Fight Clip Club: Death Lends a Hand (Columbo)

When editing makes, not breaks, a fight.

As much as beloved Columbo is a murder mystery show, the number of fights we actually see onscreen (at least in the far superior 1970s series) are quite few and far between. And so when I decided to do a Columbo fight scene (having been inspired by doing a fight from Grenada Sherlock recently), I thought it'd be an interesting challenge to pick a fight and analyze it. 

I love Columbo—it’s one of the best detective series ever created, and in my mind it’s only just below Sherlock Holmes as far as iconic brilliant detectives. I’ve written about Columbo vs. Sherlock before (‘Sherlumbo’), and I’ve even analyzed a scene from this particular episode, when I talked about body language and status for business, in A Study in Status. 

But I really haven’t done much thinking about the fights in this series: there’s one pretty impressive stunt in ‘A Friend in Deed’ where a man jumps off a helicopter into a pool; a few stranglings that take TV amounts of time (in other words, about 5 seconds); many one-shot gun deaths, a bunch of punches that pretty much always look bad: I’m thinking the backhand to the lounge singer in ‘Troubled Waters’ and Johnny Cash’s beatdown in ‘Swan Song,’ etc. But in this show, we usually see the aftermath of the violence and not the violence itself. My professional opinion? That keeps this series way more timeless, or at least enjoyably watchable, than it would be otherwise.

I had two choices, in my mind, for this piece: the coffee splash-chase-strangle from ‘Exercise in Fatality,’ and the door kick-backhand-table smash from ‘Death Lends a Hand.’ The former is a good choice because it’s actually one of the longer sequences of violence we actually see in the series. Again, usually the killing itself is offscreen.

But this fight is something special. I wanted to include the scene leading up to the violence here, so you can see how the tension between these characters builds to the crisis that is Brimmer’s kick to the door, and thence violence to the woman. But it’s not even the fight scene itself that made me want to talk about it. It’s the aftermath. Just. Let me show you what I mean: