Columbo: “Undercover” (Levinson-Link Productions, Universal, 1994)

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

Last night I watched one of the Sunshine Channel’s reruns of Columbo, which include shows from the tail end of the series – including this one, “Undercover,” from 1994. Like the last one I watched, “No Time to Die,” this was based on a story by noted crime writer Ed McBain, author of the 87th Precinct police-procedural novels set in a thinly disguised New York City. Though a few elements of the Columbo formula remain – including a final scene in which Lt. Columbo (Peter Falk) essentially annoys the criminal into confessing – the story, even filtered through other hands after McBain submitted it (Gerry Day gets credit for “teleplay”), reflects his grittier, more noir vision of the world and the role of the police in it. Columbo and his African-American sidekick, Detective Sergeant Arthur Brown (Harrison Page) – not knowing that he was a series “regular” in the latter stages of the show, my husband Charles initially suspected he might be the ultimate villain – stumble upon the central intrigue when a burglar breaks into a room at a ratty apartment building while the apartment’s legitimate occupant is on his way home. The actual resident stops at his mailbox, gets out a girlie magazine he subscribes to, and walks up the stairs when he notices his lights are on, pulls a gun and the altercation ends with both men having killed each other, the resident with a gun and the burglar with a knife.

Lt. Columbo and Det. Sgt. Brown find a jigsaw puzzle-shaped piece of a photograph that the two men were apparently fighting over, and when they return to the police station they’re confronted by an insurance agent, Irving Krutch (Ed Begley, Jr.), who’s so overwrought and twitchy I immediately concluded either he would turn out to be the prime villain or Messrs. McBain and Day were setting him up to be the Mother of All Red Herrings. Krutch tells the cops that four years previously a major bank robbery occurred in which the robbers got away with $4 million in cash (though later in the dialogue it turns into six years; I think the idea is that the actual robbery occurred six years previously but after the first two years the insurance company paid the bank’s claim for the missing $4 million and demoted Krutch because he hadn’t been able to recover the loot), only within 45 minutes they were ambushed by police and all four robbers were killed in the ensuing gun battle. But the money was never recovered – obviously it had been hidden by the robbers before they were ambushed, and it turns out they’d worked out where they were going to dump the loot before the robbery and cut a photo of the drop location into several puzzle-shaped pieces, then split it amongst friends or collaborators so whoever could reassemble the photograph could figure out where the money was and grab it. (It reminded me of all those scripts for the Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes movies in which Holmes and the villains had to race to assemble clues to the location of a secret weapon or treasure, each clue useless without the others.)

As part of his effort to assemble the other pieces of the puzzle – at first we think there are seven pieces in all but a surprise twist at the end reveals there are actually eight – before their owners are killed for them, Columbo adopts an undercover identity as a gangster (recalling the Mafiosi he played in his early movies in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, notably real-life mobster Abe Reles in the 1960 film Murder, Inc.), living in a sleazy hotel (this time the five listed producers and director Vincent McEveety really scoured the Universal backlot for skuzzy-looking false fronts of sleazy urban apartments and hotels) to contract mobster Mo Weinberg. This actur looked and sounded so much like Peter Falk that for a while I thought they had cast him in a dual role – especially since there is no scene between them in which both face the camera at the same time – but they didn’t: the imdb,com page lists Burt Young as Mo Weinberg. The search is guided by a piece of paper the detectives recover that contains the names of the recipients of the puzzle pieces – some of them, actually, since the list is torn and one corner is missing. The missing corner turns up in the possession of art gallery owner Geraldine Ferguson (a nicely controlled performance by Shera Danese),who has one of the pieces, only she’s murdered for it and her screaming-queen gallery manager, Bramley Kahn (Eddie Hibbert), is knocked out along the way but comes to in time to steer the police to the puzzle piece. There’s another scene in which which Columbo has to persuade an old alcoholic hag named Dorothea McKittrick (Tyne Daly) who plays it so much like Jessie Florian in Raymond Chandler’s novel Farewell, My Lovely I expected Moose Malloy to walk in any moment – and Columbo has to handle her much the way Philip Marlowe handled similar women: by plying them with both money and booze until they yielded up their secrets. (She begins the scene by saying, “I ain’t no Marilyn Monroe,” but Tyne Daly was only 10 years younger than Monroe and one could readily imagine Marilyn looking like this by 1994 if she’d survived but continued her bad habits.)

Columbo has Krutch write out a timetable for all his movements during the case, and every time at which a murder happened in connection with the case he claims that he was in bed with his girlfriend, Suzie Endicott (Kristin Braun), and she backs him up and says he never left their bed during the entire time. Only at the end Columbo reads her the riot act and threatens to charge her as an accessory if she keeps lying for him – so she stops and concedes they parted long enough for him to commit each murder. Frankly, the ending I was hoping for would be that this typical dumb-blonde would turn out to be the villain herself, snarling at both Krutch and the cops, “Yeah, you didn’t leave – but I did! I killed all those people who were standing in between us and the money! You, you wimp, were only going to turn the loot in to the insurance company and get the 10 percent they were offering you as a reward – but why be content with $400,000 when we could have had the whole $4 million?” That would have made her a true femme fatale and would have given Kristin Braun a role she could sink her teeth into instead of just playing the dumb-blonde stereotype – but the writer decided to take the easy way out and have Krutch turn out to be the ordinarily obvious Columbo villain. (I’d like to think Ed McBain wrote it the way I did and it was Gerry Day, at the behest of Columbo creators Richard Levinson and William Link and various other assorted “suits” at Universal, that changed it.)

There’s a postlude where the police at last assemble all eight pieces of the photo and it leads them to a waterfront location where the robbers dumped the loot in a big chest under water – I asked Charles if $4 million could have possibly fitted into a chest the size we see and he said probably not (one of his pet peeves in movies is filmmakers depicting large sums of cash in containers too small – sometimes several orders of magnitude too small – to contain them in real life), and he also questioned how the proceeds of a bank robbery would have come in stacks of pristine bills in the unopened wrappers in which the U.S. Mint would have supplied them. Though I think my ending would have been more convincingly noir and a departure from the usual Columbo formula (they were moving away from their usual gimmick of showing the murder go down in reel one, letting us know from the get-go who the culprit was, having Columbo intuit it and ultimately essentially annoy the killer into confessing – which is sort of what happens here, but only in the last act, but they could have pushed it even further), this Columbo was entertaining and Peter Falk was able to get some grit into his performance and turn down the campiness that had endeared him to audiences in the late 1970’s but was getting a bit tiresome by 1994. Also, for some reason the film is largely scored with modern re-creations of 1920’s dance-music records, including a surprisingly accurate copy of Paul Whiteman’s star-making hit “Whispering” (1920), and though there’s no indication on the episode’s imdb.com page I suspect the records came from the ones made for the soundtrack of the 1974 film of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby even though that film was made for Paramount and Columbo was filmed by Universal.