Title:"The Most Dangerous Match"
Directed by: Edward Abroms
Written by: Jackson Gillis (teleplay), Jackson Gillis, Richard Levinson, William Link (story)
Air Date: March 4, 1973
Previous: A Stitch in Crime
Next: Double Shock
Guest Starring: Laurence Harvey, Jack Kruschen, Heidi Bruhl
"The Most Dangerous Match" is the seventh episode of the second season of Columbo.
Emmett Clayton (Laurence Harvey) is a chess grandmaster and world champion. However, he is only champion because the prior world champion, Tomlin Dudek (Jack Kruschen), had to retire five years ago due to chronic ill health. Dudek is back to competition, however, and is facing off for the world championship against Clayton. Among Dudek's entourage is Linda Robinson (Heidi Bruhl), who was once Clayton's fiancée.
Clayton spots Dudek sneaking out of the hotel (Dudek is from the Soviet Union and has the typical security minders) and follows him to a restaurant. They play an improvised game of chess at the restaurant with the table settings and such, which Clayton loses. The party adjourns to Clayton's hotel room and they play another casual game, which Clayton again loses. Clayton, who has already been stressing out about the match, realizes that he can't beat Dudek. So he kills him, the night before the actual championship matches are supposed to begin, and tries to make it look like an accident. Linda doesn't believe it, however, and neither does Lt. Columbo of the LAPD, who wonders about little details, like why Dudek's shirt smelled of garlic...
One of the last acting roles for Laurence Harvey, who died of cancer eight months after this episode aired.
Tropes:
- Absence of Evidence: The final piece of evidence against Clayton. Whoever pushed Dudek into the trash compactor didn't turn it back on when the safety device turned it off. That must mean that the murderer didn't know the compactor turned off, which must mean the murderer is deaf, like Clayton.
- Always Someone Better: Clayton's motive for murder, when he realizes he will lose to Dudek.
- Artistic License – Medicine: A rather major one involving hospitals. Why did the hospital ask for Dudek's own medications brought in from outside? Beyond being a convenient plot coupon for Clayton to swap the medications and kill Dudek, it makes no sense for a hospital to have outside drugs brought in when they likely have stock on hand.
- As Long as It Sounds Foreign: The Russian characters' names do not resemble authentic Russian names at all - in fact, "Tomlin Dudek" sounds more Czech than Russian. In one scene, Lloyd Bochner can be heard speaking "Russian" on the phone - he is actually uttering gibberish lines, not sounding Russian at all. (On the other hand, when Dudek lies dying, his doctor shouts to him in pretty good Russian.)
- As You Know:
- Helpfully, Dudek actually spells out that Linda used to be engaged to Clayton.
- Dudek also narrates all the moves in the chess game between him and Clayton.
- Catapult Nightmare: A variation, as Clayton actually manages to roll off a bed as a result of his nightmare about Dudek.
- Chekhov's Gun: Clayton is mostly deaf, and gets by with a bulky 1970s hearing aid that is powered by a battery he carries in his pocket. It's broken on the night of the murder (because Clayton threw it against the wall in a fit of rage). This is how Columbo finally gets Clayton, by suggesting someone who could hear would have turned the garbage grinder back on, therefore, the murderer must have been a deaf man.
- Dream Sequence: Starts with Clayton having a nightmare in which he's on a gigantic chessboard, seeing Dudek as a king. His anxiety about the upcoming match is established.
- Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: Clayton is visibly baffled when Dudek offers to delay the match after witnessing Clayton’s obvious anxieties over it. The idea that Dudek has no real investment in winning is incomprehensible enough to Clayton, it likely contributed to his murder scheme.
- Evil Cripple: Clayton is a deaf man willing to kill a man to keep his title as a chess grandmaster.
- Fake Russian: The Russian characters are played by Canadian actors Jack Kruschen and Lloyd Bochner.
- Make It Look Like an Accident: A common tactic by the villains on Columbo. Clayton comes up on the spur of the moment with a pretty good plot in which he makes it look like Dudek panicked about the match and tried to make a hurried exit from the hotel, only to stumble and fall off some stairs and into a garbage grinding machine.
- Medication Tampering: Dudek having survived his fall from the stairs, Clayton finishes him off by tampering with the medications Dudek needs for his diabetes and heart disease.
- Obfuscating Stupidity: Dudek suggests to Clayton that he's deliberately losing their informal matches so Dudek will underestimate him. Unfortunately he's giving everything he has and is still losing.
- Photographic Memory: Emmett Clayton has one, which helps him when plotting a murder.
- Psychological Projection: Clayton tries to say Dudek was so afraid of losing the chess match and his reputation that he fled from the hotel and got injured in an accident. In fact, it's Clayton who's so afraid of the match that he has nightmares of Dudek beating him, and will go so far as to kill Dudek to get out of it.
- Ripped from the Headlines: This episode was inspired by the famous 1972 chess match between Boris Spassky and Bobby Fischer.
- Smart People Play Chess: And it's plot relevant, as Clayton's prodigious memory allows him to, say, memorize a medication list at a glance.
- Surprise Checkmate:
- Clayton fails to see the checkmate that Dudek drops on him. It's a casual game in a hotel room instead of a formal match, but still, in Real Life a grandmaster would not be surprised in that way.
- Gets goofier later, when Clayton, playing chess against a crowd of comers, wins one game by castling his way into a checkmate.
- And it gets really, really goofy right after that, when Clayton loses another game by stumbling into the Fool's mate
, the quickest and absolute dumbest way to lose a game of chess. The idea is that he's getting rattled by Columbo's relentlessness, but come on.
- Villainous Breakdown: Clayton has this at the end, screaming at Columbo to show him the proof.
