perkins in Psycho – it’s one thing to look for Hitchcock parallels in stories by writers who had nothing to do with him, but this is a tale by a man who worked with Hitchcock on one of his most famous films and it’s reasonable to assume he learned something from the experience).

The show differs from most Columbo episodes in that 1) Columbo is introduced as a guest at the wedding of his nephew, L.A. police detective Andy Parma (Thomas Calabro, of whom we get some yummy shots of him topless and wearing only a bath towel from the waist down). 2) The crime is kidnapping, not murder – the victim is the wife Andy has married only hours before, who’s snatched while Andy is in the shower getting ready for the wedding night – and [spoiler alert!] the victim is recovered alive at the end. 3) It’s only midway through the episode that we learn who the bad guy is, and that’s only once the cops have searched through all the wedding photos looking for people who don’t belong there and have found one. 4) Columbo – as Charles noted when the episode was over – never talks to the bad guy at all during the course of the episode. The show opens at the wedding reception of Andy and his new bride, Melissa Alexandra Hayes (Joanna Going), the daughter of a super-rich real-estate developer from Seattle who was at a public event photographed by Alex Varrick (Daniel Davis), a professional photographer who noticed how photogenic Melissa was and recruited her for a career as a model. Only while Alex is running the water for his shower before he gets to enjoy his conjugal rights, Melissa is snatched away. The cops can tell she was kidnapped and taken out the fire escape of the fancy hotel where this is taking place (and where we’ve heard the most ghastly band throughout playing songs like “Can’t Help Falling in Love” and other standards and making them all sound pretty much the same) because she dropped one of her white high-heeled shoes in the hotel room and another while being carried out, while the kidnapper left a wad of paper or cotton or something filled with chloroform, with which he knocked her out.

Eventually we get a scene showing what’s happened to her – she’s lying on a crude mattress in an otherwise empty room with blacked-out windows and a locked door – though writers McBain and Van Scoyk and director Alan J. Levi take their sweet time before we actually get to see her captor and learn his bizarre motive. It seems he’s long wanted to find a woman with whom to re-enact the deaths of his parents, and he’s targeted Melissa because she resembles his late mom. He’s even got reel-to-reel tape recorders (in 1992? This kid’s pretty retro) cued up to play the Mendelssohn and Wagner wedding marches in the bedroom where he intends to take Melissa for her ravishment and murder by scalpel (he always carries a scalpel with him and we get the impression it’s the very one with which his dad murdered his mom, though as big fans of the movie Doctor X Charles and I can’t help but adopt Lionel Atwill’s bizarre pronunciation of the word from that film: “scal-PEL”). Another unusual aspect of this Columbo is that it’s a race against time because the cops realize they not only have to solve the crime, they have to do so in a hurry because the longer a kidnapper holds a victim, the more likely it is for the crime to end in the victim’s murder. They enlist the aid of photographer Varrick to supply them with prints of all the people at both the wedding and the reception so they can go through them, correlate them with the guest list kept by Melissa’s father, and figure out who in the pictures was not on the list so they can identify anyone who didn’t belong there.

They notice the odd man out was wearing a Rowley College ring and then go to that campus’s library (I found it shameful that the actor who was supposed to be playing the college dean – and should therefore speak English better than this – pronounced the word “library” as “liberry”) and painstakingly look through the old college yearbooks until they find a photo of the odd man out and can therefore identify him by name. Through a night-shift janitor named Bill Bailey (David Byrd) who complains that everyone who meets him makes the same stupid joke about the old song, “Why don’t you just go home?” (and I’ll admit I made the same joke, too, when his character was introduced), Columbo and his fellow cops deduce that Melissa was carried away in a white ambulance, and they use that information to find that Strassa was an ambulance driver until he was fired Monday morning for having stolen an ambulance with which to do the kidnapping Sunday night. Meanwhile Melissa, showing a degree of intelligence and resourcefulness virtually unheard of in movie or TV depictions of models, uses the oil and vinegar Strassa provided her as part of the meal he left for her to loosen the hinges on the door so she can break out – only Strassa, home early since he’s just been fired, discovers her and is about ready to slash her throat with the scal-PEL when the cops, in a reasonably effective suspense sequence, finally burst in and Andy is the one who shoots down his wife’s kidnapper and thus saves his wife’s life. About the one plot device I was expecting that we didn’t get was that Melissa would be wounded by her captor and his scal-PEL, not life-threatening but enough to ruin her career as a model, and as a result she’d follow her father’s wishes for her, train as a doctor and specialize in abnormal psychiatry because of her experience with someone that demented. Otherwise, this was an unusually effective Columbo episode with few of the campy bits that had become a trademark for this series, and with Peter Falk emphasizing the tightly controlled, professional aspects of his character instead of his usual schtick of finding out the suspect early on and irritating him into confessing.