[It’s criminal how little I’ve written in this space about one of my favorite characters and cultural works. Well that changes this week, as I’ll be AmericanStudying a handful of the most contextually compelling—ie, not necessarily the most memorable, but the most connected to historical and cultural contexts—of Columbo’s murderers!]
[NB. Some inevitable SPOILERS in each of these posts!]
On two meaningful military moments amidst a middle of the road 1st season mystery.
I don’t know if it would ever have been a top-tier Columbo episode(there’s too much of a focus on the romance between Eddie Albert’s murderous General and Suzanne Pleshette’s un-self-confident witness), but there’s no doubt that what really knocked S1 E3 Dead Weight down a peg was that Peter Falk didn’t actually film the episode’s climatic scene alongside those two co-stars. Apparently he was in the midst of a nasty dispute with the show’s producers and sat out the initial filming for leverage, meaning that Albert and Pleshette filmed their parts of the climax with a stand-in; once the dispute was resolved Falk filmed only his parts and the different segments were edited together, which is one of those behind the scenes factoids that once you know you really can’t unsee how much the three are clearly not in the same room during that entire sequence. As all Columbo fans know, the climax is key to the best episodes, and in those terms Dead Weight was unfortunately DOA.
As I noted above, however, this isn’t a blog series on the show’s best episodes, but rather on some of the particularly interesting villains from an AmericanStudies perspective. Seen through that lens, there are a couple really compelling layers to Albert’s charismatic but cold-blooded General Martin Hollister. The more obvious is the motive for the murder: Hollister and an underling, Colonel Roger Dutton (John Kerr), have been using military contracts to defraud the government out of millions of dollars; when Dutton reveals that there’s to be an official investigation and he won’t protect the General, Hollister kills him. Of course business fraud can take place in any industry (and is a not-infrequent motive for Columbo murderers, although it runs a distinct third to blackmail and spousal homicide), but in this case the fraud is also clearly an indictment of the military-industrial complex, which in 1971—as it has famously and frustratingly been ever since—was apparently willing and able to spend millions (now billions and even trillions) of dollars in ways it most definitely should not have been, and doubly so for friends of the military like the much-celebrated General Hollister.
If military-industrial complex fraud is what makes Hollister a murderer, what leads to his capture by Lieutenant Columbo in that aforementioned climax is an even more interesting aspect of his military career and identity: his immense ego about his image as a famous general. Hollister is packing up memorabilia for an exhibit on his Korean War exploits when Dutton confronts him, and so uses his famous pearl-handled pistol to murder Dutton. As Columbo notes to Pleshette’s character in the climax, “any normal man” would have disposed of the gun immediately, or at the very least when a body is recovered; but the gun, Columbo notes, was “too caught up in [Hollister’s] pride,” and so Hollister concocts instead a phony story about it having been stolen and replaced in the exhibit with a copy, a story which Columbo sees through and thus matches the gun to the murder weapon. Just a year after the release of Patton, this is clearly meant to be a commentary on military men who get high on their own supply and would do anything to preserve their legendary image. But I would also argue that it’s a striking episode to feature amidst an ongoing war, as it reminds us that most military mythologies are just that.
Next VillainStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Columbo takeaways you’d share?
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