George Hamilton had already faced Lieutenant Columbo once, as the coolly manipulative psychiatrist Dr. Mark Collier in 1975’s A Deadly State of Mind. Sixteen years later, on February 20th, 1991, he returned on the other side of the revival divide, this time as Wade Anders, the polished host of a successful television crime show.
This episode has a rather clever idea working for it: Columbo is investigating a man whose professional identity is built around explaining how criminals get caught.
Unfortunately there isn't a lot else about the episode that's clever. I have it ranked #64 overall and on rewatching it for this guide I wondered if maybe that was too high.
The setup
Wade Anders has finally reached the top. After years as a security consultant, he has become the on-camera face of Crime Alert, a popular television program devoted to real-world crime.
Unfortunately, Budd Clarke believes that job should have been his. Clarke has also found the leverage to do something about it: an old adult film featuring Anders and a female performer Clarke says was underage.
Clarke’s demand is brutally simple. Anders must step aside and recommend him as the new host, or Clarke will destroy his carefully manufactured public image. Anders refuses to surrender the life he has built.
Quality Columbo camera work
You see him sitting in front of his public image, reflected thoughtfully in the glass of his door.
The murder
Anders contaminates several cigarettes with concentrated
nicotine compound, prepares replacement ash and cigarette butts, and records
himself entering his office in different clothes. The next day he edits the
security footage so that the camera appears to support an alibi. He then goes
to Clarke’s house, swaps the cigarette packs, and waits for Clarke to light the
poisoned cigarette.
After Clarke collapses, Anders does what so many Columbo
murderers cannot resist doing: he improves the scene. He replaces evidence,
manipulates a computer file, prints a substitute story, and tries to make the
death look ordinary. The result is a cover-up with a lot of moving parts—and
every extra part creates something for Columbo to question.
Columbo enters the picture
At first Clarke’s death has the appearance of a medical
emergency suffered by a heavy smoker. Columbo does not need long to find
trouble. The cigarette filters in the desk ashtray do not look like the other
cigarettes Clarke has actually smoked. The formatting on a printed computer
story does not match the surrounding material. And the toxicology report
establishes acute nicotine poisoning rather than an ordinary heart attack.
George Hamilton, take two
Hamilton’s first murderer, Dr. Mark Collier, was controlled, predatory, and
almost aggressively confident. Wade Anders is smoother in a different way. He
is a media professional: camera-ready, image-conscious, practiced at turning
information into performance.
That distinction matters. Anders is not merely hiding a
crime; he is protecting a public persona. His fear is exposure. The blackmail
threat attacks the very thing that made him successful—his credibility as a
respectable crime authority. Hamilton is therefore playing a man who
understands that reputation can be as valuable as money.
The role does not give Hamilton the same psychological
intensity he had in A Deadly State of Mind, but the casting kinda works. There is pleasure in seeing Falk and
Hamilton circle one another again, now in an era of videotape, computer
printouts, and syndicated true-crime television.
A television show about television
Crime Alert gives the episode a useful layer of satire. Wade
presents crime as packaged entertainment, complete with studio lighting,
production staff, dramatic re-creations, and a confident host who tells viewers
what happened. Columbo operates in the opposite direction. He dislikes tidy
explanations until the physical evidence earns them.
The production even slips in an inside joke: the closing credits shown for Crime Alert use the names of
real Columbo personnel, including supervising producer Alan J. Levi,
co-producer Todd London, and writer April Raynell. It is a small bit of
television-within-television playfulness.
A Return to KRVA
The clues: clever, but hardly shy
The episode’s strongest clue is the cigarette filter. Anders
understands the chemistry of his murder but not the mundane residue of smoking.
The substituted butts have not been smoked in the same way as Clarke’s ordinary
cigarettes, and Columbo spots the discrepancy.
This also opens one of the bigger plot holes in the episode. It's not clear why Anders had to replace all of the other cigarettes in Clarke's ashtray. Yes, remove the poisoned cigarette he was smoking. Yes, re-swap out the box of poisoned cigarettes, but why change out the others? That made no sense, and it's pretty much what got him caught.
The episode is less subtle with two other clues. A gardener makes the timing of hedge trimming conspicuous, which later helps expose the manipulated security tape. That was a pretty good clue.
Clarke’s dog also scratches Anders’ car, leaving a
distinctive pattern that places the supposedly absent Anders at the victim’s
house. The dog...well, I guess it works but it's not Columbo's best gotcha.
The gotcha
Columbo’s case ultimately attacks Anders’ alibi from two
directions. The landscaping visible on the surveillance image does not fit the
date Anders claims the tape represents, indicating that the footage was
altered. And, the scratches from Clarke’s dog connect Anders’ car
to a visit he denied making.
The ending is not one of the series’ most elegant traps,
because much of the evidence shows lying and tampering rather than recreating
the murder itself in one irresistible demonstration. Still, it is thematically
appropriate. A man who makes his living presenting airtight crime stories is
undone because his own edited story can't survive contact with the details: a hedge, a dog, a cigarette filter.
The episode’s Los Angeles
The production makes good use of contemporary Los Angeles. IMDb identifies Budd Clarke’s house as 2226 N. New Hampshire Ave. in Los Feliz. Anders Productions was filmed at 434 N. Larchmont Blvd. Other listed locations include Parker Center downtown, the former Empire 900 Motel at 900 W. Olympic Blvd., 5507 Hollywood Blvd. for the adult-shop sequence, and Le Dome on Sunset Boulevard for the restaurant scene.
Small pleasures
Peter Falk gets several opportunities to play Columbo as an
awkward visitor in a changing cultural landscape, including the adult-shop
sequence and the television studio material. The moment in the adult-video shop with the other customer in the matching raincoat is simultaneously funny...and a bit cringy.
Falk is always good, but this one isn't his best.
The supporting cast is fine. Peter Haskell makes Budd Clarke unpleasant enough that the blackmail has real bite.
Penny Johnson
(later widely known as Penny Johnson Jerald) gives producer Maxine Jarrett a composed
professional presence. Robert Donner and Steven Gilborn add familiar
character-actor texture around the investigation.
Just a few more things
- When Wade comes off set after the beginning segment he gets introduced to three people. He shakes their hands as he passes and keeps walking. Not really clear why they were there.
- At the awards show rehearsal we see a set of dancers practicing their dance number. I get that they didn't want to spend a lot of time and money choreographing a background dance number for Columbo, and it may be that they're just learning the routing but...they're kinda a mess. Seem to be mostly half a dozen people dancing their own dance.
- When Wade arrives at Bud's house...Bud's dog is across the street running free. Seems a bit irresponsible.
Verdict
Caution: Murder Can Be Hazardous to Your Health is not a
top-tier Columbo mystery, but it is one of the more conceptually interesting
entries from the ABC revival. Its best idea is Wade Anders himself: a
television crime expert who believes he can use editing, staging, and image
control to manufacture innocence.
The episode sometimes explains its clues too loudly and gives Anders more cover-up work than good criminal sense would recommend. And ultimately it sort of slumps into the gotcha.
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