Columbo: "The Mot Crucial Game" (Levinson=Link Productions, Universal, NBC-TV, aired Nova.mber 5, 1972)

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

I had hoped the Sundance Channel would have followed up “Etude for Murder” with the next episode in sequence, “The Greenhouse Jungle,” partly because the plot synopsis on imdb.com sounded interesting (“Columbo arrives at a kidnapping case, which at some point turns to worse. Everything seems to be related to a trust fund managed by a man with a great love for orchids”) and partly because the cast included another old Hollywood “name,” Ray Milland. Instead they chose to show the episode after that, “The Most Crucial Game,” in which the killer is Paul Hanlon (Robert Culp in his second of three Columbo appearances: he was also in the pilot for the short-lived spinoff Mrs. Columbo), the general manager of the Rockets professional football team (who are shown playing the “Pioneers” in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum – ironically, an imdb.com “Trivia” poster claims that the shots of the audience watching this game are from the very first Super Bowl between the Green Bay Packers and the Kansas City Chiefs on January 15, 1967 even though no complete film of that game is known to exist). Hanlon was hired two years previously to turn around the Rockets’ fortunes by their owner, and he has expanded the sports empire to include a basketball team and is about to close a deal to buy a hockey franchise as well – only in the meantime the owner has died and left his estate to his scapegrace son, Eric Wagner (Dean Stockwell).

Eric’s only interest in the business is the money he can make from it so he can lavish it on an expensive home and all the drinks and “party girls” he can afford to indulge in while his wife Shirley (Susan Howard) is out of town. When Hanlon calls Eric to get him ready to go to Montreal, where he’s needed to sign the papers transferring the hockey team, Eric takes the call under an expansive black sheet and there’s a bit of suspense as to whether he’s telling the truth or lying when he assures Hanlon that there’s no one else in the bed. There isn’t, but there was because he’s coming off a big party night in which the hippie girl he invited over brought along her sister for a three-way. Hanlon decides to get rid of Eric once and for all; when he arrives and Eric is in his swimming pool, Hanlon clubs him to death with a block of ice, then throws it in the pool (where the warm pool water will melt it) and fakes it to look like an accidental drowning. Frankly, the most entertaining aspect of this show was Dean Stockwell’s physique: he’d been a child star at MGM in the mid-1940’s and died just a month ago (November 7, 2021) at age 85. When he made this he was in his mid-30’s and was still quite a delectable hunk of man-meat, especially in the black swim trunks that are the only clothes he wears in the whole episode.

Alas, once he departs the episode becomes considerably less interesting, though there are some nice intrigues between Hanlon and Wagner family attorney Walter Cunnell (Dean Jagger), who have literally been bugging each other. Columbo finds that one of the bugs recorded the phone call Hanlon made to Eric, ostensibly from a box at the Coliseum but actually from an ice-cream truck he used to drive to Eric’s place and kill him without anyone knowing he had left with the game playing on the truck’s radio, and confiscates both the bugging equipment and the private investigator’s license of the man who recorded it, Ralph Dobbs (Val Avery), who whines that Columbo’s refusal to return the equipment and the license is keeping him from being able to work. There’s also a scene in which Columbo interviews the woman who planted the bugs for Dobbs, a coolly efficient high-end prostitute named Eve Babcock (Valerie Harper) who mistakes Columbo for her latest “john” – and when her real customer, a bald, homely middle-aged businessman in town for a convention, sees Columbo there and learns he’s a cop, he beats a hasty and quite frightened retreat. In the end Columbo establishes that Hanlon faked the phone call and wasn’t in his stadium box when he made it because it occurred precisely at 2:30 p.m. and didn’t include the chiming of the ornate clock in Hanlon’s box, which rang at every half-hour. This was an efficient Columbo, hardly at the level of inspiration as “Etude in Black” (the writer was John T. Dugan and the director was Jeremy Kagan – the director of “Etude in Black” was Nicholas Colasanto but imdb.com claims Peter Falk and John Cassavetes both had a hand in it) but a nice, reliable piece of entertainment. I liked the Columbo show then and I still do, but after a while both the concept and the schticks get more wearing than entertaining.