It's All in the Game

On October 31st, 1993, Columbo did something almost as startling as solving a murder: he let a beautiful woman (who wasn’t Mrs. Columbo) kiss him.

It's All in the Game is the only Columbo episode credited as written by Peter Falk himself, and that fact is impossible to ignore while watching it. This is not merely another revival-era mystery with Falk in the lead. It feels like Falk asking what would happen if the Lieutenant's greatest weapon - his ability to make a murderer feel safe around him - was turned back on him by someone who could make the relationship genuinely personal.

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Faye Dunaway plays wealthy socialite Lauren Staton, who conspires with the younger Lisa Martin (Claudia Christian) to murder Nick Franco (Armando Pucci), a violent, two-timing lover. The mechanics of the killing are clever enough, but the real mystery is how much does Columbo know, how much is Lauren playing him, and how much does he actually like being played?

A murder in two parts

The opening gives us a murder plan divided between two women. Lauren hosts a large party at her home, surrounding herself with witnesses while Nick arrives, makes excuses and eventually leaves. Lauren telephones Lisa, who is waiting for him.

Lisa meets Nick and keeps him occupied. When he takes her back to his apartment, Lauren is already inside. She shoots him. The two women then work together to distort the time of death, keeping Nick's body warm with an electric blanket before Lisa later fires a shot to create a false murder time.

It is a variation on an old Columbo idea: manufacture a timeline that appears to make the killer's alibi impossible to break. The twist is that the audience is not initially told everything about Lauren and Lisa's relationship. We know they are close. We know they are protecting each other. We don’t yet know why.

Before we go to far...

Let's talk about the opening. There are so many curious goofs and issues in the opening that I was compelled to write an entire post about it.

One more thing: The opening credits of It's All in the Game

From backward fountains to actors who shouldn't be there and more....the editors weren't having their best day.

Nick Franco

Armando Pucci has a thankless but important job as Nick Franco. The episode needs us to understand why two women would take such an extreme step without turning the murder into something morally clean.

Nick is handsome, confident and predatory. He is involved with Lauren while also carrying on with Lisa, and we gradually learn that his behavior toward Lisa has become violent and threatening. The full extent of that relationship is held back until late in the story, which changes how we interpret Lauren's actions.

On first viewing, she appears to be a sophisticated woman eliminating an unfaithful lover. By the end, we understand that it much more complicated than that.

Lauren Staton

Faye Dunaway is the episode.

That is not meant to diminish Falk. It is simply difficult to imagine It's All in the Game working with a less commanding guest star. Lauren has to be elegant enough to turn heads, clever enough to sustain a complicated alibi, warm enough that Columbo's affection feels plausible, and dangerous enough that we never forget she has killed a man.

Dunaway gives her all four qualities. She does not play Lauren as a femme fatale in the conventional noir sense. The flirtation is calculated, but it is not entirely false. That is what makes the relationship interesting.

Does Columbo fall for her?

The episode's most famous question is also the hardest one to answer cleanly. Lauren decides very early that Columbo can be distracted through charm. She gives him attention, asks personal questions, buys him a tie, kisses him and treats him as a man rather than merely a policeman.

Columbo responds.

He blushes. He smiles. He accepts the attention. He goes to dinner with her. At several points, he seems almost giddy in a way that would have been unthinkable opposite most suspects.

But Falk is careful not to tell us exactly how much is genuine. Columbo has always encouraged suspects to underestimate him. If Lauren believes she is controlling the tone of the investigation, that belief is useful to him.

At the same time, the episode would be much less interesting if every smile were merely police technique. Falk allows the possibility that Columbo genuinely enjoys Lauren's company and is affected by her. The ambiguity is the point.

The cold room

Columbo's first serious clue is temperature.

Nick's apartment is unusually warm. The thermostat has been turned up, which fits with the murderers' effort to manipulate the apparent time of death. Columbo notices because the heat does not make sense.

Shortly afterward, he notices something else: Lauren has poor circulation and dislikes the cold.

That detail links her, psychologically if not yet legally, to the overheated apartment. It is exactly the kind of Columbo clue that looks harmless until the Lieutenant refuses to stop thinking about it.

Making himself at home

A common theme in Columbo is the Lieutenant getting overly comfortable at the crime scene. He's cracking eggs on the victim's ashtrays, he's looking in the victim's fridge for orange juice to drink. 

It's a good reminder that Columbo is a TV detective and this isn't a documentary of police procedure.

A party-sized alibi

Lauren's alibi seems particularly strong because it is public. She has not arranged to be seen by one conveniently forgetful witness. She has hosted a house full of people.

Yet even a crowded room contains gaps. Lauren withdraws from the party for a period, supposedly because of a headache. Columbo begins to worry about exactly how much of her evening can really be accounted for.

‘Headache gone?”

“All gone.”

One can't help but see the double meaning in that response. Nick was her headache...and he's gone. 

Dinner for two

The dinner between Lauren and Columbo is where the episode takes its biggest risk.

The scene could easily have become ridiculous. Columbo on what looks suspiciously like a date with a glamorous murder suspect? Yet Falk and Dunaway play it with restraint. Lauren is seductive without becoming a caricature, and Columbo is bashful without becoming foolish.

And of course it is an interrogation.

The one moment where the scene becomes a little cartooinish is Lauren entering the restaurant and every man, a curiously stereotypical mix of dudes, turns to stare as if they'd never seen a female of the species before.

She's pretty, we get it. No need to beat us over the head with it.

What's your first name?

Lauren asks the question generations of viewers have wanted answered: what is Columbo's first name?

His answer is perfect: 'Lieutenant.'

Columbo is playing along with the flirtation, but doesn't completely give in to it.

Mrs. Columbo is still in the room

Any story that flirts with the possibility of Columbo being romantically interested in another woman has one enormous obstacle: Mrs. Columbo.

For decades, the unseen wife has been one of the character's fixed points. Columbo may exaggerate details about her for investigative purposes, but the marriage itself has always been real. It's All in the Game does not erase that.

Instead, Falk writes Columbo as a married man who enjoys being admired. That is a much smaller and more believable transgression than an affair. He is flattered. He is curious. He may even be tempted by the fantasy of Lauren. But he never stops being Lieutenant Columbo, and he never suggests that Mrs. Columbo has ceased to matter.

The slightly awkward undercurrent that undermines the sympathy we might have for Lauren is that she's enthusiastically seducing a married man. She's perfectly aware Mrs. Columbo is still there but she's throwing herself at Columbo anyhow. Whatever her motivation that feels not good.

But what about Mrs. Falk?

It hasn't escaped attention that Peter Falk was a fan of Faye Dunaway and people have openly mused about the fact that Falk wrote a script where he gets to kiss Dunaway a couple of times.

Apparently Peter and Shera were having a spat while this episode was filming and Peter was allegedly sleeping in his pool house. Related? Don't know. Could have just been a coincidence.

Barney gets a real scene

John Finnegan had appeared in Columbo repeatedly over the years, often in small roles. Here he gets to return as Barney, the bartender Columbo talks to about Lauren.

The Barney scenes matter because Columbo has nobody else with whom he can discuss what is happening emotionally. With a suspect, he performs. With fellow officers, he talks about evidence. With Barney, he can admit - or half-admit - that Lauren has gotten under his skin.

The case that needs a confession

One of the more unusual features of It's All in the Game is Columbo's acknowledgement that his case is not especially strong.

He increasingly believes Lauren is involved, but belief and proof are different things. The timeline has been carefully manipulated, the physical evidence is suggestive rather than decisive, and Lauren remains composed.

That pushes Columbo toward a strategy we do not see often: instead of building toward one crushing forensic contradiction, he works toward getting Lauren to confess.

Lisa Martin

Claudia Christian's Lisa spends much of the episode at a distance from Columbo, which is essential to the deception.

The audience is encouraged to interpret Lauren and Lisa's relationship without being given a label. They are affectionate, protective and emotionally intimate. Because of the age difference and the absence of family exposition, the episode lets viewers draw the wrong conclusion.

Then comes the reveal: Lisa is Lauren's daughter.

It is one of the better late revelations in the Columbo canon. It's a twist few people, especially Columbo, saw coming.

The deal

The ending is where Falk's script departs most dramatically from the usual moral machinery of the series.

Columbo gets Lauren's confession. In exchange, Lisa is allowed to leave.

This is not the first time Columbo has shown mercy to someone connected to a killing, but the arrangement here is unusually explicit. Lauren accepts responsibility for the murder and asks Columbo to let her daughter go. He does.

Peter Falk, writer

The episode is unique in the series because Peter Falk receives the writing credit.

A contemporary Washington Post piece published on the eve of the broadcast reported that Falk had written and produced the film and described it as 'very different, more unpredictable, more complex, more ambiguous and more human.' That is a remarkably accurate summary of what he was attempting.

Later accounts say the germ of the story went back many years, inspired by a detective Falk knew who developed feelings for a suspect. Whatever changed through the long development process, the final version is clearly built around an idea Falk cared about: what happens when the detective's emotional connection to the killer is no longer merely part of the game?

Falk and Dunaway

Falk and Dunaway were not strangers. Contemporary reporting noted that Dunaway had appeared years earlier on Falk's 1960s series Trials of O'Brien, and that she came to It's All in the Game after discussing another television project with him.

Falk was effusive about her work. In publicity quoted by the Washington Post, he called Dunaway 'stunning, arresting, complicated, funny, dangerous and moving.' The enthusiasm is understandable. The entire episode depends on the audience believing that Lauren can alter the temperature of a room simply by entering it.

Emmy-winning performances

Dunaway won the 1994 Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series for her performance as Lauren Staton.

It was a deserved reward. The role asks her to be glamorous without becoming remote, manipulative without losing sympathy, and emotionally open while concealing the most important fact in the story.

Peter Falk was also Emmy-nominated that year for playing Columbo.

Vincent McEveety again

Vincent McEveety directed the episode, continuing one of the longest creative relationships in Columbo history. By 1993, he knew exactly how to frame Falk's pauses, digressions and seemingly casual questions.

The direction here is noticeably less frantic than some revival installments. Long scenes are allowed to rest on Falk and Dunaway simply talking to each other. That confidence is important. This is an episode that leans hard into the chemistry between the stars.

And his son...

A Vincent McEveety trademark seems to be casting his son, Vincent Jr., in a minor role. He appeared in A Trace of Murder as the busboy and in A Bird in the Hand as a policeman. Here he's a blurry policeman in the hallway with a single line of dialog.

A small cast helps

Compared with some later Columbo films, It's All in the Game has a remarkably tight cast.

Bill Macy plays Ruddick, the manager at Nick's apartment building, while John Finnegan's Barney becomes Columbo's sounding board. The limited number of major characters keeps the focus where it belongs: Lauren and Columbo.

That concentration gives the film an intimacy more reminiscent of the classic series than many of the larger, busier revival episodes.

A familiar face in that small cast

Fans of Gilligan's Island may have noticed an old friend in the party scene. Dawn Wells, the original Mary Ann, appears as one of Lauren's friends.

And another

Columbo occasional Ed McCready has a very brief role as one of the detectives.

On. Off. On. Off. On. Off.

A key clue, masked in comic relief, is a slightly overlong scene where Columbo interviews Nick's maid. She may look familiar to fans of the show Will & Grace. She had a long-running role as Karen's maid Rosario.

Familiar Columbo tricks

The episode is original in tone, but some of its mechanics are very familiar.

Keeping a body warm to distort the time of death recalls Suitable for Framing. Lauren buying Columbo a tie brings Requiem for a Falling Star to mind. And the decision to show mercy toward someone who technically escaped full accountability has an obvious kinship with Forgotten Lady.

Claudia Christian talks about the episode

So does it work?

Sort of - and largely because it is willing to risk making viewers uncomfortable.

Columbo flirting with a murderer sounds like a bad idea. Columbo allowing an accomplice to leave is questionable. A mystery that depends more on a confession than on a perfect gotcha risks feeling underpowered.

Yet It's All in the Game survives those objections because Falk understands that the real subject is not the murder plot. It is the relationship between detective and murderer.

Faye Dunaway gives him a partner strong enough to make that relationship credible. Claudia Christian makes the late revelation about Lisa emotionally meaningful. 

Just a few more things…

• The title is wonderfully apt because everybody in the episode believes they understand the game. The only person who truly understands the rules is Columbo - and even he discovers something he did not expect.
• That wasn't the original title though, the script was titled "Two Women and a Dead Man."
• It’s never made clear how Lauren sneaks out, and back into, her party with nobody noticing. I suppose it’s a big house and she knows it well so there’s probably a side door or something she knew would be out of view.
• A common movie trick...did you notice when the detective is staking out Lisa's apartment that his car has no rear-view mirror? They're often removed in filming because they block the shot.
  
  
  
  
  
• “Coming in on a dead run” is a familiar line in Columbo. It appears in several other episodes, especially from the ABC era. Ashes to Ashes and Murder, Smoke, and Shadows being just two examples.