Colombo - Ashes to ashes

 Well, not one of those that merit countless reruns, but not too bad. It’s only a bit boring at times, but i was nice to see the same face that portrayed Mr Finch in Agenda for Murder :)

My main problem with his one is that I don’t understand the logic of why he did what he did, other than it was necessary otherwise Colombo would not have been able to catch him…

What I liked though was seeing Colombo taking to the taxi-drivers and then making up some story about a cousin when talking to Prince; he’s always done that, but it was never so openly like this. I’ve always known that he lies constantly to his suspects, but it’s finally in the open :)

The story:

Verity Chandler is a tv journalist and is working on a new piece on a funeral home, but she also wants to confront Eric Prince personally. He’s the owner, and they’ve been lovers in the past, I think. She’s uncovered a very dirty secret on how he made so much money: years ago, when famous actress Dorothy Page died, he stole her very precious diamond necklace. She appears during the funeral of a war veteran and even kisses him leaving evident traces of lipstick so the woman working there (Prince’s assistant) uses her handkerchief to wipe it out, and then Verity confronts Prince with a photo of a house, Dorothy Page’s house, and tells him she will expose him in a few days time, so he kills her right there and then. After the funeral, he exchanges the bodies in the coffin, burning Verity and keeping the veteran frozen. He gives the ashes to the veteran’s rich widow who throws them over the Hollywood sign, even if it’s forbidden. Prince then puts Verity’s shoes and earrings in her house, near a desk with a glass smeared with lipstick, and then he writes something on her computer changing the date, to make it look like she was home in the evening.

It’s Verity’s secretary that insists the police must investigate because she’d never stay so many hours without answering her phone or contacting him, especially after he left her three messages.

I did not like this guy, this secretary was so annoying and so patronising towards Colombo; in a way he was right, something serious had really happened, but he was annoying nonetheless.

At first it does look like she had been home and then someone entered by force and kidnapped her, but then they discover that Verity’s puppy had been left alone for hours without food or water and he gets angry, and sure that nobody would have bought a puppy and then left him alone to starve like that.

The secretary knew Verity was going to the veteran’s funeral, so Colombo has a place to start. Prince says that he sometimes called her, when it was someone famous’ funeral, because it was all publicity for him, he even says that he called her to come for the veteran’s funeral. And yet, he mentions having another famous man’s funeral to organize but he did not call her for this. 

The assistant tells Colombo that Verity came in a taxi and gives him the handkerchief she used to wipe off the lipstick, so Colombo can see that it is not the same shade on the glass on her desk, clearly put there to make people think that she had been home.

Prince has another cremation, of a short man that died in an explosion, so there’s a small body in a sack, and Prince puts this Lerby together with the veteran’s body and burns them together, and puts all the ashes in the same urn. 

Talking to the taxi driver, Colombo realises that the picture is of a house in Sunset Boulevard that now belongs to a sheik, but it once belonged to actress Dorothy Page, and Colombo learns of the case of the missing diamond necklace. 

This is how it went: when Page died, she was sent to the funeral home with the necklace on her; somebody called right away, Prince denied having seen it and a search found nothing - because diamonds don’t burn, so he shoved them down her throat and took them after cremating her. He used the taxi driver’s help to sell it.

Colombo now has a problem, because there’s no body and no way to prove there ever was a murder. His only chance is to prove that there was a switch in bodies, that he burned Verity before the veteran… and he can do this because the war veteran had a metal plaque in him of a metal that won’t burn, so he gets hold of that urn and shakes it, and we clearly hear a noise, and Colombo shows us that there is a piece of metal inside, proving that the veteran’s ashes are in Lerby’s urn.

…It was important for the plot, of course, the only way… but it’s still silly to me that there was a switch ata all, he should havec burned both bodies at the same time, and kept only part of the ashes… it’s all a bit of nonsense in my opinion. 

This story is set in 1997, October I think. 

 

ITA scandali a Hollywood

Colombo - Rest in peace, Mrs Columbo

 This one wasn’t bad, although it was’t anything special either. Very interesting the first time for sure, a little less valuable as a rewatch.

Viviane Dimitri is so not in her right mind… years ago she loved Pete and he loved her to the point of stealing money from his clients to give her everything she wanted, but then the market went bad and he lost everything… she says he could have made it, the market was about to go up again and he’d have made the money he needed but he didn’t have the time because someone “called his boss and told him what he was doing”… when the client demanded his money back Pete killed him, and ‘a police lieutenant’ hunted him until he arrested him and Pete got a ten years sentence, but eight years in he got a heart attack and died.

Viviane sells houses, talking/convincing people to buy much more expensive houses than they inetnded to. She’s sure that her boss Charlie is the one who ratted out Pete, so she kills him, then she goes to dinner with married Leland during which she sneaks out to use Charlie’s bank card to get some money that she’ll put back in his wallet and back in his pants.

Colombo finds 400 dollars cash in Charlile’s pockets, it was money he won in a bet on a basket game. So Colombo soon explains to his young seargeant his own theory about that cash, great way to instruct the younger ones!

She wanted Colombo to be the one in charge of this case, and she made sure by calling the police station to ask for him, to be sure that he’d be back from his holiday. For security reasons cops’ addresses and phone numbers are not in the phone book.

Colombo eats his beloved chili with crackers as usual. 

28-29 years of marriage for Colombo. He says they never had children but they have each other, and that she’s always doing something…

Colombo knows from the start that Viviane did it, it’s quite obvious from the cash money, and also that she has left clues for who he has to suspect, so he makes her think he bought it to see what her true game is. He can’t find any proof at all. She insists on asking to meet Colombo’s wife, and when he mentions that he does not eat jam but that his wife loves it, she brings him some for her. 

Colombo tracks down Viviane’s old psychiatrist who of course can’t really tell him much about her, but I liked their meeting,, and he made it clear that not only in a case such as that a woman would choose to go after the wife of the man responsible for her husband’s death, but also that she wanted him to know the truth, wanted the satisfaction of him knowing.

So Colombo arranges for his sergeant to rush to him saying his wife is at the hospital… and then there’s Mrs Colombo’s funeral (the priest reminds me a lot of Filini ) and then Colombo asks Viviane to drive him home. He makes himself a slice of bread with the jam Viviane gave him and she watches him eating it. He fakes getting sick until she laughs at him and tells him everything, that she poisoned him and his wife and killed Charlie. At this point he says that it’s not his house but it’s the sergeant who lives there, and who has recorded her confession. His wife is alive and with just a small flu, he never gave her the jam, of course, but sent it to be analyzed immediately. He says he’s sorry for her pain but he took it rather personally that she wanted to kill both him and his wife.

We saw a picture on the piano, a double frame, one with Colombo and one with another woman that’s supposed to be his wife, but at the end of the episode, after the sergeant takes Viviane away, Colombo calls his wife to ask how she feels, and says that the picture is of her sister and she can now take it back, and also tells her that he wants her to have her picture taken because apparently she never had before, and he’s rather sweet, and ends the call with an “I love you too”.

Weird bit: when Colombo visits a ‘hotel’ that rents rooms for prostitutes and where people gamble, the guy at the reception reacts weirdly upon hearing that he’s the police: he says that ‘we gave it to your office’ and that all has ‘been taken care of’ and Colombo says that he didn’t come here for that… and from the guy’s face it looked a lot like he was talking about some sort of bribe… I mean these things happen for sure, but would Colombo not care at all? … Actually maybe not, he has quite an easy attitude about anything that isn’t his case…

ITA che fine ha fatto la signora Colombo?

Colombo - Undercover

 Well, I don’t really care about this story, but I do like that we see Colombo in quite a few different situations than we’re used to. Like, we see him at a murder scene in a very poor area, so he’s more loose and direct, none of all that fake humility he uses to soothe rich people; we see him undercover, we see him working at the police station (although not in his own office of course :lol:), we see him getting dress inside a car and then pretending to be a mafioso…all things that are surely part of his life but we usually don’t see in the other episodes.

These are the things I like of the episode, the scenes that show us our beloved character’s job and life and soul. 

The story is a little bit boring, unfortunately. Two men are found dead (and I’m actually not sure who killed them, at the end… did they kill each other?) and this starts an investigation on an old theft. While Colombo is discussing it with Brown, a man named Irvin Krutch comes in saying that he works for an insurance company that had to pay a lot of money when the robbery money were never found. It’s an old robbery, something like 2 million dollars, and the place where the money was hidden can only be found putting together the pieces of a photograph. Irvin shows them one, saying an old woman gave it to him along with the whole story. Colombo has one found at the murder scene, and one found in the house of the other victim. Colombo finds one by giving some money to an alcohol-loving woman (when the played the widow picked up and carried around by football players, she used to drink all the time as well :lol).

One piece h finds by going undercover and exchanging information with a small thief or something. This Weinberg will also be found dead, and Colombo will be attacked in his hotel room. Hit on the head, our poor lieutenant. Miss Ferguson has another piece but she refuses to cooperate and then she’s found dead. Her partner gives Colombo her piece of the picture.

Most pieces are simply grey. The picture is in black and white and it mostly shows… grey. It will be revealed at the end that Irvin had two pieces but he kept his piece with the X marking the right place hidden. It was quite easy to suspect him, but at first it seems like he might have an alibi since a girl swears that she was with him all day and all night when Weinberg was killed, but then Colombo finds his proof: a parking meter with a coin with Irvin’s fingerprints, and it had been emptied recently so they have a specific time range when he could have put it there - and he had to put it there because cars could be towed away otherwise. After bein told this, and also that it involved murder, the girl tells the truth.

At the end, the cops recover the money hidden underwater, but Colombo is not really interested anymore after the puzzle has been solved.

ITA indagini ad incastro

Colombo - Murder: a self portrait

Well, this wasn’t too bad but it wasn’t good either, it’s quite in the middle, really nothing special though. The main character is very arrogant and full of himself, a famous painter, an artist who has three women and demands they get along so he can have whatever he wants whenever he wants. Really, this Max Barsini lives with his second wife Vanessa and his young model Julie and their nextdoor neighbour is his first wife Louise, and he wants them to have dinners together and everything.

It all changes when he finds out that she’s seeing again her old psychologist, only for personal reasons now. They have a relationship and she wants to leave and live with him. She vaguely mentions something that happened in the past but sh’s adamant that she’d never do anything against him, or to cause him trouble. God only knows why.

He decides to kill her and prepares well. He goes to Vito’s, it’s a bar with a small apartment upstairs where he used to live with Louise when they were younger and broke. Max says he’ll paint something for him that will attract people to his bar, but while he’s supposed to be there behind a big canvas painting, he’s actually sneaking out to reach the small beach where he knows he’ll find her. Louise always went swimming, and he starts with friendly words, to depart as friends… and then covers her mouth with the rag and the white spirit that he uses to clean the brushes. After she’s passed out, he carries her into the water where he drowns her. 

I’s supposed to look like an accident, but of course there are details, like the fact that she only had one contact lense in her eyes, the other one was in its box, so she was interrupted… and also the smudge of colour on her face. It wasn’t lipstick, it was oil paint, and a specific colour indeed, the one called Barsini red because he makes it himself, of course. And there’s lipstick traces on the rag.

When Max mentions doing a portrait, Colombo accepts with enthusiasm, so he has the perfect chance to spend time together to talk to him and they listen together to the recordings of Louise’s nightmares, three of them, a bit different but all three alluding of a man with a monocle that they knew years before. This Harry was Max’s agent when he was starting out, and not an honest one. More than once he sold someone’s art and never gave them the money. Colombo is sure that Max killed him, and probably buried him in Vito’s basement, but he can prove nothing about that. What he can prove is this murder, because of the colour and lipstick.

Colombo had also noticed that in the apartment where Max was supposed to have painted that last piece, the water was all mud, hadn’t been used in a long time, so he hadn’t used it to clean the brushes of the spirit, and also that there were no paint stains on the floor.

After a lot of shouting,because of course neither of them is happy with the situation, finally Vanessa and Julie actually talk to one another and decide to do something for their own sake instead of always for Max, so they both leave him.

Colombo’s portrait is quite nice :)

ITA autoritratto di un assassino

Colombo - Last salute to the Commodore

Unfortunately this was one of the most boring episodes of Columbo, I didn’t like it at all. I say unfortunately because it was different, meaning that for once we didn’t really know the culprit, and it had a final à-la-Poirot, where the detective gathers everyone to give his speech, sort of… but it didn’t go well. The whole episode was very boring, Colombo’s scenes were boring as well because all centered around nautical terms and stuff, and the final revelation was in part too out of the blue and in part sort of silly. 

When the Commodore dies, we see his son-in-law Clay taking things away, cleaning things and then hiding the body at sea, so that it might be thought of as an accident…

Colombo soon has the right idea, that Clay went from one place to the Commodore’s ship by swimming underwater so that nobody could see him, then pretended to be the Commodore going out at sea, then dumped the body there.

As soon as they know this, Clay is found dead.

There’s a lot of talking about ships and Colombo trying to understand all the new terms.

Then the solution:

Clay thought his wife had killed her father and since she’s always drunk she has no memory of what she did that night. It wasn’t her though. He tried to cover for her only because he wanted her to have her father’s inheritance so he could get his hands on it.

Apparently the Commodore wanted to marry young Lisa, and this was so out of the blue that when I saw that he wanted to give her name to a ship/boat/whatever, I thought she might have been his secret daughter or something, but no. They were in love and she loved him for what he was and did not want his money and never cared for it, so she’s not a suspect. I’m not sure how they can be sure of it or why this relationship matters anyway…

The Commodore’s brother’s son Swanny killed him, and Colombo’s only evidence seems to be that when Colombo made them hear ticking and said ‘the Commodore’s watch’ he was the only one that said “impossible!”, because he was the only one who knew it had broken during the murder.

That’s it. 

I’m not sure of how he killed him, or even why since the daughter is the heir.

I did not like this episode at all, all that ship-talking was boring to me that I don’t care, and maybe it’s boring to those who care too, since they probably already know it all already. 

There was very little investigation, nothing of the usual Colombo we know.