Title:"Columbo and the Murder of a Rock Star"
Directed by: Alan J. Levi
Written by: William Read Woodfield
Air Date: April 29, 1991
Previous: Caution: Murder Can Be Hazardous to Your Health
Next: Death Hits the Jackpot
Guest Starring: Dabney Coleman, Shera Danese, Cheryl Paris, Little Richard
"Columbo and the Murder of a Rock Star" is the third episode of the 10th season of Columbo.
Hugh Creighton (Dabney Coleman) is a rich, high-powered criminal defense attorney. His mistress/common-law wife is Marcy Edwards (Cheryl Paris), a has-been rock star. But she's not faithful to him. Creighton, growing suspicious of her, hires a private investigator to surveil her and finds out that Marcy is having an affair with her old drummer, Neddy Malcolm. When he throws her out of their mansion, Marcy demands a divorce settlement. When he reminds her that they aren't legally married and he doesn't have to give her anything, she demands $5 million in exchange for not going to the press with what she knows about Creighton's history of bribery and corruption.
Naturally, Creighton decides on murder. He spikes a bottle of champagne with sedatives and plants it in the beach house where Marcy regularly meets Neddy for trysts. Neddy takes a drink from the champagne bottle and passes out. Creighton, disguised as a gardener, then sneaks into the beach house and strangles Marcy. Some time later Neddy wakes up, finds his lover lying next to him dead, and makes a panicked exit.
Neddy's prints are in the beach house and he is the obvious suspect for Marcy's murder, but two people aren't fooled. The first is Creighton's associate at the law office, Trish Fairbanks (Shera Danese), who puts two and two together about Creighton's request to borrow her car on the day of the murder, and demands marriage to Hugh and promotion to full partner at the law firm as the price of her silence. The second is Lt. Columbo, who thinks it curious that two lovers would open two bottles of champagne in the kitchen before retiring to the bedroom, and spots some dust on Marcy's gold records, hanging on the wall (the dust comes from the air vent, where Hugh's private detective had concealed a camera).
Second Columbo apperance by Dabney Coleman, who pops up as a detective in Season 2 episode "Double Shock". One of six Columbo appearances for Peter Falk's wife, Shera Danese. This episode was the end of the last proper Columbo "season"; the remaining 11 Columbo TV movies aired sporadically over a period of 12 years, 1991-2003.
Tropes:
- And Now You Must Marry Me: One of Trish's conditions of keeping her silence, knowing full well her personal insurance policy gives Creighton no way to back out.
- Blackmail:
- Marcy demands $5 million for the price of her departure, lest she reveal all Hugh's nefarious deeds to the police. He kills her.
- Then Trish demands marriage and a partnership as the price of not telling what she knows about the murder. Unlike Marcy, Trish got extra insurance to insure that if she dies, a letter incriminating Creighton in her's and Marcy's deaths will go to the cops.
- The Cameo: Columbo, on the trail of Neddy the drummer, finds Little Richard himself performing in a club.
- Character Name and the Noun Phrase: "Columbo and the Murder of a Rock Star". A relatively rare example of a Columbo episode being titled this way.
- Cigarette of Anxiety: Hugh starts puffing away on a cigarette nervously in the scene where Columbo zeroes in on the champagne in Hugh's office, and Hugh first realizes that Columbo suspects him.
- Confess to a Lesser Crime: Hugh arranges for a photo of him speeding to be taken by a speed camera at the time the murder was being committed. On showing this photo to Columbo, he facetiously says he cannot see any way out of this and confesses to speeding and says he will pay the fine. Needless to say, Columbo is not satisfied.
- Expository Hairstyle Change: Amusingly, after extorting a promotion and an engagement out of Hugh, Trish celebrates by getting her formerly restrained hairdo blown out into a spectacular example of '80s Hair.
- Fair Cop: Columbo's unofficial partner for this episode, Sergeant Hubach, played by the very attractive Sondra Currie.
- Gory Discretion Shot: We only get to see Creighton prepare to strangle Marcy before the film instantly cuts to Creighton washing out the champagne bottles in the kitchen sink and cleaning up the crime scene.
- GPS Evidence: When Hugh stole the gardener's truck, he wound up parking Trish Fairbanks' car in a particular spot in Los Angeles where berries fall from a particular kind of tree. Columbo finds those same berries inside the windshield wiper well of Trish's car, forming a crucial piece of evidence.
- Killed Offscreen: The scene cuts away before Hugh strangles Marcy.
- Non-Indicative Name: Sort of. One might expect an episode entitled "Columbo and the Murder of a Rock Star" to be about, well, the murder of a rock star, and to revolve around the music industry. But as it turns out Marcy is a washed-up former star, and her past in the music business has nothing at all to do with the story. It's almost as if they made the character a has-been pop star to justify the Little Richard cameo.
- Oh, Crap!: Marcy gets off a pretty good one when Hugh enters the bedroom, she says "Don't hurt him!" in defense of Ned, then realizes that he's there to kill her.
- Plot Hole: A massive one. Late in the episode Columbo is thrown off track when a camera-based speeding ticket, complete with picture, appears to show Hugh in Pasadena at the time Marcy was murdered fifty miles away in Malibu. He eventually deduces, due to the lack of a shadow under the nose, that it was actually Trish driving the car wearing a Hugh mask. Fine. The only problem is that the scene where Trish confronts Hugh about borrowing her car on the day of the murder makes it perfectly clear that she didn't know about the murder in advance. ("You killed her, didn't you?") So, somehow, Hugh got Trish to wear a mask of his face and deliberately get a speeding ticket, without knowing why. However, this could possibly be explained if it wasn't Trish; Columbo only suggested she was the one driving his car as he only proves that Hugh wasn't the one driving. It has already been established that Hugh is a corrupt attorney with multiple connections. Hiring somebody else to drive his car at a particular time and place with no questions asked would've been easy to setup.
- Shout-Out: The private detective that Hugh hired to spy on Marcy is named "Sam Marlowe" for Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe. And if that isn't enough, Sam has The Maltese Falcon in his office.
- Slipping a Mickey: Hugh spikes the champagne in the beach house with a sedative, by using a syringe. Since he slipped some of his disulfiram into her tea earlier, it prevents Marcy from drinking the spiked champagne and passing out as well by making the sip she takes from a different bottle taste disgusting, making it so that she doesn't drink any more of it for the rest of the day. As a result, she's still conscious when he chokes her to death in order to pin the crime on Neddy and make it look like he did it as a result of an argument, something that naturally couldn't have taken place if they were both passed out, as well as preventing traces of the sedative from being found in Marcy's body.
- You No Take Candle: Some disturbingly racist humor when Columbo tracks down the gardener who tends the beach house, and finds him to be an older Japanese man who speaks broken pidgin English.
