You're the most persistent creature I've ever met, but likeable.
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History remembers the 1968 telefilm Prescription: Murder as the de facto pilot episode of Columbo, one of television's most beloved detective series, but this was neither the intent nor, really, the function of the movie. And its path to its first airing on NBC, on 20 February 1968, in no way suggested that there would be an ongoing series of crimes to be investigated by the stumpy little detective at its center. The film's earliest genesis lay in a story by writing partners Richard Levinson & William Link, "May I Come In?", published in the March 1960 issue of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. Within months, Levinson & Link had adapted that story into "Enough Rope", the tenth hourlong episode of The Chevy Mystery Show, which aired for one season in the summer of '60. This episode then formed the basis for a third version of the story, this time written as a stage play, and now given the title Prescription: Murder. The play began tryouts early in 1962, featuring Thomas Mitchell (one of John Ford's most recognisable regulars) in the role of the dogged LAPD detective Lt. Columbo, and it was Mitchell's death that same year that ended the play's fortunes, but Levinson & Link felt they had a good thing on their hands, and adapted it into a fourth and final incarnation: a two-hour made-for-TV movie (meaning that the final cut, sans commercials, is slightly less than 100 minutes).*
In other words: Prescription: Murder wasn't the pilot to anything, but just a story that a couple of established mystery writers couldn't get out of their heads until they'd finally done something with it, and I think it's only fair to the movie to treat it as such. Certainly, in the moment of watching it, free from any preconceptions, I don't think you'd end up supposing that Lt. Columbo himself, now played by Peter Falk, was meant to be anything but the catalyst for the story of the film's obvious main character, the murderer Dr. Ray Flemming (Gene Barry). There's the fact that Falk gets first billing, sure, but Levinson & Link's script is a deliberate, extremely loose riff on Crime and Punishment, with Flemming in the Raskolnikov role and Columbo as the analogue to inspector Porfiry Petrovich - a key role (certainly moreso than the equivalent in Alfred Hitchock's own Dial M for Murder, another even looser Crime and Punishment riff), but not the role on which the story's psychological investigation centers.
What you probably would notice, even if you weren't aware that Lt. Columbo has spent a half-century as almost certainly the single character with which the enormously talented Falk has been most closely associated, is that whatever is going on structurally or psychologically with Prescription: Murder, the detective completely and effortlessly steals the show. Barry isn't giving a bad performance by any means, and Flemming is well-written as a moral monster constantly remaining cool and intelligent, but Falk's Columbo is just a miracle of impeccable character work. He was not remotely the first choice for the role: the authors envisioned the detective as somebody much older. Falk was 41 when the movie premiered, compared to Mitchell's well-aged 69 years, though he was in fact several months older than Bert Freed, who'd played the character in "Enough Rope", with the aid of some old-age makeup. None of their first choices were available, though, and Falk lobbied hard for the role. Clearly, it's because he knew exactly what he wanted to do with the character, because his Columbo comes across as fully-realised and extraordinary detailed work of character creation right from the moment he walks into the room, in the 33rd minute of the 99 minutes that Prescription: Murder runs. There are certain performances that don't need anything but posture and a walk to immediately start selling us on a character, right from the instant we see him, and Falk has fully worked out both. Columbo ends the door with a clomping, heavy step, almost a waddle, as he rolls slightly from left to right with every step; he's not precisely "hunched over", but his neck seems to have receded somewhat into his shoulders, and his head is bowed over a little bit, so he always suggests slightly that he's looking up, even when he's staring straight across. He feels graceless and schlubby, but he feels small: a little guy, less an attack dog than a squat little basset hound of a man, and that's even before Falk gets his first close-up and treats us to his characteristic squint, the result of childhood surgery that left him with a glass right eye. It's one of the main tools in his arsenal as a performer, that squint, but perhaps he never wielded it better than as Columbo, whose expression is perpetually a bit distant and addled, like he's trying to race to catch up to a conversation he's not quite grasping. The trick being, of course, that he's already three steps ahead of his quarry. Anyway, it's the heart of the character, I think, that way of looking kind of tiny and muddled and curious, and Falk has knocked it out of the park in his first time at bat. With the benefit of hindsight, you can absolutely see why audiences and executives wanted more of this character: he is a remarkable figure, a magnetic screen presence precisely because of how modestly he wobbles through the frame. And it's there immediately - within mere seconds of the character walking through a doorway, it's impossible to look away from him.
But as I said, Prescription: Murder isn't really "a Columbo story", even to the degree that later episodes of the show (which mostly followed this movie's formula of holding Falk offscreen until the plot was in full swing) would be. It's a "perfect murder" plot, centered around the bloodless Flemming, a psychologist who uses his training to exactly predict how people will respond to the story he fabricates and the red herrings he lays out. He's come up with a plan to kill his rich wife Carol (Nina Foch), so he can be with his younger lover, Joan Hudson (Katherine Justice), involving a trip to Acapulco and disguising Joan as Carol so she can storm off the plane in a violent temper, while Carol's body lies cold in the Flemming's apartment. This is all laid out in place by the 31-minute mark, at which point Flemming disposes of the last piece of evidence; by the time Columbo comes onscreen, there's really nothing left for the story to do. This is a defining example of the story structure usually called an "inverted detective story", in which we see the entire crime and all the salient details and so know more than the detective at all points; the tension is thus more about the "how" of the investigation than the "what". It's a formula that existed decades before Prescription: Murder, but it became popular almost entirely because of Columbo, and this film offers all the evidence one could want to see how just how much could be done with this seemingly self-negating narrative form. As befits something whose first incarnation was in a Hitchcock-branded magazine, this story is tense as hell, right up until it hits the wall of not quite knowing how best to end the story (I gather, not with very much confidence, that the Prescription: Murder ending was the third completely distinct approach Levinson & Link had trotted out to this problem, suggesting that they hadn't quite cracked the code of a satisfying and clean way out of a drama which is about 65% denouement, in effect). Director Richard Irving was a TV guy through and through, having been involved in the medium from pretty much the earliest years that it existed in any meaningful form, and while the budgetary and production limits of even a well-heeled TV movie are apparent throughout - it's very flatly lit, and it starts to nag that we don't see more locations - he's controlling the pacing and shot scales beautifully for maximum impact on the small screen.
That is to say: Prescription: Murder isn't at all "cinematic", which was of course the goal for so many made-for-TV movies (though perhaps moreso in the '70s than the '60s), but it's simply excellent at being televisual. The film uses close-ups with brutal effectiveness: never overrelying on them, but building up to them over the course of every scene. The last two-thirds of the movie consists of basically nothing but one battle of wills after another: generally between Columbo and Flemming, but not always. It is, in essence, 60 minutes of watching two unflappable men staring calmly at each other until one of them breaks into a sweat, and Irving know the rules of TV well enough to recognise that the way to land that is by using close-ups to punctuate, but use medium and medium-wide shots to tell the story. This works particularly well when of those faces belongs to Falk: he knows how to work a close-up just as well as Irving does, putting some very small wrinkles at the corner of his mouth to suggest the sly amusement of a detective who suspects more than he knows, and much more than he's admitting to. Barry is holding his own in this duel of close-ups, though he's mostly just locking his face into a granite block; his performance of Flemming makes the murderer seem absolutely devoid of the smallest molecule of morality, and it is, to be perfectly honest, a little repetitive over 99 minutes. There's never a moment where we see him almost break until pretty late in the story, and so a huge chunk of the middle third consists of nothing but Columbo being dogged and annoying, and Flemming regarding him with zen-like stillness. Falk is so inordinately good at this, letting tiny sharklike flickers of razor-sharp instinct light up his face, that it absolutely never gets boring - but it does feel like we get more less exactly the same scene at least four different times. Levinson & Link are still treating Columbo like a battering ram, more than the chess player or fencer he'll become - it works in the context of a one-off story, but it's good that it would later evolve.
But again, treating this as the one-off story it though itself to be, Prescription: Murder is pretty damn watchable stuff altogether. Foch's small performance as the doomed Carol is a terrific tour of complicated emotions, as she plays the part of a confident professional class wife turned towards fury when she thinks her husband is cheating on her, and then turned towards a happiness that verges on mania when he tells her a convincing enough lie. There's something terribly sad in watching Carol allow herself to be swayed by his flimflam in that opening half-hour, with Foch letting us make up our own mind as to whether the character is gullible or willing herself to believe a somewhat flat and colorless lie, just because she needs it to be true; the murder is delayed for long enough that she's able to make a real impression as a pitiable figure, not just to swoop in and get killed to set the plot in motion.
Beyond the acting, and the generally tight, suspenseful directing, Prescription: Murder benefits from the slight hint all throughout that this is secretly a study in class warfare. The first thing we ever learn about Flemming, at a party he and Carol are hosting for their tenth anniversary, is that he's an overeducated snob who enjoys lording his knowledge over other people; throughout the remaining 90-odd minutes, we continuously get a sense of him as the embodiment of all kinds of '60s "hip" culture. He's sophisticated and trendy. The full bloom of Columbo as working-class hero will need to wait for a later day, but already, Falk is certainly not playing him as sophisticated: he's mushmouthed and clunky. I would say this is really only the background to the film, but it's a rather persistent background; particularly in the first third, Flemming just keeps racking up evidence that he's a self-styled intellectual of the first order, and his tragedy lies in assuming that nobody could possibly think on the same complex level of himself. This is, after a fashion, the main theme of Columbo-that-will-be, and it will certainly be developed more robustly than we see here, but it's absolutely present in the way that Prescription: Murder goes out of its way to suggest that cosmopolitan '60s life has something of a cold, austere heart. The "point" is still watching the increasing temperature of the two leads as they keep trying to stare each other down; but it is, happily, not the only point.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
*I have been able to lay hands on none of these prototypes; "Enough Rope" exists in the holdings of both the UCLA Film & Television Archive and the Paley Center for Media Research in New York, but neither institution has made it readily available online.
History remembers the 1968 telefilm Prescription: Murder as the de facto pilot episode of Columbo, one of television's most beloved detective series, but this was neither the intent nor, really, the function of the movie. And its path to its first airing on NBC, on 20 February 1968, in no way suggested that there would be an ongoing series of crimes to be investigated by the stumpy little detective at its center. The film's earliest genesis lay in a story by writing partners Richard Levinson & William Link, "May I Come In?", published in the March 1960 issue of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. Within months, Levinson & Link had adapted that story into "Enough Rope", the tenth hourlong episode of The Chevy Mystery Show, which aired for one season in the summer of '60. This episode then formed the basis for a third version of the story, this time written as a stage play, and now given the title Prescription: Murder. The play began tryouts early in 1962, featuring Thomas Mitchell (one of John Ford's most recognisable regulars) in the role of the dogged LAPD detective Lt. Columbo, and it was Mitchell's death that same year that ended the play's fortunes, but Levinson & Link felt they had a good thing on their hands, and adapted it into a fourth and final incarnation: a two-hour made-for-TV movie (meaning that the final cut, sans commercials, is slightly less than 100 minutes).*
In other words: Prescription: Murder wasn't the pilot to anything, but just a story that a couple of established mystery writers couldn't get out of their heads until they'd finally done something with it, and I think it's only fair to the movie to treat it as such. Certainly, in the moment of watching it, free from any preconceptions, I don't think you'd end up supposing that Lt. Columbo himself, now played by Peter Falk, was meant to be anything but the catalyst for the story of the film's obvious main character, the murderer Dr. Ray Flemming (Gene Barry). There's the fact that Falk gets first billing, sure, but Levinson & Link's script is a deliberate, extremely loose riff on Crime and Punishment, with Flemming in the Raskolnikov role and Columbo as the analogue to inspector Porfiry Petrovich - a key role (certainly moreso than the equivalent in Alfred Hitchock's own Dial M for Murder, another even looser Crime and Punishment riff), but not the role on which the story's psychological investigation centers.
What you probably would notice, even if you weren't aware that Lt. Columbo has spent a half-century as almost certainly the single character with which the enormously talented Falk has been most closely associated, is that whatever is going on structurally or psychologically with Prescription: Murder, the detective completely and effortlessly steals the show. Barry isn't giving a bad performance by any means, and Flemming is well-written as a moral monster constantly remaining cool and intelligent, but Falk's Columbo is just a miracle of impeccable character work. He was not remotely the first choice for the role: the authors envisioned the detective as somebody much older. Falk was 41 when the movie premiered, compared to Mitchell's well-aged 69 years, though he was in fact several months older than Bert Freed, who'd played the character in "Enough Rope", with the aid of some old-age makeup. None of their first choices were available, though, and Falk lobbied hard for the role. Clearly, it's because he knew exactly what he wanted to do with the character, because his Columbo comes across as fully-realised and extraordinary detailed work of character creation right from the moment he walks into the room, in the 33rd minute of the 99 minutes that Prescription: Murder runs. There are certain performances that don't need anything but posture and a walk to immediately start selling us on a character, right from the instant we see him, and Falk has fully worked out both. Columbo ends the door with a clomping, heavy step, almost a waddle, as he rolls slightly from left to right with every step; he's not precisely "hunched over", but his neck seems to have receded somewhat into his shoulders, and his head is bowed over a little bit, so he always suggests slightly that he's looking up, even when he's staring straight across. He feels graceless and schlubby, but he feels small: a little guy, less an attack dog than a squat little basset hound of a man, and that's even before Falk gets his first close-up and treats us to his characteristic squint, the result of childhood surgery that left him with a glass right eye. It's one of the main tools in his arsenal as a performer, that squint, but perhaps he never wielded it better than as Columbo, whose expression is perpetually a bit distant and addled, like he's trying to race to catch up to a conversation he's not quite grasping. The trick being, of course, that he's already three steps ahead of his quarry. Anyway, it's the heart of the character, I think, that way of looking kind of tiny and muddled and curious, and Falk has knocked it out of the park in his first time at bat. With the benefit of hindsight, you can absolutely see why audiences and executives wanted more of this character: he is a remarkable figure, a magnetic screen presence precisely because of how modestly he wobbles through the frame. And it's there immediately - within mere seconds of the character walking through a doorway, it's impossible to look away from him.
But as I said, Prescription: Murder isn't really "a Columbo story", even to the degree that later episodes of the show (which mostly followed this movie's formula of holding Falk offscreen until the plot was in full swing) would be. It's a "perfect murder" plot, centered around the bloodless Flemming, a psychologist who uses his training to exactly predict how people will respond to the story he fabricates and the red herrings he lays out. He's come up with a plan to kill his rich wife Carol (Nina Foch), so he can be with his younger lover, Joan Hudson (Katherine Justice), involving a trip to Acapulco and disguising Joan as Carol so she can storm off the plane in a violent temper, while Carol's body lies cold in the Flemming's apartment. This is all laid out in place by the 31-minute mark, at which point Flemming disposes of the last piece of evidence; by the time Columbo comes onscreen, there's really nothing left for the story to do. This is a defining example of the story structure usually called an "inverted detective story", in which we see the entire crime and all the salient details and so know more than the detective at all points; the tension is thus more about the "how" of the investigation than the "what". It's a formula that existed decades before Prescription: Murder, but it became popular almost entirely because of Columbo, and this film offers all the evidence one could want to see how just how much could be done with this seemingly self-negating narrative form. As befits something whose first incarnation was in a Hitchcock-branded magazine, this story is tense as hell, right up until it hits the wall of not quite knowing how best to end the story (I gather, not with very much confidence, that the Prescription: Murder ending was the third completely distinct approach Levinson & Link had trotted out to this problem, suggesting that they hadn't quite cracked the code of a satisfying and clean way out of a drama which is about 65% denouement, in effect). Director Richard Irving was a TV guy through and through, having been involved in the medium from pretty much the earliest years that it existed in any meaningful form, and while the budgetary and production limits of even a well-heeled TV movie are apparent throughout - it's very flatly lit, and it starts to nag that we don't see more locations - he's controlling the pacing and shot scales beautifully for maximum impact on the small screen.
That is to say: Prescription: Murder isn't at all "cinematic", which was of course the goal for so many made-for-TV movies (though perhaps moreso in the '70s than the '60s), but it's simply excellent at being televisual. The film uses close-ups with brutal effectiveness: never overrelying on them, but building up to them over the course of every scene. The last two-thirds of the movie consists of basically nothing but one battle of wills after another: generally between Columbo and Flemming, but not always. It is, in essence, 60 minutes of watching two unflappable men staring calmly at each other until one of them breaks into a sweat, and Irving know the rules of TV well enough to recognise that the way to land that is by using close-ups to punctuate, but use medium and medium-wide shots to tell the story. This works particularly well when of those faces belongs to Falk: he knows how to work a close-up just as well as Irving does, putting some very small wrinkles at the corner of his mouth to suggest the sly amusement of a detective who suspects more than he knows, and much more than he's admitting to. Barry is holding his own in this duel of close-ups, though he's mostly just locking his face into a granite block; his performance of Flemming makes the murderer seem absolutely devoid of the smallest molecule of morality, and it is, to be perfectly honest, a little repetitive over 99 minutes. There's never a moment where we see him almost break until pretty late in the story, and so a huge chunk of the middle third consists of nothing but Columbo being dogged and annoying, and Flemming regarding him with zen-like stillness. Falk is so inordinately good at this, letting tiny sharklike flickers of razor-sharp instinct light up his face, that it absolutely never gets boring - but it does feel like we get more less exactly the same scene at least four different times. Levinson & Link are still treating Columbo like a battering ram, more than the chess player or fencer he'll become - it works in the context of a one-off story, but it's good that it would later evolve.
But again, treating this as the one-off story it though itself to be, Prescription: Murder is pretty damn watchable stuff altogether. Foch's small performance as the doomed Carol is a terrific tour of complicated emotions, as she plays the part of a confident professional class wife turned towards fury when she thinks her husband is cheating on her, and then turned towards a happiness that verges on mania when he tells her a convincing enough lie. There's something terribly sad in watching Carol allow herself to be swayed by his flimflam in that opening half-hour, with Foch letting us make up our own mind as to whether the character is gullible or willing herself to believe a somewhat flat and colorless lie, just because she needs it to be true; the murder is delayed for long enough that she's able to make a real impression as a pitiable figure, not just to swoop in and get killed to set the plot in motion.
Beyond the acting, and the generally tight, suspenseful directing, Prescription: Murder benefits from the slight hint all throughout that this is secretly a study in class warfare. The first thing we ever learn about Flemming, at a party he and Carol are hosting for their tenth anniversary, is that he's an overeducated snob who enjoys lording his knowledge over other people; throughout the remaining 90-odd minutes, we continuously get a sense of him as the embodiment of all kinds of '60s "hip" culture. He's sophisticated and trendy. The full bloom of Columbo as working-class hero will need to wait for a later day, but already, Falk is certainly not playing him as sophisticated: he's mushmouthed and clunky. I would say this is really only the background to the film, but it's a rather persistent background; particularly in the first third, Flemming just keeps racking up evidence that he's a self-styled intellectual of the first order, and his tragedy lies in assuming that nobody could possibly think on the same complex level of himself. This is, after a fashion, the main theme of Columbo-that-will-be, and it will certainly be developed more robustly than we see here, but it's absolutely present in the way that Prescription: Murder goes out of its way to suggest that cosmopolitan '60s life has something of a cold, austere heart. The "point" is still watching the increasing temperature of the two leads as they keep trying to stare each other down; but it is, happily, not the only point.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
*I have been able to lay hands on none of these prototypes; "Enough Rope" exists in the holdings of both the UCLA Film & Television Archive and the Paley Center for Media Research in New York, but neither institution has made it readily available online.
Categories: columbo, crime pictures, mysteries, television, thrillers
