Attack
of the Giant Leeches
A
tale of the Everglades, a general store, the fat proprietor’s young wife,
and a good old boy with an eye to her.
The second theme
breezes in from Wind Across
the Everglades with a game warden and his sweetheart and her father, a
professor who sees no problem dropping dynamite into the swamp against the
monstrosity.
So there are two
man-sized bloodsuckers harvesting captured humans in an underwater cave (the
bodies float up later in Dementia 13).
The MacGuffin has
to do with Cape Canaveral, the lovely score has its
Impressionist side. A Corman production expertly directed by
Kowalski.
The Case of the Grumbling
Grandfather
Perry Mason
A
companion piece to “The Case of the Negligent Nymph”. Three generations of Gideons
are menaced by a conniving, murderous secretary. Young David is vamped and
framed, Uncle Lucius is swindled and made to appear a
suicide, Grandfather J.J. suffers an extortion attempt
but sees the culprit apprehended.
“It’s
the only time in my life I was ever right about a woman,” he says,
amazed. Kowalski has a notable view of the courtroom, foursquare from the left
wall.
The Case of the Missing
Melody
Perry Mason
Harold
Lloyd’s A Jazzed Honeymoon is perhaps betokened in the opening
scene of a combo playing at a church wedding, which doesn’t come off. By
way of Hitchcock’s tribute in Rich and Strange, his remake of The
Man Who Knew Too Much is arrived at in a Straussian
dialogue of Jazz and the composer’s art.
Fall Guy
The Untouchables
A
trio of hoodlums start a
racket, National Personnel Services, Inc., hiring out thugs of every stripe.
The first caper is a diversion to allow a gangster to move his slot machines out
of Ness’s view. The hirelings set fire to a school and a Federal
distillery, the mobster’s trucks roll right up the middle in broad
daylight.
Ness puts the
pressure on, they need a fall guy. Big Joe Hovack is
out of Joliet, an old-timer who wonders where it all went. They set him up with
a salary and a limousine as president of the firm.
When it all comes
down, Hovack holds his wrists out for the handcuffs.
“No charge,” says Ness, who earlier describes Hovack
as “a canvasback for three rotten lightweights” (Herschel Bernardi,
Don Gordon, Robert Emhardt).
A
heroic part for Jay C. Flippen as the delusionary kingpin.
Takeover
The Untouchables
Three beer barons
run the Northside, spiking legal near beer for the speakeasies. One sends
another to jail and is murdered by the third.
Joe Kulak in New
York has an alibi for the jailed baron, sets him up for a takeover of the
Northside, imperative three weeks before the election on FDR’s announced
intention to repeal the Volstead Act. The instrument of the takeover is the
third baron’s son, kept out of the rackets by his father but now working
for Kulak.
In the beer war,
the father nearly kills his son unknowingly, the son gives his father’s
brewery away to Ness, the father delivers the son “on a silver
platter”, the son is killed, the father dies in
prison.
Leonard Nimoy as
a gunman, Mort Mills and John Banner as barons, Robert Loggia and Luther Adler
as son and father all vie for acting honors. Collin Wilcox as a bereaved moll
foreshadows a very similar role in Columbo: An
Exercise in Fatality. Adler develops a very neat characterization with a
payoff in the last scene.
Element of Danger
The Untouchables
The centerpiece
takes place at a sidewalk cafe, where Ness is offered money and glory to go
away, and doesn’t refuse it because he’s filming the conversation.
All he asks is the name of the hood who killed a
Federal agent investigating the case, and this is recorded as well.
The businessman
who makes this offer has brought in 50,000 pounds of opium, enough to make two-and-a-half
tons of heroin. The hood is his factotum, a hysterically violent three-time
loser.
The company
manufactures butane, oxygen and acetylene. It goes up in flames with the opium
when the sold-out hood Tommy-guns the businessman and his partners. Ness and
the squad end “the greatest narcotics threat in the history of
Chicago”.
Kowalski’s
spectacular direction bubbles and fizzes right to the explosive finish, and catches every nuance of brilliant performances by Victor Jory and Lee Marvin.
Man in the Middle
The Untouchables
The very touching
story of a nightclub owner forced out of the business. He rebuilds when a hood
burns his place down for buying hooch from a rival, then it’s burned down
by the other one. His wife can’t get a singing job. He keeps two rats as
pets in separate cages, each with the name of one of the hoods emblazoned on
the bars, and carries out his revenge. “He’s a nothin’,”
says the chanteuse, “a total zero.”
The first hood,
“Porker” Davis, has been forced into a partnership by his rival,
Joe Bomer, who finds his partner weighting the slot
machines and eliminates him. Bomer is continually
raided by Ness, finally stops the leak.
In the midst of
it all, the chanteuse gets a new dress from Maison
Robert. It takes money to be a singer, arrangements, costumes, a certain air
must be presented, “who says a mink coat can’t sing?” They
live in squalor, the dress is a posh print. “You
like it?” “Unzip me.” “Don’t I get
anything?” “Maybe.” She wears it to
ask Bomer for a job, he gets the idea who’s
talking.
Time
to leave the country, with a last request to Ness, “take care of
her.” Dying, he asks his
wife, “they hurt you?” She is holding her
arm, “I hurt my funny bone.”
“I owe
him,” she had told Bomer at his Hotsy Totsy Club, “you owe
him, too. You done enough to him, give him a break, he’s a little man.”
She’s followed to him.
Looking at her
husband’s body, after Bomer has fallen three
flights in a scuffle with Ness, she says, “I did that. I did it. He
didn’t deserve it.” The rats are dead, shot by a furious Bomer (“the rats that chewed him down to
nothing”). Ness tells her, “neither did
you.”
Harry Kronman’s teleplay is exactly matched by
Kowalski’s direction.
The Case Against Eliot Ness
The Untouchables
He is badgered into
naming a murderer and slapped with a lawsuit. The case is a clever trick by a
pillar of the community out to secure a franchise in the Century of Progress.
The proprietors are killed, a mobster takes their place, he
exposes the man.
This is all
arranged with a fee for assassins and mobster alike. He enters into a
confederation with Frank Nitti to clean up the loose ends for Ness, Nitti reserves one as blackmail for equal shares.
The
assassin’s erstwhile widow sells him out for cash so they can both flee the
country, he dies in a shootout with the squad and is dramatically photographed
under the classically upraised knife of a pillar of the community.
The Monkey Wrench
The Untouchables
Nitti moves on
Kulak with imported brewmasters, New York replies
with the man in the title.
When raided,
Nitti kills a brewmaster to avoid detection. The
monkey wrench joins in the stream of illegal aliens and achieves a position of
trust.
Chippewa Landing
is the Michigan point of entry. A mob widow presents a respectable front under
duress. She asks what her new boarder wants. “The world, Mrs. Kerner, the world that belongs to Nitti and that fink
Kulak, and you’re gonna get it for me.”
She has been
speaking to Ness, Hobson says she’s “a fan”. She’s set
up as the stooge and bait for an ambush, which she prevents.
A
well-thought-out performance by Dolores Dorn sounds each degree of the
woman’s character and plight.
The Night the Wizard
Shook the Earth
The Wild Wild
West
In the hands of
Dr. Miguelito Loveless is a Spanish land grant to his
mother, half of California is his, he wants a “kingdom of children”
there.
The
Governor’s office is a study for Lepetomane.
Dr. Loveless’s inventions number among them
things we know today as radio, penicillin, the automobile and the airplane.
Sent to prison, he works on television.
An explosive so
powerful that an independent rival has taken it to the government has also been
discovered by Loveless, whose extortion plan depends on it.
Robert Drasnin composed the ideal dispositions of Markowitz’s
theme that close each act and were used again by Richard Shores in “The
Night of the Whirring Death”.
Pilot
Mission: Impossible
El Presidente lives at the Hotel Nacional,
an armed camp that is still a functioning inn with a walk-in safe for valuables
where two small nuclear bombs are kept in a sealed container.
What this owes to
Thunderball it repays to Fanny and
Alexander, but the actual structure is an exquisite calculation of Dr.
Strangelove. Rollin has a triple role as Cinnamon’s aged husband in a wheelchair,
El Presidente and also Briggs, who plays a Swiss
watch merchant (Willy is his manservant) and has the job of eliciting from the
real Presidente a three-color code that opens the
container without setting off the bombs, which are to be used against the U.S.
Peter Sellers and
Buñuel provide further material as mice are released in the hotel lobby (The
Mouse That Roared) and Barney as the Exterminador
is at first not allowed to move freely in pursuit of them, until the comically
puzzled security chief gives permission.
There is even an
exact reference to Sellers in Rollin’s difficulty with El Presidente’s television speech, which Barney has to
omit (Sellers was supposed to play the B-52 pilot, Maj. “King”
Kong, but couldn’t achieve the accent, Terry Southern tells us).
Kowalski’s
inspired, controlled, brilliant direction of this initial week on the set is
especially remarkable for its dynamism, which sets the tone for the entire
series. Wally Cox as a tense safecracker in close-up is sterling. Rollin’s
mask of Briggs is a motif cited at the end of Escape from Alcatraz.
The security
chief is sent on a wild goose chase for El Presidente’s
two personal guards while Cinnamon does a necessitous quick-change in front of
the bound and gagged soldiers, and Kowalski cuts to Briggs (eyes only) and El Presidente (also bound and gagged).
A
Spool There Was
Mission: Impossible
Elegance,
science, violence.
Elegance
in the final shots, out of From Russia with Love, of Rollin and Cinnamon
escaping on a boat.
Science
in the delicately-constructed layout of an Iron Curtain lakeside resort.
Violence in the
surrealistic continuity of this pursuit after a wire recording which is tied to
stakes supporting vegetation, and then becomes a boy’s fishing line, and
finally goes up Rollin’s sleeve, while enemy soldiers shoot down toy
balloons.
“The most
beautiful mission I’ve ever been on,” Cinnamon exclaims, watching
this.
Fakeout
Mission: Impossible
The opening on a
rooftop (and Thorpe’s The Scorpio Letters) signals Fuller’s Dead
Pigeon on Beethoven Street.
The target is an
animal, self-described, on the lam in Latin America beyond the long arm.
Cinnamon emerges
in a white fur stole with him, from an elevator, complimenting his choice of
restaurant, immediately after Barney has dispatched a henchman into the polar
bear pit at the zoo (cf. Kowalski’s joke in the pilot).
The badger
game... this heroin smuggler is baited with his own
lure, and caught across the border, extraditable.
Death
Lends a Hand
Columbo
One
of the most brilliant scripts in this series, a tour de force by Link
& Levinson. The head of a
private security firm (Robert Culp) uses blackmail to gain more information for
more blackmail. His company is trailing the wife (Patricia Crowley) of a
newspaper publisher (Ray Milland) who suspects her of
infidelity. She refuses to turn over inside information, threatens to tell her
husband all about it, and is killed in a heated moment.
Now, the beauty
of the construction is revealed in the stratagem of her now-abandoned affair
with a golf pro who isn’t “really good at
golf.” This blind end prepares Lt. Columbo’s stunning admission
that he probably became a police officer to make up for the pranks he played as
a kid.
Between
Culp’s precise characterization and Milland’s magnificent turn,
Kowalski is inspired to film the murder (related to the one in Columbo Likes
the Nightlife) most spectacularly in slow motion, with a reaction shot that
tells the tale. The script at one point even has the lieutenant slip in a Holmesian précis, and he alternately underplays and
overplays his hand preparing the net, which is sprung and tied with a neat joke
setting off the overall explanation of Jefferson’s preference for
newspapers over governments.
The Woman Hunter
Dina Hunter
(Barbara Eden), a newlywed heiress who has killed a man accidentally in a road
mishap and is now a neurotic, comes to believe she is in danger from a killer
and jewel thief, but she has made the mistake of marrying the wrong man.
New York, Bermuda
and Acapulco are the crime scenes. The two men are Stuart Whitman and Robert
Vaughn, with Sydney Chaplin as a business associate and Larry Storch a party guest. The plain abstraction gives a sense
of earlier style but really supports the complicated dispersion of the theme.
A
Million the Hard Way
Banacek
Taking it all
around, on the surface it would appear to be something of a joke episode (like
“Project Phoenix”, in a manner of speaking). It takes place in Las
Vegas, where a million dollars in cold hard cash disappears right in public
view from an airtight display case quicker than a flash. The
workings of all this (patiently elaborated by Kowalski) paint, if you will, a
better picture, a more substantial setup.
A mechanized
operation, aerial shots by day, the Strip by night (where statistics
don’t fly), a prodigious deal of work... and for all that, not at all a serious
place...
If
Max Is So Smart, Why Doesn’t He Tell Us Where He Is?
Banacek
The prologue shows
the crime and is in two parts, announcing the structure. One day the Lyle
Pavilion’s medical computer is making diagnoses, the next (its official
unveiling) it’s gone.
Banacek and Carlie are in bed, no, it’s a park, the morning
after. She gets a call about the disappearance, so does he. There’s a
marching band in the park.
The rest takes
place at the Pavilion, a hospital financed by wealthy Miss Lyle, director of a
dozen corporations and hopelessly hypochondriacal.
“Overworked,” Banacek concludes.
The computer,
which is known as Max, is a façade connected by phone to another
hospital’s coded diagnosis service, and is insured for a fortune. It
folds up neatly into false walls. A tape measure furnishes Banacek with the
facts, accompanied by a veiled cadence from Also Sprach
Zarathustra (William Sylvester plays a quack, supplying placebos and
narcotics as well as another note from 2001: A Space Odyssey).
“There’s an old Polish proverb
that says, ‘No matter how warm the smile on the face of the sun, the cat
still has her kittens under the porch.’”
The
Vanishing Chalice
Banacek
A game of mirrors
like The Roaring Twenties or a Borges fiction, a “giuoco delle coppie”,
as well as a companion piece to “Let’s Hear It for a Living
Legend”. The Museum of Fine Arts is a Grecian temple,
a rare Greek drinking vessel is put on display and disappears. But there are
two, one is a copy, and the original has two provenances, found by a shepherd
boy or plundered by Nazis (“You didn’t want to know,” says
Banacek to the director).
Jay cannot fathom
L. Plotkin’s 1970 abstract, Dog With Bone. “Maybe you’re too close to
it,” observes Carlie. After some study, Jay
comes up with a Cubist reading, then the museum
director arrives with the real painting, switched when the walls were cleaned.
“I would rather see the portrait of a dog that I know,” says Dr.
Johnson, “than all the allegorical paintings they can shew
me in the world.”
The neurotic
mobster (John Saxon) who plays suicidal games with his father’s gun,
unloaded lest it blow a hole in his art collection, is an æsthete
with an Utrillo copied from the Tate, a dead giveaway.
The secret of the
form is identified in a gag when Felix dives under a table at his shop to
retrieve a jigsaw-puzzle piece, and the lady he’s solving it with bemusedly
finds him between her legs.
An angled mirror
(hidden behind a No Smoking sign perhaps) obscures the chalice at the opening,
giving the curator (Eric Braeden, a well-studied
performance) time to destroy it as a fake.
The beautiful
development of the mobster’s moll goes from this exchange:
CECE:
Why’s it worth so much?
HARRY: You wouldn’t understand.
CECE: You always say that about everything.
HARRY: Well, it’s because there’s only one like it in the world.
CECE: I don’t understand.
to Banacek’s remark at the close, when he gets
in his limousine and she is waiting for him, holding out a glass of champagne.
“Good thinking, Cece,” he says
(“that’s where your brains are,” says Harry to his
confederate Sue Ane Langdon, “in the bedroom.”).
“There’s
an old Polish proverb that says, ‘Though the hippopotamus doesn’t
have a stinger in its tail, the wise man would rather be stung by the
bee.’”
Or, “‘A duck with three wings and a loaf of bread is
brother to the turkey.’”
Fly
Me—If You Can Find Me
Banacek
The structure is
symbolic and expressive in equal measure, with nothing left over. The crime is
a mirror of the 1958 Vietnam operation described, and the entirety is a mirror
of the times, with big business on a vengeful rampage against a collapsed
society (Felix’s house of cards).
Banacek informs
Fowler the industrialist that the Dortmunder
he’s been drinking is Münchener. The abandoned
Air Force base is a flying school run by a husband and wife, and the latter is
having an affair with a mechanic. The abandoned missile pad is already owned by
Fowler, who wants the airfield as well.
In
“pre-official-war” Vietnam, Fowler was shot down and crippled on a
supply run when his partner sold him out to the enemy. All subsequent business
ventures by this partner, whose name is Wayne, have been systematically ruined
by Fowler in secret, including a charter jet service. It’s to save this
last vestige that Wayne has one of his planes make an emergency landing by
night on the access road to the missile pad, with the crew given to understand
it’s the airfield. When day comes, there is no plane to be seen, and the
flight engineer is dead on the tarmac.
Wayne flies the
plane to Mexico, and plans to sell it overseas as well as collect the
insurance. The interrupted flight is from L.A. to Philadelphia to pick up
conventioneers for Miami. The flight engineer cuts two of the engines, and his
girlfriend, one of the two stewardesses, is also in on
the plot. She distracts Banacek, who observes, “There’s an old
Polish proverb that says, “‘A truly wise
man never plays leapfrog with a unicorn.’”
He and Jay are
shot at from a Fowler helicopter while inspecting the access road, and
hastening away Banacek adds, “There’s an
old Polish proverb that says, ‘When the wolf is chasing your sleigh,
throw him a raisin cookie, but don’t stop to bake him a
cake.’”
An Exercise in Fatality
Columbo
The structure is
not unlike “Now You See Him”. Milo Janus Inc. is a chain of spas
supplied by various subsidiaries with gym equipment, office furniture etc. at
“twice retail” to build the fortune of Janus himself (Robert
Conrad), who funnels the money overseas via Bolingbroke Travel Corp.,
another holding in Britain. A franchisee, Gene (Philip Bruns),
confronts him and is told, “My markup is very small. But I have to
maintain quality. That’s what gives me control.” Janus continues,
“When I grow, you grow.” Gene says, “Bull.” Gene worked
with military procurement at his former job. “I can smell flim-flam right down to the paper
clips you make me buy.” He threatens a class action lawsuit by the
investors, as well as SEC action.
Janus professes
to be unconcerned. He tells his right-hand man, Buddy (Pat Harrington, Jr.),
“In eight months I’ll be at my villa overlooking the Adriatic with
two million in Swiss francs to keep me warm.” Nonetheless, he carefully
plans to murder Gene by crushing his windpipe and disguising it as the result
of a weightlifting accident.
Lt. Columbo
arrives at 6:30 AM and is told the bare facts but can’t really consider
them until he’s had his coffee, which he’s brought in a Thermos (in
a brown paper bag). He takes a call from his wife (“Who the hell’s
calling me at this hour?”) in Gene’s office, where he notices a
stain on the rug (spilled coffee from the death struggle). Mrs. Columbo has
invited guests for dinner, what should they have? The lieutenant sees empty
containers of Chinese food in the wastebasket, recommends that.
He goes to
Janus’s home and is met by the company secretary (Gretchen Corbett in a
bikini). Mrs. Columbo was saved from depression by watching Janus’s TV
show. She exercised and forgot to eat, and anyway, observes the lieutenant, who
wants to eat the soybeans and wheat germ she started buying? Janus works out on
Malibu Beach (Jim Rockford’s stretch of beach), swimming and push-ups,
then running along the sand and up to his house, with Lt. Columbo panting
along. A dip in the deep blue pool and a rat-a-tat with the punching bag
complete the morning routine, while the lieutenant asks questions and furtively
searches for a place to empty the sand from his shoes, one of which has a
shoelace that breaks in his hand. Janus serves breakfast, a handful of pills
and a glass of orange liquid that is carrot juice. “That’s
breakfast, huh?” says the lieutenant, who anyway has heard Janus’s
defense of Buddy, an ex-con for investor fraud who is “as honest as I
am.”
Lt. Columbo
interviews the widow (Collin Wilcox Paxton), who gives him a lead on one Louis
(or Lewis, she doesn’t know which) Lacey. As he gets off the elevator at Tricon (where Gene worked before meeting Janus through
Buddy), a security guard stops him for having a cigar. “It’s not
lit,” says the lieutenant. “Company policy,” says the guard,
“no smoking in the building.” Lt. Columbo deposits his cigar in an
ashtray, and walks over to the Personnel Counter. Standing before a bank of
computers is a woman dispatching applicants hither and thither, including the
lieutenant, who identifies himself as a police officer. “Why didn’t
you say so,” she briskly responds, and directs him to the Security hiring
office. No, he wants to find Mr. Lacey. She enters the name into the computer,
which does nothing and then starts typing out a long data sheet. “I just
want to know where he works,” says the lieutenant. More
typing. “You think we could just do it on the phone?” he
asks. “I’m sorry, Sir,” she explains, “a phone call would be much too complicated.” Still typing. Finally, it stops. The lieutenant says,
“I think it’s over.” What does the computer say? Numerical jargon meaning “he’s been terminated.”
Is there a home phone number? “Sir,” he is told, this Tricon computer is a “total spectrum” system.
Is there a pay phone? Yes. The lieutenant walks a few feet and places the call.
Lacey answers the phone, the lieutenant starts to
question him and is cut off by the rest of the answering machine message. At
the tone he speaks slowly and carefully, as though he were talking to an
imbecile, and sounding like one himself (the woman behind the counter gives him
a look). Done at last, the lieutenant crosses back to the
elevator. The doors close behind him, then re-open as he walks back into
the room, looks around, retraces his steps and at the last moment snatches his
cigar from the ashtray before regaining the elevator, while the guard shakes
his head.
Lacey (Darrell Zwerling) is an expert on corporate law who has done the
investigative work for Gene. His considered opinion is that Janus is
“technically within the law.” The company even records all calls to
protect against lawsuits, and that’s what gives Janus the idea for a
perfect alibi.
The widow
confronts Janus with Lacey’s findings. There is Green Eagle
Manufacturers, who make the gym equipment used in the spas. There is MJ
Manufacturers, “a broken-down pill factory” selling nostrums
“at six times the cost.” Janus sneers and invites her home. She
drapes her glass of wine over his face.
She wakes up in
the hospital after taking pills. “I knew he was cheating Gene. I told
him. He just laughed at me. I guess I had too much to drink. I couldn’t
sleep. I kept seeing his face laughing and laughing.”
Kowalski is
inspired by Peter S. Fischer’s script (story by Larry Cohen) to his best
work, which at this stage is just noticeably beyond the unit’s
capabilities. A good example is a two-shot of the widow and Lacey that pans
over as she reaches across to pick up a plate of sandwiches, hears the name
Milo Janus, and has a flicker of recognition all in one motion as the camera
immediately pans back and dollies in.
The script
transcends itself in a continuous stream of inspiration coming to Lt. Columbo
from his wife’s phone call, his broken shoelace, the answering machine,
etc., all of which piece by piece clue him in to the facts of the case (Marlowe
meeting Poirot in this case), just before the Milo Janus TV jingle is sung over
the end credits.
Playback
Columbo
The gadgets
worked on by wastrel Oskar Werner are revealed by transmutation in the second
art gallery scene. Patricia Barry shows Lt. Columbo a blobby figure à la Arp called Esprit d’un Chien Mort, and a
tinselly, skitterish mobile called Parking Lot, then he asks her what this
other thing is called. “That? That, sir, is the ventilator for the air
conditioning.”
All of this
exactly conveys the feeling of a bad art show (there were Emmy nominations for
art direction and set decoration) or literary magazine, namely the void of its
emptiness and the admiration instilled by anything really invented, like the
subtle gag that has Werner covering his tracks by tape replay, but overlooking
his invite to the opening.
His peculiar
penchant at Midas Electronics, Inc. is for the home gadgets he ensconces his
wheelchair-bound wife (Gena Rowlands) among: doors that open when you clap your
hands (he wears a newly-invented digital watch), and a closed-circuit
television system to monitor the living area. This is how the murder is
committed, by feeding a tape loop to the security guard in his gatehouse, and
showing him the actual murder by tape delay. Isn’t the guard an
eyewitness? “Not exactly,” answers Lt. Columbo, “he saw it on
a monitor, he wasn’t in the room.”
Fade in to Murder
Columbo
If you can
compare the formal method of Perry Mason to a sonnet, “Fade in to
Murder” is as simple as a musical phrase. Lt. Columbo’s suspect is
America’s favorite television detective, Detective Lucerne. The actor
playing him is a Korean War deserter who has been paying blackmail to the
show’s producer, and finally kills her. Lt. and Mrs. Columbo are great
fans of the show, and incredibly the lieutenant holds conversations with
Detective Lucerne as an equal, as a colleague. Everything said by Detective
Lucerne is good analysis and exactly reflects the mind of Lt. Columbo, so that
he very eerily seems to be talking with himself, with his ideal persona, and
when he tries on Detective Lucerne’s snazzy hat and elevator shoes in the
actor’s dressing room, there’s a certain shiver (or as film critics
say, a frisson) in the back-and-forth of the imagery, and this is as
much what is expressed as anything else.
The studio locale
is utilized for comic interiors (the lieutenant stumbling through a hot set)
and poetic exteriors, on the shore of the Universal lake, the director
hurriedly lays out his shooting schedule as the mechanical shark raging in the
background stimulates Lt. Columbo’s curiosity.
All Dressed Up and
Nowhere to Die
Diagnosis Murder
The script is a
marvel, the perfect occasion for Kowalski to show the perfection of technique
he has attained.
A Jewish wedding,
the groom steps on the glass and it explodes, killing him (actually it’s
a light bulb under the cloth, supplied by the lady rabbi and evidently tampered
with to produce a shaped charge which injures no-one else).
The bride and
groom were partners in a fashion house. He slept with all the models and
supplied them with drugs from a mobster whose daughter is one of them. Her
lover’s plan to turn State’s evidence decides her.
A bomber once
forced to infiltrate a radical group is her ex-husband. Her father tries to
implicate himself with his father’s Medal for the Defense of Leningrad
dropped at the scene of the crime, belatedly.
The killer is
exposed at a fashion show emceed by Dr. Sloan.