Columbo: “Murder with Too Many Notes” (Levinson-Link Productions, Universal, 2001)

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

Late last night at 11 p.m. my husband Charles and I watched yet another rerun of the TV series Columbo on the Sundance Channel, this one from the tail end of the series: 2001. Columbo, the legendary show about the seemingly bumbling but actually highly savvy Los Angeles Police Department homicide lieutenant, was created by Richard Levinson and William Link, debuted in 1971 with veteran character actor Peter Falk as the star, and became a huge sensation. It vaulted Falk to superstardom and made him a ton of money, much of which he used to finance the independent films of his long-time friend, actor-director-writer John Cassavetes, usually starring in these films alongside Cassavetes’ wife, Gena Rowlands. The original run ended in 1979 but a decade later Levinson, Link and their backers at Universal decided to revive it as a limited-run series that lasted until 2003, but if this episode is any indication to diminishing returns both artistically and commercially. This episode was called “Murder with Too Many Notes” and told the tale of highly regarded film-music composer Findlay Crawford (Billy Connolly) and his long association with director Sidney Ritter (Charles Cioffi), with whom he’s worked frequently, mostly on action-suspense films. (We see a film within the film of a young woman followed, cornered and eventually stabbed to death by a knife-wielding man, ostensibly on a recording stage where Crawford is conducting.

Since Columbo was flmed at Universal, a long-established studio with plenty of real-life facilities for filmmaking, director Patrick McGoohan (himself a highly talented actor best known for the British TV series Secret Agent and The Prisoner; when James Bond film producers Harry Saltzman and Cubby Broccoli were putting together the first Bond film, Dr. No, their short list for Bond was Sean Connery, Roger Moore and McGoohan, in that order, though unlike the other two McGoohan never got to play 007) was able to shoot on an actual recording stage and show the process as it is for real. The conductor stands in front of the orchestra and at the back wall there is a screen projecting the movie as the musicians lay down the orchestral tracks that will accompany it. As this is going on, a young man is standing on the roof of the soundstage where the recording is going on, listening to a boombox containing a recording of the score and conducting it himself, albeit with nobody there. He, it turns out, is a young apprentice composer named Gabriel McEnery (Chad Willett, proof that Universal was still able to find these tall and blankly handsome young men they’d put in their 1970’s TV shows as late as 2001) who’s actually been ghost-writing most of Crawford’s most recent scores. The idea of an unknown working as a “front” for a famous but burned-out talent has been done pretty often – the film I was most reminded of in this movie was The Phantom Broadcast, a remarkable 1933 film from the first-iteration Monogram (which made films of genuine quality, including the 1934 Jane Eyre with Virginia Bruce and Colin Clive, as well as some of the usual “B” dreck), in which a handsome young man becomes a star on radio, only little does his audience know that he can’t sing at all and the real singer is a homely hunchback who stands behind a curtain in the radio studio and does the actual singing while he merely lip-synchs “live.”

In addition to dubbing Sidney Ritter’s latest film, Crawford is planning a live concert of his music, “Crawford Plays Crawford,” to take place on a Universal soundstage, and to appease Gabrlel’s growing bitterness that something that was supposed to be an apprenticeship is turning into a full-time career as Crawford’s ghostwriter and his own career is going nowhere, Crawford offers Gabriel a chance to conduct the opening piece after the intermission, the theme from the film The Killer, for whose score Crawford won an Academy Award though it ws really Gabriel’s work. Only it’s a trick: Crawford has discovered an elevator in the soundstage where he’s going to hold the concert (just under the spot of the roof from which Gabriel does his pretend “:conducting”) previously installed by a hot-shot director who used it for only one shot in a film that flopped and killed his career. He intends to rig it in such a way that he will first drug Gabriel, then leave his body across the trap door, then secretly turn on the elevator just before the concert starts so that the trap door will open and Gabriel will fall to his apparent death from an accidental fall. (Supposedly Crawford has picked a drug for this purpose that dissipates so quickly in the body it won’t show up on toxicology tests.) The best parts of this episode are, as usual, the cat-and-mouse playing Columbo does with Crawford, though much of it doesn’t make much sense either as police investigation or as policier plotting: at one point Columbo pretends to run out of gas when he’s supposedly leading Crawford to the late Gabriel’s bungalow cottage, forces his way into Crawford’s car and then deliberately drives him to the address in Bel Air without taking the car out of first gear.

In these later Columbos the writers (in this case McGoohan and Jeff Cava) show a good deal more of the rest of Columbo’s homicide squad and don’t leave as much of an impression as they did the first time around that Columbo was solving one elaborate murder case after another all by himself – but they also put in far fewer of the scenes in which Columbo plays cat-and-mouse with the killer (whose identity he always seemed to intuit well before he had any actual evidence), and they’re nowhere nearly as deliciously written as they had been in the glory days of Columbo in the 1970’s. Peter Falk is clearly older-looking and more heavy-set than he’d been in this series’ early days – though since he was never a glamorous actor to begin with he suffered less from age than did former matinee idols like Robert Taylor and Errol Flynn), but what was pretty obvious was that by this time in his career he was doing Columbo just for the money and was totally bored – well, not maybe totally bored, bit he knew what was expected of him and, like an old pro (which he was) he delivered it. For me the best part of the show was tha actual music, composed for it by Dick DeBenedictis, who expertly caught the style we’re told Crawford works in – though at the end of the movie, after he’s killed his ghostwriter and he’s on his own to score a romantic drama, DeBenedictis supplies a theme that still seems to have half its leg in the action genre and Ritter chews him out, saying that it’s the wrong sort of music and wondering if Crawford is losing his inspiration. I joked at the TV screen, “Just do what all film composers do when they’re stuck – rip off Wagner!”