Hello, hello! If you’re new around these parts, you should know that we don’t spend this day commemorating a man who was fired from the Spanish governorship of the West Indies in 1499 for being a psychotically brutal tyrant, at a time when simply being an ordinary brutal tyrant wouldn’t have been enough to attract attention. No, around here we celebrate the second Monday in October by honoring one of the greatest fictional detectives of the 20th century, Lieutenant Columbo. Happy Columbo’s Day, everyone!
This year, we’re taking a look at the great Johnny Cash in his only appearance on Columbo, in the episode “Swan Song,” directed by Nicholas Colasanto (Coach from Cheers!), which aired on NBC on March 3, 1974.
The Man in Black plays Tommy Brown, a popular gospel music singer doing a one night stand in Bakersfield, California. We open on Tommy and his backing band, the Lost Soul Crusaders, performing “I Saw the Light,” a hoary old Hank Williams chestnut that’s still better than anything that’s come out of Nashville in the last 30 years.
Backstage after the concert, Tommy reluctantly fights off waves of eager teenage groupies under the baleful glare of Edna (Ida Lupino), his hateful wife and manager, and calls the airport for a weather report. It’s not looking good: the coastal fog rolling means zero ceiling and visibility in the area, but Tommy—a licensed pilot—should be okay if he takes off within the next half hour or so. Tommy begins making his flight preparations, which include stuffing a parachute into his flight bag and drugging the contents of a thermos bottle.
Edna returns to the dressing room just as Tommy is finishing, and the two of them have it out. He resents the fact that most of the money they make is funding construction of the Tabernacle—the Lost Soul Crusade’s grand new church, which is set to cost 5 million whole dollars to build—while Edna keeps Tommy on such a short financial leash that he doesn’t even own a car. Pointing out that there would be no Tabernacle at all without the money he brings in, Tommy threatens to walk unless Edna agrees to a more equitable arrangement: she gets half of the take for her fancy church, and he gets the other half for hookers and booze, or whatever. Edna retorts that he wouldn’t even have a career if she hadn’t gotten him paroled from that Arkansas prison farm, so there. It always warms my heart to see a strong marriage built on a solid foundation of mutual exploitation. Incensed, Edna threatens to pull the pin on her biggest weapon: backup singer Maryann (Bonnie Van Dyke), a nondescript young woman who’s been hovering in the background during this entire scene. Tommy started sleeping with Maryann when she was only sixteen, a fact that Edna correctly assumes he would not want to become known to either his fans or the law.
Hours later—i.e., long after the fog was scheduled to roll in—Tommy, Edna, and Maryann arrive at the airport and board their single-engine Cessna for departure to Los Angeles. As the plane climbs, Tommy surreptitiously shuts off the cabin heat; when Edna snottily complains about the cold, Tommy offers the women coffee from the drugged thermos. Minutes later, the two are out like a light, which is Tommy’s cue to toss the thermos out the door, retrieve the parachute from the flight bag, and peace out. The Cessna, unmanned, spirals down into the Tehachapi Mountains and crashes.
On the ground, nursing an injured leg from the landing, Tommy stuffs the parachute into a convenient hollow log and hobbles down to the crash site to wait for help to arrive. Hooray, another successful crime! There’s no way this unnecessarily convoluted plan could ever unravel!
Come next morning, it’s time for Lieutenant Columbo (Peter Falk) to arrive at the crash scene, as a TV news crew is interviewing one Roland Pangborn (John Dehner), an investigator from the National Transportation Safety Board. To Pangborn, the crash appears to be a pretty clear-cut case of pilot error: when interviewed at the hospital, Tommy claimed his instrument panel blacked out, which when combined with the bad weather caused him to become disoriented and send the plane into an aerodynamic stall he couldn’t pull out of. He’s lucky to be alive, unlike Edna and Maryann. Of course, that doesn’t satisfy Columbo, who quickly finds several inconsistencies in the wreckage: The women’s seat belts were still fastened after the crash, but Tommy’s seat belt was unbuckled. And the pilot’s flight bag, which should be full of navigation charts and air notices, is empty. Impressed at Columbo’s powers of observation, Pangborn urges Columbo to apply for a job at the NTSB, but the great detective quickly demurs when he learns the job would involve flying, due to his dislike of heights: “My ears pop in an elevator. As a matter of fact, I don’t even like being this tall.” My big strong hero.
At Edna’s funeral, Columbo runs into Luke (Bill McKinney), Edna’s brother and Tommy’s flunky. Luke is convinced that Tommy killed Edna and Maryann, and urges Columbo to question Tommy today. Columbo agrees, and the two men take Columbo’s shitty car to Tommy’s newly rented mansion ($2000 a month!) The sweet sounds of Johnny Cash can be heard wafting out of the back yard as they roll up, and Luke fumes when Tommy’s way of mourning his wife’s death turns out to involve laying down a few tunes at a backyard party, surrounded by assorted hangers-on.
Long story short, Luke slugs Tommy and gets hustled out by his entourage, so Columbo questions the singer alone. Tommy has an answer for everything. The seat belt? When the power went out, Tommy had to unbuckle it to fish for a flashlight in the glove compartment (apparently planes have glove compartments). Good thing, too, because otherwise he wouldn’t have been thrown free of the wreck and survived. In the 1970s, people were pretty sure that seat belts killed more people than they saved. The flight bag? The defroster quit working when the power went out, so Tommy had to open a window, which sent all the papers flying. This plane is starting to sound like my first car. His concerns apparently satisfied, Columbo takes a white-knuckle flight in a police plane to Bakersfield, where he meets Jeff (Doug Dirkson), the goofball airplane mechanic who prepared the Cessna for takeoff. Jeff mentions that Tommy had a thermos bottle with him on the front seat of the plane, which is curious, because no thermos bottle was discovered in the wreckage.
Back in LA, Tommy is “rehearsing” with Tina (Janit Baldwin), another dewy-eyed young backup singer, when the doorbell rings. It’s Lieutenant Columbo with a few more questions. It’s just a formality, mostly—the captain won’t let him close the case without tying up the last few loose ends, you see—and the two men shoot the shit for a while. When Columbo turns to leave, Tommy places a brief call to discuss cancelling the Tabernacle project…and is then rattled by an oh-just-one-more-thing-sir from Columbo, who’s still standing there. Regaining his composure, Tommy calls the detective out for eavesdropping, only to be thrown for a loop again when Columbo tells him he knew about the project being canceled all along.
Field trip time. Columbo visits Colonel Mayehoff (John Randolph), Tommy’s old CO in the Air Force. Tommy was never a very good flyer, the Colonel says, but he was pretty good at rigging parachutes. Hmmm. Next he visits a recording studio to pester Tommy some more, which I mention mainly because this scene features Sorrell “Boss Hogg” Booke rocking a puke-colored polyester shirt with a black satin bow tie and groovy 1970s sunglasses. Oh, and because we learn Columbo ordered an autopsy on the two women, and they came back positive for barbiturates, which seems unlikely for the churched-up pair. Next, the temporary headquarters of the Lost Souls Crusade, where he learns that a bolt of nylon—you know, the stuff parachutes are made of—has gone missing from the sewing room where they make choir robes. Finally, with NTSB investigator Pangborn in tow, Columbo visits what appears to be a flight school or skydiving center, and learns that a small nylon parachute fits neatly into a flight bag like Tommy’s.
Finding this parachute is now Columbo’s most important task. Trouble is, that’s an awful big mountain to comb over for a parachute, which Tommy no doubt concealed somewhere on landing. Nothing to do but make the murderer lead him to it.
To Tommy’s house again, providing us with one more awesome scene of Johnny Cash noodling around on his guitar as Columbo allows the musician to overhear him on the telephone ordering a search of the mountain. Turning back to Tommy, the detective lowers the hammer: he believes someone may have tried to kill Tommy by drugging the thermos of coffee he was planning to take on the flight, and he’s only alive today because he never drank the coffee, only the women did. Tommy dismisses this theory as farfetched, but Columbo is adamant: he’s going to put a guard on Tommy while the police scour the mountain for the thermos bottle, in hopes that it bears fingerprints that could lead them to the killer.
Tommy tells him not to bother with the guard, as he’s departing soon for a tour date anyway. Sure enough, when Columbo follows his car a short time later, he ends up at LAX. If Tommy is catching a plane to San Francisco for the concert instead of rushing back to the crash scene in a blind panic, maybe that means he’s not the killer after all—and Columbo has egg on his face when the singer catches him skulking around the ticket counter. Sheepishly, Columbo admits that he followed Tommy to the airport because he’s just so worried about his welfare that he won’t rest until Tommy gets on that plane. Chuckling, Tommy waves back at the detective as he boards. Columbo stands outside the airport, utterly flummoxed, until the uniformed officer who gave him a ride unlocks a nearby police call box to report in—and suddenly everything falls into place.
Night has fallen, and a car drives along a mountain road. It’s Tommy. He drives along, searching. He’s not worried about the thermos—it’s his bottle, after all, so he doesn’t have to worry about his own fingerprints turning up—but he can’t take the chance that the search will uncover his parachute. He spots the hollow log and retrieves the incriminating parachute—only to be caught in the act by Lieutenant Columbo. Busted!!
What tipped him off, he explains, was the sound of the officer’s keys as he unlocked the call box. It reminded him of a similar sound he heard when Tommy emptied his pockets at the airport metal detector. There were keys in his pocket. Keys with a rental car tag. There’s only one reason Columbo can think of that someone would take rental car keys on a plane with him, he says, and that’s if they’re planning on coming right back. So after calculating how long a return flight would take, Columbo’s been staking out the crash site, waiting for the singer to fall into his trap.
Slump-shouldered and guilt-ridden, the defeated musician climbs into the car with Columbo and prepares to face justice, as “I Saw the Light” by Tommy Brown and the Lost Soul Crusaders plays over the radio. And if this all strikes you as being one of the more ridiculous plots we’ve seen on this show, well, at least we got some Johnny Cash out of it.
Columbo: Swan Song is available for streaming on Netflix. If you’d like to hear a discussion of this episode by two fans with impenetrable Scottish accents, I can’t recommend the Columbo Podcast highly enough. And while you’re here, you should check out our look at last year’s episode, “A Stitch in Crime,” starring Leonard Nimoy. Celebrate Columbo’s Day today with someone you love.