[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 couple reasons why I’m very glad the last of the 70s Columbo episodes went as big as it did.
As it apparent when you watch it, the final episode of Season 5, S5 E6“Last Salute to the Commodore,” was intended as a possible series finale for Columbo (he very symbolically rows away in the final moments, for example). I don’t want to devote too much space in this post nor this series to what is to my mind one of the very worst Columbo episodes, so I’ll just say thank goodness it wasn’t the finale, not even of the 70s episodes—Columbo returned for a three-episode 6th season and then a five-episode 7th season that was indeed the culmination of the show’s 70s era. The finale of that final 70s season, S7 E5 “The Conspirators,” is an infinitely more worthy series finale (at that time, before the late 80s reboot on which more this weekend), not only because it’s simply one of the best episodes overall, but also and especially because it features a mystery that goes much bigger than any other 70s episode, tying its murder plot and murderer (Clive Revill’s Joe Devlin), and thus Columbo’s dogged quest to bring that man to justice, into a network of international terrorists who likewise become targets of the Lieutenant’s climactic investigation.
I love that extra layer to “The Conspirators” for a lot of reasons (including that it leads to one of the very best final scenes and definitely the best final line in the show’s history; major SPOILERS in that video, obviously), but here I’ll focus on a couple AmericanStudies ones. While there had occasionally been Columbo plots and murders that were connected to contexts beyond the personal—like the implicit role of the military-industrial complex in Monday’s subject “Dead Weight” for example; or the ways Jackie Cooper’s Senate candidate Nelson Hayward in “Candidate for Crime” uses cultural fears of “crime” as a misdirect for his murder—“The Conspirators” is the first that really leans into such contexts as a central part of both why Devlin commits murder (he and his terrorist allies have been double-crossed by the broker who is arranging their latest illegal shipment of weapons) and what Columbo has to figure out and solve in his investigation (which results in him stopping the weapons shipment at the same time that he captures Devlin). I don’t doubt that many murders are very personal, nor that many people have the potential to commit murder if they are pushed far enough (both of which are frequent premises of Columbo murders and murderers); but I also believe that the worst violence in the world is political, and I love that Columbo had the chance to take down political criminals in his finale.
Columbo doesn’t just take down Devlin, though—he also destroys the high-minded rationale that this charming Irish poet and IRA terrorist uses to defend his crimes. About halfway through the episode, Columbo hears Devlin interviewed on a radio show (in his guise as poet/author), and Devlin approvingly quotes a poem by another fictional Irish poet, Michael Dolan, which features the lines “Justice for the many/Justice for the free/Let each man be paid in full/That’s just enough for me.” But when Columbo researches Dolan, he learns that he wrote the poem while in prison for terrorism, a crucial context for those lines that Devlin had omitted from the discussion. That leads to a parallel and powerful exchange in the climatic scene: Devlin quotes Lewis Carroll, “You can charge me with murder or want of sense/We’re all of us weak at times/But the slightest approach to a false pretense/Was never among my crimes”; to which Columbo pointedly retorts, “Well sir, you pretended to raise money to help the Irish victims, and all the while you were planning to make more victims. Wasn’t that a pretense, sir?” One of the very worst things about terrorists is that they always hurt their own people—the people they’re ostensibly committing their crimes in service of—at least as much as they do their targets, and I love that as part of his takedown of this particular, series-concluding terrorist murderer Columbo gets to make that vital point.
Special post this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Columbo takeaways you’d share?
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