The Shabby Detective: Yet Another Columbo Podcast

Peter Falk strolls through gunfire like it’s light rain while Alan Arkin screams for both of them, and there isn’t a trace of Columbo in sight. The In-Laws (1979), directed by Arthur Hiller and written by Andrew Bergman, lands on The Shabby Detective during the long haul between Columbo Season 7 and Season 8. Mike and Chris sort out whether this mark-and-stooge romp earns its reputation. They weigh Falk playing against type, a first hour that stalls before the madcap begins, Richard Libertini’s black-velvet art gallery, screenwriter Walon Green’s tales of William Friedkin wrangling Falk on The Brink’s Job (1978), the troubled Big Trouble (1986) reunion, and the The In-Laws (2003) remake with Albert Brooks and Michael Douglas. Serpentine!Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-shabby-detective-yet-another-columbo-podcast--5084441/support.

How many push-ups can you do? Between Columbo seasons, Mike and Chris dig into another Richard Levinson and William Link production: Murder by Natural Causes (1979), directed by Robert Day for CBS. Hal Holbrook stars as Arthur Sinclair, a stage mentalist whose heart condition makes him an inviting target: his younger wife Allison (Katharine Ross) and her lover, struggling actor Gil Weston (Barry Bostwick), cook up a plan to literally frighten him to death with a staged home invasion. Naturally, nothing goes as planned. Arthur's lawyer George (Richard Anderson) has his own designs on Allison, and the film piles on twist after twist — the kind of nested double-crosses Levinson and Link built entire careers on.Holbrook and Ross had already played off each other in They Only Kill Their Masters, and Bostwick brings a slippery, vain energy to Gil that makes his scheming both funny and pathetic. Mike and Chris talk through how the film's chamber-piece structure (four characters, one house, one long night) squeezes maximum tension from minimal sets, how it fits the "TV movie as filmed stage play" tradition Levinson and Link mastered, and why the finale's final line lands as one of the great mean little punchlines in their catalog.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-shabby-detective-yet-another-columbo-podcast--5084441/support.

Mike spends the cold open dodging one simple question: why, exactly, are he and Chris watching a 1979 Romanian comedy called Nea Mărin miliardar? He won't say. The answer arrives thirty minutes and seventeen seconds in, when a stranger billed as Detective Columbo shuffles into frame and asks for one more thing.Director Sergiu Nicolaescu's mistaken-identity farce casts Amza Pellea in a double role as a bumpkin uncle and the American billionaire he's confused with, with Puiu Călinescu doing his best Peter Falk impression as the country's most inexplicable cameo cop. Two sets of gangsters, a kidnapped heiress, a doubled briefcase, and a laundry chute all get involved. Mike and Chris trace the Columbo Connected Universe to Ceaușescu's Romania, debate whether Falk owns the character even secondhand, and confirm that Columbo was universal.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-shabby-detective-yet-another-columbo-podcast--5084441/support.

Peter Falk said no. Richard Levinson and William Link said no. Fred Silverman did it anyway. Mike and Chris take a detour into the Columbo universe's most dubious corner: Mrs. Columbo, Season 2, Episode 5, "A Chilling Surprise" (aired November 22, 1979). Kate Callahan — no longer even Mrs. Columbo in any meaningful sense — investigates a body that won't stay put in a restaurant freezer.When her friend Zev Arno collapses and promptly disappears, Kate finds herself chasing a tangle of affairs, frame-ups, and frozen corpses while no one, least of all Det. Sgt. Mike Varrick, believes a word she says. Directed by Philip Leacock and written by E. Arthur Kean, the episode features a gloriously charismatic Armand Assante doing his best with very little. It's 45 minutes that feels like three times that — a cash-in spinoff that couldn't even commit to its own premise long enough to keep the title.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-shabby-detective-yet-another-columbo-podcast--5084441/support.

Mike and Chris close the book on Season Seven with "The Conspirators," a 1978 episode that takes Columbo somewhere the series rarely ventured: the murky, morally weighted world of real geopolitical conflict. Clive Revill — Tony-nominated stage actor, Matilda's trainer in the boxing kangaroo film of the same name, and the original voice of Emperor Palpatine in The Empire Strikes Back — plays Joe Devlin, an Irish poet and public charmer who moonlights as a gun-runner for the IRA. Devlin doesn't irritate Columbo the way most killers do — he disarms him. They exchange verse, play darts, share whiskey, and trade jokes about their respective cultures, two sides of the same immigrant coin. We weigh whether all that conviviality comes at the cost of tension. An episode this pleasant can sometimes forget to be dangerous.Directed by Leo Penn and written by Howard Berk, "The Conspirators" is not Season Seven's sharpest hour.  As the last Columbo of the 1970s, the last on NBC, and the last new case the Lieutenant would face for nearly eleven years, it leaves a lot to be desired. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-shabby-detective-yet-another-columbo-podcast--5084441/support.