[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 a more stereotypical and a more nuanced reading of one of the show’s rare female murderers.
By my count (and it gets a little tricky as there are some episodes with a pair of murderers who could be defined as primary and secondary, so I welcome responses as always), only 11 of the 69 Columbo episodes featured a woman as the primary murderer (another 5 or so feature a woman who conspires with the primary murderer to help commit the crime). That list definitely features some serious star power of both the small and the big screen variety, from Lee Grant, Joyce Van Pattern, and Janet Freakin’ Leigh (among others) in the early years to Lindsay Crouse, Tyne Daly, and Faye Freakin’ Dunaway (again among others) in the later ones. But as you might expect with a relatively small number of these roles, particularly in the 70s-era episodes but even to a degree into the 80s/90s ones, it was difficult for even the most talented and famous actresses to keep these rare female murderers from trending a bit toward stereotypes (a problem that we also see with the show’s even rarer, more overtly ethnic murderers, as I’ll have more to say about on Thursday).
Which means that when S1 E5 Lady in Waiting featured the relatively unknown TV actress Susan Clark as murderer Beth Chadwick, Clark didn’t necessarily stand a chance of keeping the character from verging into stereotypes (not because she’s not talented, but because she would have had less say over the part than her former famous fellow actresses). And indeed, Beth Chadwick lines up with a particular stereotype of female characters with which viewers of teen/high school films will be very familiar—she begins as a mousy wallflower type, and then when given the chance to blossom morphs into a beautiful and confident powerhouse, a transformation especially reflected in her radical shifts in physical appearance through outfit and hairstyle changes. This is an episode of Columbo, so she does get that opportunity because she commits a clever and self-confident murder—staging an elaborate “accident” in order to kill her overbearing and chauvinistic brother Bryce, who is keeping her from blossoming or even having a life of her own (following it seems in the footsteps of their equally overbearing late father and living mother). But even after succeeding with that plan, Beth remains beset by hysterical fears, and generally verges between extreme emotions in likewise stereotypical ways.
But are those various reactions and layers to Beth actually stereotypical sides to the character as written and/or performed, or are they reflections of how this woman has been defined and limited by both her family and broader social and cultural expectations of her? If we put the episode’s title in conversation with Columbo’s last line to Beth—she has pulled a gun on him once he has caught her in the episode’s climax, and Columbo talks her down with, “There’s no point in that, not with the police officers outside. Besides, you’re too classy of a woman”—I believe we can see this episode as not only a clever murder mystery, but also a “Problem with No Name” level commentary on how patriarchal forces can deny women not just their full individual identities, but even the very womanhood that those forces claim to valorize and protect. Columbo catches and arrests even the most sympathetic murderers, with just a couple partial exceptions that I won’t spoil here (but both of whom, interestingly enough, are also women, which FYI is SPOILED in that hyperlinked piece), and there’s no doubt that Beth committed 1st-degree murder and needs to be arrested. But her brother, her family, and her whole society were also guilty, and I believe Columbo (perceptive as ever) recognizes it as such.
Next VillainStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Columbo takeaways you’d share?
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