Columbo: “Dagger of the Mind” (Levinson-Link Productions, Universal, 1972)

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

Last night’s first Columbo rerun on the Sundance Channel was an episode that got stretched out to two hours and 15 minutes by the additional commercials they added (as the story moved to its climax we seemed to be watching more commercials than program!) from 1972 called “Dagger of the Mind.” It was set in London and featured Lt. Columbo of the Los Angeles Police Department (Peter Falk) visiting Detective Chief Superintendent William Dunk (Bernard Fox) of Scotland Yard. While there he gets involved in a case involving a constantly bickering husband-and-wife acting couple, Nicholas Frame (Richard Basehart) and Lilian Stanhope (former Bond girl Honor Blackman), in characterizations obviously based by writer Jackson Gillis (working from a story by Columbo creators Richard Levinson and William Link) on the legend of Alfred Lunt and Lynne Fontanne. (I say the “legend” because it’s hard to imagine anyone alive today who saw them “in the flesh” – they’re not totally legendary because they made a film together in 1931, The Guardsman, which I recall as quite good, an adaptation of one of their stage hits by director Sidney Franklin, who managed to make the film a real movie instead of just a photographed stage play, but the legend of two people who play intense love scenes on stage and can’t stand each other off stage has survived the Lunts’ reality.)

They had previously inveigled a legendary retired stage producer, Sir Roger Haversham (John Williams, a marvelously dry British actor who appeared in two of my favorite – and quite different – films from the 1950’s, Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial “M” for Murder and Richard Quine’s The Solid Gold Cadillac – incidentally Quine directed this Columbo episode as well) into bankrolling their new production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth by throwing Lilian at him, ostensibly for an affair. Only he’s caught on that he’s just being used by the couple for his money, and he shows up on the dress rehearsal night of the Macbeth production and announces that he’s pulling the plug, the show won’t open and he’ll make sure they never work in the theatre again. So they kill him – he’s struck by a makeup jar or something Lilian throws at him (though she was aiming at Nicholas and he ducked) – and then plant his body in a trunk (so this was the second night in a row we’d watched a movie in which someone killed someone, or thought they did, and shoved the body into a trunk, which they then put in the back of an open car to dispose of it) and take it to Haversham’s own home to make it look like he died in an accidental fall down stairs. Then they go ahead and hold a wake for Sir Roger on the theatre stage, then open the production as scheduled and dedicate it as a memorial to him. Interestingly, when they act out scenes from Macbeth Honor Blackman is absolutely riveting, vividly emotional and thoroughly evil, while Richard Basehart just seems lackluster (but then I was comparing him to Orson Welles’ performance, more than a bit overwrought but also far more dramatically compelling, as Macbeth in his 1948 film).

Though Lt. Columbo is way out of his jurisdiction, he sticks his nose in the case anyway as the medical examiner does an autopsy and realizes that Haversham died somewhere else and was moved post-mortem, and suspicion falls on Haversham’s butler Tanner (Wilfrid Hyde-White – it seems as if director Quine had quite a Rolodex of old British character actors he could call to enliven this episode) before Columbo persuades the British authorities that Frame and Stanhope are the real killers. They’re arrested at the opening of a wax museum exhibit dedicated to them and to Haversham that includes a custom-made umbrella Haversham had left behind at the theatre when he visited them on dress-rehearsal eve to lower the boom and got the boom lowered on himself. Only his umbrella got mixed up with Frame’s own (or somebody’s) and the killer couple were worried that someone would notice the honorary mini-plaque and put two and two together. Their fear was that if anyone figured out that Haversham had visited the theatre last night – during a brief sudden squall that had left tell-tale indications of rain on the hood of his car (a Rolls-Royce, of course, while Frame and Stanhope drove a sports convertible, one of the four-wheeled cars the British Morgan company started making after 1935; earlier they’d built three-wheeled cars because under British law they would be taxed as motorcycles, at a far lower rate, but when the British government eliminated that tax advantage, Morgan started making their cars with four wheels like everyone else) – they would figure out that Frame and Stanhope had killed him to keep their play and their overall careers going. It was a charming episode, and the British character actors as well as the London locations (some of which my husband Charles recognized from having been there in the 1980’s) added to its appeal.