Recap / Columbo S 00 E 02

Episode: Pilot Movie
Title: Ransom for a Dead Man
Directed by: Richard Irving
Written by: Levinson and Link
Air Date: March 1, 1971
Previous: Prescription: Murder
Next: Murder by the Book
Guest Starring: Lee Grant, John Fink, Harold Gould, Patricia Mattick

Ransom for a Dead Man is a 1971 TV movie. It was the second Pilot Movie for Columbo, airing a full three years after 1968's Prescription: Murder.

Leslie Williams (Lee Grant) is a hotshot attorney with an older husband who she doesn't particularly want to be attached to anymore. In the opening scene—something that would become standard Columbo formula—she shoots her husband Paul (Harlan Warde) dead just as he gets home from the airport. She wraps up his body and tosses it into the ocean. Then she concocts an elaborate plot to make it appear that he is still alive, using clips from a recording to fake an answering machine message and mailing ransom notes to herself to trick the authorities into believing that her husband has been kidnapped.

Because kidnapping is a federal crime, the FBI is called in on the case and their lead investigator, the supercilious agent Carlson (Harold Gould), believes Leslie's story. But two people don't. One is Paul's daughter Margaret (Patricia Mattick), who loathes her stepmother and soon figures out there was no kidnapping. The other: Lt. Columbo of the LAPD.

Written by Columbo creators Richard Levinson and William Link. In this film the character of Columbo and the formula of the series start to come into focus—the rumpled raincoat, the tousled hair, the deferential manner, the endless stories about his wife and family. The popularity of this movie led NBC to pick Columbo up as a regular series, starting in September of 1971, as part of the "wheel" series The NBC Mystery Movie.

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Tropes:

• Artistic License – Law:
  • This is the first episode where Columbo is on the case before a body is found, setting up a recurring theme of Columbo also dabbling in missing person cases.
  • Leslie keeps threatening to throw Margaret out. A lawyer should know that this is called "criminal non-support" and is, as the name might suggest, illegal.
• Awful Wedded Life: After the death of Paul Williams's previous wife, Leslie worked her wiles on him and they eventually married and he made her his law partner—whereupon she immediately made it clear that that were going to live in the same house together...and nothing else. Turns out she'd only been after him for what he could do for her career. He was miserable about it, as he would relate to Margaret.
• Batman Gambit: How Columbo catches Leslie. He works with Margaret to maneuver her into a spot where she thinks she can get Margaret out of her hair by buying her off. And since she isn't liquid at the moment, having had to raise money for the fake ransom, Leslie uses the ransom money for Margaret's Briefcase Full of Money bribe. And the ransom money is in marked bills.
• Bratty Teenage Daughter: Margaret is sulky and hostile, with explosions of temper. Justified due to knowing her father was murdered.
• Briefcase Full of Money: Actually a leather bag full of money, the ransom money that is never collected because there are no kidnappers. It does eventually find its way into a briefcase, though, which is how Leslie is caught.
• Buy Them Off: Subverted and Deconstructed when Leslie decides to get Margaret off her back by paying her some of the ransom money, only to find Columbo himself waiting for her. The lieutenant points out that her Lack of Empathy made her honestly believe that Paul's loving daughter would actually accept a payout, and Leslie just implicated herself in the murder simply by agreeing to it and showing up with the cash, rather than realizing both the daughter and Columbo were working together all along.
• Cut-and-Paste Note: Part of Leslie's plot involves mailing herself the stereotypical newspaper ransom note, to convince the FBI that her husband has been kidnapped. Margaret mocks her by pasting a similar note onto her vanity mirror.
• Dawson Casting: Twenty-year-old actress Patricia Mattick plays “minor” Margaret Williams.
• Do Wrong, Right: Implied. As a way for the show to hint at Columbo's tendency towards duplicity, Columbo tells Leslie that he disapproved of Margaret planting false evidence because she did so rather sloppily.
• Dramatic Irony: The note the episode ends on: Columbo finds himself struggling to pay a $1.10 bill, all while a suitcase full of money he can't use rests on his table.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: Much less present here than in Prescription: Murder; this Columbo is a lot closer to the classic character. But the fancy camera work—zooms, match cuts, etc—are the mark of a TV movie with a higher budget.
• Even Evil Has Standards: After she gets him a favorable outcome in court, Leslie tells her slum-lord client to get his building's safety standards up to date.
• Everybody Has Standards: Like every detective hero, Columbo wants to catch the culprit behind the murder of the week. But even he finds it dishonest that Margaret would go so far as to plant false evidence just to put her much-hated stepmother behind bars. In the least, he's disappointed that she resorted to this in such a sloppy manner.
• Exact Words: "I can't have you arrested on the wrong evidence." And, yes, Leslie catches it.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: This is what brings down Leslie. Being The Sociopath herself, it doesn't occur to her to question whether a man's daughter would actually be willing to forget about his murder in exchange for a payoff. (Surprise: the answer is no.)
• Evil Stepmother: Leslie and Margaret have always hated each other. Following Paul's "kidnapping", Leslie reveals to Margaret that she drained her trust fund for the ransom money, and hints that given what a...financial blow...Paul's death was, the allowance Margaret lives on while going to school in Switzerland might be at risk too if she doesn't watch it. Later, she also threatens Margaret's share of Paul's estate. Oh, and there's that little "marrying her father for prestige and then killing him" thing.
• First-Name Basis: Although not too uncommon when it comes to stepparents, when it comes to Leslie, Margaret is clearly using her first name from a lack of respect. (Not that her sarcastically sweet "mother dear" is very respectful either.)
• Five-Second Foreshadowing: In the ending, Margaret smiles broadly and says "Goodbye, Leslie" and leaves. Seconds later, Columbo tells Leslie he worked with Margaret to trap Leslie.
• Genre Savvy: Leslie swiftly figures out and lampshades Columbo's Obfuscating Stupidity tricks and appearance, and simply decides not to indulge him. Ironically, this was the first episode many of those traits appeared.
• Graceful Loser: When caught, Leslie says only that Columbo is very lucky, and politely declines to finish her sherry before going with the police officers.
• Hitler Cam: Multiple shots of Leslie from what would be Paul's point-of-view if he wasn't dead, as she disposes of the body.
• The Ken Burns Effect: Seen a couple of times in the murder sequence as the camera zooms in on still frames of Paul.
• Kick the Dog: According to Margaret, Leslie wasn't above telling Paul Williams she only married him to further her career or laughing in his face when he declared he was going to leave her. Both acts of spite, fueled by envy, drove Paul to tears, something Margaret says he rarely does.
• Large Ham: The actress playing Margaret does a lot of shouting and glaring.
• Match Cut:
  • From Leslie throwing a tarp over her husband's corpse to Leslie closing the trunk of the car she dumped him into.
  • Another showy camera cut matches Leslie's cold, hard eyes with the headlights of Paul's car.
• Phoney Call: Twice.
  • Leslie has a friend call her to remind her about a tennis date. She keeps talking after the friend hangs up, and tells the people in the room that it's the kidnappers.
  • Then she uses an audio recording of her husband she cobbled together from different tapes. She rigs up her fancy automated phone gizmo, which must have appeared very advanced in 1971, to call her when she's with the FBI agents, to make it seem as if Paul is still alive and delivering the ransom message.
• Quote Mine: Leslie clips together different audio recordings to simulate a phone call from Paul telling Leslie that the kidnappers want $300,000.
• Sanity Has Advantages: A less sociopathic woman than Leslie might not have been able to kill her husband so coldly and completely, but she also probably wouldn't be fooled into thinking that his own daughter would be willing to accept a bribe from her father's murderer. Columbo tells her as such right to her face in their final scene:
  Columbo: No conscience. Limits your imagination. You can't conceive of anybody being any different than what you are, and you're greedy. And that's why as bright as you are — and you're bright — you believed that Margaret could be bought.
• Shout-Out:
  • Margaret watches Double Indemnity—a movie about a woman who murders her husband and then strives to conceal the crime from her stepdaughter—on TV.
  • Columbo says it's not enough to acquit people legally, he can also ruin "some people" in the court of public opinion. Leslie says she's familiar with "the Perry Mason school of justice" and can just play the innocent victim of his hounding.
• Social Climber: Leslie married her husband for his money and also for his social standing to advance her career. When he was no longer useful to her she killed him.
• The Sociopath: Leslie is just one of many sociopathic murderers that Columbo has to deal with. As he tells her when explaining how she was caught, "You got no conscience."
• Staggered Zoom: Onto the face of poor Paul as Leslie levels a gun at him. What follows is a very arty sequence with freeze frames and zooms as Paul falls dead to the floor.
• We Hardly Knew Ye: Paul is amongst the murder victims with the least amount of screen time in the series, as he gets shot by Leslie the moment that he appears for a few seconds. As such, this leads to a lot of Paul's character and qualities being talked about after the fact, by Leslie and his daughter Margaret.
• Worthy Opponent: Leslie genuinely admires Columbo's "almost likeable...shopworn bag of tricks". Of course, a highly competent lawyer would be used to those kind of tricks. Ironically, this is only the second TV movie, and the first one to feature most of those tricks.