Another rich, arrogant murderer. In this episode Colombo has a bad cold throughout, one of those little things that makes the character more real, makes you feel sympathy for him, makes the show less fake and cold. We also see his poor dog; it seems healthy and happy, but Colombo always leaves him alone in the car, saying to stay put and silent... I mean, poor doggy...
Harold is an arrogant man, very much obsessed with his technological gadgets, so proud of his wristwatch that can show numbers, his whole house is absurd, the doors open with a loud sound and he claps his hands to make them open. There are videocameras everywhere in the house and a guard outside checking the cameras, and he takes advantage of this for his premeditated plan to get rid of his mother-in-law that wants to exclude him from the company, thinking he's wasting her money on his stupid inventions.
By attacking him with her words so much she doesn't come out very nice, but then again she IS right in her judgement of him, so we shouldn't really judge her, maybe she would be nicer with a decent son-in-law. She even says that she hired a private detective so she knows about all his affairs... and yet no private detective came forward to talk to Colombo about this, after her death :-/ I mean, client confidentiality and all that, sure, but after her death, wouldn't it be the decent thing to do to volunteer the information to the police?
Anyway, Harold secretly cuts a little glass of the window, leaving some dirt on the wall outside to make it look someone entered the house that way.
The designated night, he plays a video showing an empty room for the guard while he kills the woman, being careful not to appear in the camera frame, then he goes out to an art party. He sets a timer for the recorder to show the murder at a later time, when he'll be at the party, so when the guard sees it and runs inside the house, he can be seen by a lot of people at the party.
As always Colombo seems very impressed by all this technology :lol:
Harold starts right away 'explaining' to the police how things went :-/ I didn't quite understand the little things about Harold doing one thing differently than usual: apparently usually it was the guard to write down the hour and I guess the place where he goes, but this time Harold handed him a magazine with everything already written on it by him... why? I didn't quite get this part. Why did he? And why the guard didn't copy it in his chart? What was the meaning of all this? I really didn't get this, the only obvious thing was that once again Colombo explains to us how he always gets suspicious when someone does things he never did before...
Colombo finds that there is no dust near the window, inside the house, and of course this is important because it's very difficult to walk through a field, a garden, enter a clean house and to not leave even the smallest particle of dirt... Harold suggests the thief might have taken his shoes off... which is absurd :-/
Harold's wife Elizabeth (Gena Rowlands), after petting the poor dog a little before Colombo shoo him away, tells him of that night, when she thought she heard a noise while Harold was still in the house but he told her he heard nothing so she says she might have been dreaming. She heard nothing afterwards... Colombo is convinced that she heard the shot, because such a loud noise would have caused the doors to open, which is the only way she could have seen the chair - that otherwise would have been in the dark - and she had told him that she saw it coming out of her nightmare.
Harold is getting very frustrated, but Colombo won't stop because he thinks, obviously, that there was no thief, that Harold did it but he can't figure out yet how to get him.
He stops to eat something at a bar and the guys there are all watching a game of American football, so Colombo has the chance to see a replay scene, like they always do in sports, and he gets the right idea of how he did it, now he only needs to prove it, so he takes the video of the murder that Harold gave him and takes it to expert to analyse it. He watches the first part, the murder, and the second part, when the guard arrives on the scene, at the same time on two different screens, looking for something that might prove that there was a time gap between the two, and he finds it.
A much better proof than those he finds sometimes, actually. This one was really good.
He takes the video to Harold's house, and shows it to him and his wife. By zooming in (really? on a videotape?) he can clearly see that on the desk, while the woman was being murdered, there still is the party invitation, which clearly means that he hadn't gotten out yet, since not only he needed it to enter the party, but he clearly presented it there and I think he even left it there. Colombo got it back from the gallery people, showing them that it was indeed the same one that appears on the screen.
Elizabeth is in tears. Harold is having a breakdown, trying to get himself a new alibi from his wife: it would be a weak and useless one anyway, but his wife doesn't confirm it of course, she can't speak at all. Poor woman, she lost her mother and now she's losing her husband... but in the long run I say it will be good for her, she'll be able to speak her mind and choose for herself, because he kept her always locked up in the house with the excuse that being on a wheelchair it was safer for her to stay in that house...
ITA playback
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