Columbo: “Columbo Cries Wolf” (Levinson-Link Productions, Universal, NBC-TV,. 1990)

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

Last Friday night at 11 p.m. I watched another Columbo rerun from the Sundance Channel, this one from the series’ reboot starting in 1989 after the original went off the air in 1978 – still, of course, with Peter Falk as Lt. Columbo of the L.A. Police Department’s homicide squad (in real life it’s called “Robbery-Homicide,” presumably because of how often these two crimes are committed together) driving his outrageously ugly little Peugeot convertible amongst the cars of the rich and famous whose crimes against each other he investigates. This was the first Columbo from 1990 and the first clue both my husband Charles and I had that it wasn’t from the series’ original run was the song “She Drives Me Crazy,” released in 1988 by the band Fine Young Cannibals, heard as part of a party scene at the mansion owned by playboy Sean Brantley (Ian Buchanan, who comes off as a sort of more sinister version of Montgomery Clift) and paid for with the income from Bachelor magazine (read:Playboy). Only his business partner, Diane Hunter (Deidre Hall), wants to sell the publication to British media mogul Sir Henry Matthews (Alan Scarfe), who will cut costs on the publication and in particular close down the Beverly Hills chateau where Brantley lives and indulges hismelf with a continuous flow of alcohol, probably other substances, and women who seem willing to throw themselves into his much-explored arms at the drop of a thong.

Brantley stages an elaborate operation that involves kidnapping Diane on her way to the airport, ambushing and killing her while her chauffeur Cosner (Mark Margolis) has parked her limo in the back alley entrance of a particular restaurant that has the ultra-thin sliced salmon she likes. A heavily made-up and bundled-up woman gets on the plane to London with Diane’s ticket, but the real Diane’s whereabouts are unknown. Columbo spends most of the episode piecing together a theory that Brantley killed Diane with a female accomplice who posed as her in the limo and boarded the plane, then disappeared. They even dig up the grounds of Brantley’s chateau to find the body of Diane, presumably buried there as part of the plot, only the city’s officials, including the mayor (David Huddleston), get angry at the speculative nature of the investigation and in particular their inability to locate Diane’s remains. The mayor has a press conference and puts the LAPD on the spot for mounting an “investigation” when they can’t even prove a crime was cimmitted – and then Diane turns up, very much alive, and the cops realize that the whole “disappearance” was cooked up between Sean and Diane as a way to boost circulation of their magazine. Only Sean and Diane are still at cross purposes – he still wants to keep the magazine independent even if it means having to mortgage it so Sean can buy out Diane’s 51 percent interest, while she still wants to sell it to Matthews and cash out.

So Diane disappears again and, with a very public black eye from his earlier fiasco, this time around Columbo investigates far more gingerly – only, in yet another surprise twist (from writer William Read Woodfield) on a show that usually worshiped at the shrine of St. Alfred Hitchcock and avoided whodunits or surprise tricks (Hitchcock always thought the audience should know what was really going on from the get-go, and the suspense should come from how the characters would find out and what would happen to them when they did), it turns out that Diane engineered Sean so the whole plot would expose him as a potential murderer and allow her to get out from under him and sell out to Matthews. We find this out at the end when one of the two matching gold bracelets Sean and Diane wear that are really beepers (remember beepers?) from Diane to Sean flashes the message, “Gotcha.” After the decade-long hiatus this Columbo, aired under the episode title “Columbo Cries Wolf,” was surprisingly good; it helped that Peter Falk (like Robert Mitchum) had never been especially good-looking, so age wasn’t going to be the sort of career threat to him it was to a handsomer, sexier actor. It also helped that Woodfield concocted a script that mostly stayed close to the old Columbo formula but also included variations and surprise twists – and though there wasn’t a “name” star in this one (at one point in the 1970’s celebrities had been actively seeking roles as murderers on Columbo – someday I’d love to see the one they’ve been promo-ing with Johnny Cash, who in his few screen appearances as an actor showed himself quite authoritative and considerably better than his former Sun label-mate, Elvis Presley), Ian Hamilton was a quite effective villain, good-looking but with all too much awareness of the power of his good looks and how he could use them to manipulate those around him and get what he wanted both economically and sexually.