Way back in Season Two, the writers of Columbo made some odd choices. They took a format that was working brilliantly, and almost immediately decided to mess with it. The usual dramatic irony of the viewers seeing the murder take place before Columbo arrives on the scene was lost in The Greenhouse Jungle, with his arrival long before the murder was committed. In The Most Crucial Game were were not shown the motive for the murder. Requiem for a Falling Star functioned so much like a traditional murder mystery and so unlike the usual Columbo format that I wasn’t even able to write about it using the usual section headings, and for the second time I find myself unable to do that again, but for different reasons. Like The Greenhouse Jungle, Columbo turns up before a crime has been committed. Alarmingly, he arrives 1 hour 18 minutes before a murder takes place, in a 1 hour 32 minute episode. This one is going to be different…
For the majority of the episode Columbo has been set up, investigating a fake crime so that he can be humiliated, subjected to an international whirlwind of media, and gain a lot of free publicity for one of those magazines that used to have pictures of naked women in them. This is very much a product of its time, along with the importance of a pager to the plot. Do those kinds of magazines even exist any more? One would have thought the invention of the internet would have made them redundant. Anyway, Columbo Cries Wolf is the first episode of the 1990s and it suddenly feels like a very… well, 1980s series, really for the first time, with the pop music start, 80s fashions, and even the “tonight on Columbo” introduction. It feels like a modern series rather than a 70s show that has been taken off a shelf and dusted off.
It’s not much fun watching Columbo being humiliated, with things getting progressively worse and worse for him, until he is the butt of everyone’s jokes. When he is doused with water by the side of a swimming pool as a final act of disrespect, we see him sinking lower than he has sunk since he dug up a concrete pile for no reason in Blueprint for Murder. Other viewers describe being taken in by Brantley’s ruse right up until the point that Dian turns up again, but I didn’t find the episode worked all that well on that level, as soon as we get to the point where Brantley is obviously baiting Columbo into searching his huge property. It just seemed to me unusually foolish of Columbo to go along with the search. He’s normally far too astute an expert in the psychology of the criminal mind to be taken for a fool. That makes the majority of the episode something of a waiting game unless you are similarly fooled by Brantley.
Luckily, the final ten minutes makes it all worthwhile. The writer is left to pack in basically the entire plot of a usual Columbo episode into the final few minutes, and does so brilliantly. It actually makes you realise how much unnecessary padding goes into one of these episodes normally, if you can achieve all the usual plot beats within such a short space of time. The motive is established, we watch the murder play out (a brutal neck snapping), and then we see Columbo piece together the mistakes: a missing bracelet, the storage bag for the fur coat the accomplice was wearing being used as a body bag and therefore missing from the wardrobe, and finally the gotcha moment, quite literally utilising the word “GOTCHA” in a paged message.
OK, so it doesn’t quite make perfect sense. We have to believe Brantley was somehow capable of hiding a body inside a wall cavity and making good the damage to a professional standard, so the workmen didn’t notice. A line dropped earlier into the episode could have fixed that problem, something to the effect that he used to be a carpenter until he made his fortune in photography, or whatever. But it doesn’t really matter too much, because the final ten minutes or so are such a roller-coaster, and it’s so satisfying to see one of the most smug, hateful enemies of Columbo defeated, following on from the Lieutenant’s almost total humiliation. Amazingly, an almost complete break from the usual format of the show resulted in the first big hitter of the revived series, and the only one so far that can compete with the brilliance of some of the best of the 70s episodes. Could this be the start of a second golden age for Columbo? With a very familiar face returning next time, I wouldn’t bet against it. RP
Read next in the Junkyard… Columbo: Agenda for Murder
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The View from the Junkyard 
Not one of my favorite Columbo episodes. But it’s certainly one I remember for its most particular gotcha moment. Soap opera star Ian Buchanan makes a most devious adversary. As for this being the second golden age for Columbo, without getting too far ahead, there were specific episodes for this new series that signified the depth that they, especially Peter Falk, were ready to explore. The 90s would be interesting for seeing how well this iconic sleuth may adapt to the times. Thank you, RP, for your review.
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I’m not much of a fan of the 90s Columbos because to me they had two problems. (1) Peter Falk by this point was playing the character too broadly as if he were doing Columbo in a variety sketch. So much of the underplayed subtlety from the early days of the show was now gone and far too many of the “quirks” we associate with Columbo were being stressed (2) the mysteries were not as strong. They were often not particularly well-developed which is why in some 90s Columbos more than a half hour will go by before the killing takes place, because that way the writer doesn’t have to worry about the “little” clues Columbo first detects to unravel the killer’s story but which aren’t enough to cinch the case that require a “gotcha” clue. And another problem is that too many of the 90s stories have more of a noirish quality at times which isn’t the right format for a detective like Columbo who is more drawing-room-mystery sleuth.
“Columbo Cries Wolf” was one of the better entries in the 90s overall because it broke the format in an intelligent way (though it does expand on a gimmick from Season 1’s “Blueprint For Murder” in which the killer’s hope is to get Columbo to act publicly in digging things up and be humiliated so he’ll never be able to go looking again). The episode also has an interesting call-back moment to a 70s episode when Columbo mentions his friend at Scotland Yard, “Superintendent Durk.” This was the character played by Bernard Fox in the 70s episode “Dagger Of The Mind” when Columbo visited London.
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I felt the same about most of the 90s’ Columbo too. But there were still a few worthy exceptions, one especially with Faye Dunaway as the adversary. I look forward to the Junkyard’s review of that one.
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