Columbo and the Murder of a Rock Star

On April 29, 1991, Columbo and the Murder of a Rock Star premiered on ABC. The episode was directed by Alan J. Levi and written by William Read Woodfield, with Dabney Coleman returning to Columbo nearly two decades after his small role as Detective Murray in Double Shock.

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This time Coleman gets the better assignment: Hugh Creighton, a nationally famous criminal-defense lawyer who has never lost a murder case. Creighton discovers that his longtime girlfriend, former rock star Marcy Edwards (Cheryl Paris), is sleeping with musician Neddy Malcolm (Julian Stone). Marcy then threatens to throw a lot of public dirt at him unless he pays her $5 million.

Naturally, Creighton decides that murder is the cleaner option.

Coleman is very well cast as Creighton. He can make irritation look effortless, and Hugh spends most of the episode radiating the confidence of a man who is accustomed to being the smartest person in every room. That makes him a natural Columbo adversary. The Lieutenant’s apparent disorganization doesn’t merely annoy him; it offends him professionally.

But is Creighton really all that?

We get to see Hugh in action defending a young man accused of murdering his mom. But his closing argument is...well, weak. It's a bunch of "Look into his soul" nonsense that went on far too long.

And how does he not know Columbo?

Hugh is supposedly a famous lawyer who defends murder suspects. How would he not know about the detective who brought down Nelson Hayward, Tommy Brown, Oscar Finch, Nora Chandler, Milo Janus, Ward Fowler, Alex Brady, and many many others. He was just on international news chasing down the fake-then-real murder of Dian Hunter.

Creighton would surely have been aware of him, even if he never defended any of Columbo’s murderers.

The victim is no innocent flower

Marcy Edwards is not written as an innocent bystander. She has been cheating on Creighton, and once he confronts her she responds by threatening to expose the bribery and other misconduct that helped build his reputation. Or did it – it’s never entirely clear if her allegations about Creighton “buying cops and judges” was true, or a lie she was blackmailing him with. 

It gives the opening a particularly sour edge: this is less a crime of sudden passion than a negotiation between two people who know exactly where the other is vulnerable.

A very complicated alibi

Creighton’s plan is one of the more elaborate alibis in the series. He needs to be at the beach house to kill Marcy while also appearing to be somewhere else. The key is a police speed-camera photograph showing what seems to be Creighton driving his own car at the time of the murder.

Eventually Columbo realizes that the image is too flat. The shadows on the face don’t behave like the shadows on the other photographed drivers. His theory is that somebody else was behind the wheel wearing a photographic mask of Creighton’s face.

As a television idea, it’s memorable. As courtroom evidence, I’m less convinced. A defense attorney as good as Creighton is supposed to be could have a very pleasant afternoon creating reasonable doubt about the angle of a shadow in a traffic photograph.

Trish Fairbanks has questions of her own

Shera Danese plays Creighton’s associate Trish Fairbanks, and she winds up in one of the episode’s strangest positions. She is useful to Creighton’s alibi, but she is also smart enough to figure out that he has used her.

That creates an interesting reversal: Creighton murders Marcy partly to escape blackmail, then manages to put himself in a position where Trish can pressure him too. For a lawyer presented as a master strategist, he has an alarming habit of creating new liabilities while eliminating old ones.

The bigger problem is that the mechanics of Trish’s role are never as convincing as they need to be. If your boss asks you to drive his car through a speed trap while disguised as him, it seems reasonable to ask at least one follow-up question.

Also, legally, I doubt she could be charged as an accessory when she had no knowledge of the crime. He used her, but she wasn't complicit...until she chose to blackmail him rather than going to the police with what she knew.

You hear Shera even more than you see her…

Shera actually had a second part in this episode. She’s the voice singing Marcy’s “Closer Closer Your Lips to Mine” song that we hear over and over (and over) again throughout the episode.

Welcome back Sondra Currie

Sondra Currie’s Sergeant Habach gives Columbo a recurring police partner who remains involved for a substantial stretch of the investigation. She is not simply there to hand him a lab report. She follows leads, participates in the mask demonstration, and even gets pulled into the episode’s unusually physical chase after Neddy Malcolm.

The 1990s episodes sometimes surround Columbo with more police infrastructure than the classic NBC years, and Habach is one of the better examples of that approach. She gives Falk someone to play off without competing with the central duel between Columbo and Creighton.

If she looks familiar it’s because she had a small role a couple of episodes earlier, as the producer’s wife that Wayne sleeps with in Palm Springs in Murder in Malibu.

Currie also happens to be married to the director of this episode, Alan Levi.

Welcome back John Finnegan

We even get a couple of scenes out of Columbo regular John Finnegan, once again cast as the police chief.

Neddy makes a run for it

Julian Stone’s Neddy Malcolm is the obvious person for Creighton to frame. He is Marcy’s lover, he is at the beach house, and after waking up beside a dead woman he behaves in approximately the worst possible way for an innocent man: he runs.

It does give the episode a couple rare bursts of action. Columbo is usually happiest allowing suspects to talk themselves into trouble, so a window-and-balcony escape feels like it wandered in from a different police show. And when he flees the scene we have a moment of him racing away on his motorcycle.

Sam Marlowe is...a little hokey

One of the swings and misses in this one is the curious film noir move of "Sam Marlowe", the private detective. It felt out of place in this episode and a little gratuitous.

The Little Mermaid

One of the more visually memorable scenes in the episode is when Columbo goes to talk with Darlene...who it turns out performas as a mermaid at a uniquely themed bar. Darlene is played by Susie Singer, very early in her career. She later found a lot of success as a writer, director, and producer.

The cast of characters in the bar is vaguely reminescent of the regular crowd at Artie Jessup's hangout in A Friend in Deed.

Good golly, Little Richard

And then Little Richard appears as himself.

His cameo isn’t really connected to the murder, but it gives the “rock star” episode the only authentic piece of rock music. Columbo’s investigation takes him into a musical setting and suddenly one of the genuine architects of rock and roll is on screen performing. Peter Falk’s Columbo seems delighted by the whole thing.

For an episode called Columbo and the Murder of a Rock Star, it is amusing that the only actual rock star is not the victim, not the murderer, and barely relevant to the plot.

It’s not really clear how Little Richard ended up getting cast in this episode but it was during a period when he was doing a lot of TV cameos so it’s likely that the Columbo folks and Little Richard’s agent just saw the opportunity.

A clue on the gardener’s truck

Creighton borrows gardener Ando Miaki’s truck as part of the murder plan, and the truck eventually becomes far more important than he expects. Columbo notices physical evidence connecting the vehicle to the scheme, including the berries that have fallen onto vehicles parked beneath a particular tree.

This is very Columbo in spirit: the expensive lawyer builds an elaborate alibi around photographic evidence, and a piece of landscaping helps undo it.

The problem is that the berry evidence is stronger as a clue than as a final proof of Creighton’s guilt. It helps reconstruct movements of cars and the gardener’s truck, but there is still a gap between proving that the vehicles were moved and proving beyond doubt who moved them.

And I’m not really buying the “glove marks” evidence on the truck or on Marcy's neck. Those were just heavy leather work gloves. Not likely to be uniquely identifiable.

NFI

When Columbo goes back to the beach house to look at the corks he's wearing a hat that says "NFI" on it. There are conflicting stories about the hat and nobody (including maybe Falk himself) seems to really know what NFI stands for.

The most persuasive story I've heard is that Falk saw somebody wearing the hat and just liked it.

I think he's glad he ain't married to you too...

The housekeeper at the beach house is fairly unpleasant. She has a couple of moments where she's normal, otherwise she just seems to be in a bad mood the whole time.

Who brought the weather?

When Columbo arrived at the beach house it was raining; he even had an umbrella that he left on the front porch. But a few minutes later when he and the housekeeper went out to check the trash cans there was hardly a cloud in the sky.

The mask demonstration

The most memorable part of the gotcha is Columbo recreating the speed-camera trick. Sergeant Habach sits behind the wheel wearing a flat photographic image of Columbo’s face, and at a glance the effect is just credible enough to explain how Creighton’s alibi photograph could have been manufactured.

It is also wonderfully creepy. A giant flat Columbo face staring through the windshield may not be one of the series’ great pieces of forensic evidence, but you are unlikely to forget it.

The fighting Falks?

By some accounts the final scene had to be changed at the last minute because Peter and Shera were fighting and Shera walked off the set. They changed the gotcha part to be outside and Shera is conspicuously absent from the final few minutes.

Mrs. Columbo makes another invisible appearance

This episode also belongs on the long list of evidence that Mrs. Columbo is a real person and not simply one of the Lieutenant’s interrogation inventions. He mentions her in police company, where there is no obvious tactical reason to fabricate a wife.

The episode’s Los Angeles

The production makes excellent use of Southern California locations. Marcy’s beach house was filmed at 30708 Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu. Hugh Creighton’s mansion was 56 Fremont Place in Los Angeles, and the construction-site material used Harbor Place Tower in Long Beach.

If you look closely in the background of the construction scene you'll see the Queen Mary in the haze. Just over Charlie's shoulder.

The Malibu house is especially fun for Columbo location hunters because it remains one of the more recognizable and accessible locations associated with the series. The Japanese sand garden seen in the episode may be gone, but the house itself and its beachside setting remain familiar. Creighton’s Fremont Place mansion is a different story: the neighborhood is private and guarded, so it is not a practical sightseeing stop.

And the beach house neighborhood was familiar to the Columbo crew too...when Columbo arrives in the episode you see him driving past the Broad Beach intersection of PCH. That was the turn you took to get to Teresa Goren's house in Murder in Malibu.

Just a few more things…

During the speed camera experiment Columbo says that he has never had the top down on the Peugeot before. In fact, we’ve seen the top down on multiple occasions in prior episodes, going back at least as far as Season 1’s Short Fuse.

A running bit throughout the episode has Columbo interested in getting a portable stereo for his nephew. The closing credits pay it off with footage of him driving the Peugeot with the stereo beside him, singing along to Marcy’s music. Case closed, shopping completed.

Ando Miaki, the gardener, was played by Tad Horino, who was better known in comedic films like Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey.

Verdict

Columbo and the Murder of a Rock Star is not one of the revival era’s tightest mysteries, but it has more going for it than the title might suggest. Dabney Coleman is exactly the right sort of adversary for Falk, Sondra Currie does a nice job as the likeable Sergeant Habach. Little Richard provides a completely unexpected jolt of energy, and the pacing is generally good.

The weak spot is the murder plan itself. Creighton is supposed to be a man who understands evidence better than almost anyone, yet his scheme depends on an accomplice accepting an extraordinarily suspicious assignment and on a speed-camera trick that becomes less convincing the longer you think about it.