Murder by Natural Causes (1979)

Tonight on The White Shadow, the team challenges a golf course while Coach Reeves takes on even stiffer competition. Surprise me. Then, it's Catherine. Ross, the wife. Barry Bostwick, the lover.

Hal Holbrook, the target. Murder. Five natural causes. A Tuesday night movie right after The White Shadow. Welcome to The Shabby Detective, yet another Columbo podcast.

I'm your host, Mike White. Joining me, of course, is Mr. Chris Dashew. Has anyone ever told Hal Holbrook that with the mustache and maybe a little bit longer hair, he looks exactly like Mark Twain? I don't think anybody ever did.

Weird. We are still in this period between the NBC and ABC years here on The Shabby Detective. We are talking about either... Columbo-related content, Columbo-adjacent content, Columbo-inspired content. We are talking today about one that was written by Lincoln Levinson.

It's a murder mystery, and it's called Murder by Natural Causes. It first aired on CBS on February 17, 1979. It was later released on VHS. And in 1985, Tim Kelly penned a stage adaptation, and I will definitely be talking about that as we go along. It was directed by Robert Day, stars, as you said, Hal Holbrook, Catherine Ross, Richard Anderson, our old friend from the Kolchak days, Barry Bostwick, and has music by Dick DeBenedictus, which is just a great name to say.

Sounds like a stage name, but I think that was the gentleman's name. Chris, what did you think of Murder by Natural Causes? I'd like to mention before I give my answer that you mentioned we're in this mid-Columbo being gone, Columbo being back phase, and we're wandering the Columbo wasteland. One thing we're not talking about, unfortunately, is The Uncut Detective, the Columbo pornographic film that came out, I believe, was it 1982 or 1983, Mike? I can't remember.

I think starring Ron Jeremy as Cock Lumbo. We're not talking about that, though. You can find it on the Internet. Just one more thing, ma'am. And then you hear the zip noise.

That's not a real thing. I wish it was. When you mentioned we were watching this and you kind of pitched this one to me, the title sounds like a Columbo episode. Absolutely. This already feels like a Columbo thing.

You could make the case that it ends right before Columbo shows up in a lot of ways, like because there is a, as Dennis Reynolds says, the implication at the end that how Holbrook may be committing murder. But if how Holbrook shoots his wife, he will have murdered his wife justly or not. And then Columbo might be on that case. So, This is interestingly like a Columbo adjacent thing because it already feels like Columbo should be in this and he's not. In the role of Columbo tonight is Hal Holbrook, is essentially what this ends up being.

He solves and thwarts his own murder because he has the one thing Columbo doesn't have, which is he can actually read people's minds. Maybe. That's kind of the question I have is can he actually read minds? I do not know. Or is he just really smart and talented and has lots of money?

I put that question to you, Mike. What did you think of this? And I'm curious because you are the one who programmed this in between and this show entirely. Why are we watching this other than Levinson and Link? Because there's plenty of other Levinson and Link stuff.

But why this specifically? Why this one specifically? So first, let me say that. How Holbrook has something that Columbo doesn't have, which is Phil Leeds, one of our favorite character actors from Barney Miller, who plays a private detective in this one and gets all of the dirt. He has the means, brother.

Yes. So he goes out and gets all the dirt for Holbrook, who does kind of a mentalist act. This is very Great Santini adjacent for me. We talked about that episode. I believe that was the last season, the one with Jack Cassidy. where he plays the mentalist slash magician, and they even have pretty much the exact same gag in here, where it's the guess a number, and then if you guess this one, okay, pick up the stapler, and it'll say you were going to choose number six, or oh, pick up the thing on this desk, oh, you were going to pick number one.

Here it's a case filled with, what, 52 different tape recordings and they all have different cards on there so you get to choose a card and then he'll always know the answer that way oh pick up this tape and play this and here you go kind of thing I don't think he can read minds I just think he's too smart for his own good and always second guessing things he is a Columbo the way that he will come in and assess a situation we see him first off getting his heart checked. He's got a pacemaker, but then we find out he's actually in the green room waiting to come on to set. And as soon as he walks out, he sees a safe hanging over the set. So he knows exactly what's going to happen. He can parse out what's in the safe because he can look at the cue cards and find out that the host has got a new book out.

So he's, oh, it's a copy of his book is in the safe. I like that. I like that a lot. The reason, though, to get back to that, why we're talking about this over all of these other Lincoln-Levinson properties that they were doing throughout all of these years, whether they were working with Columbo or not, is that I don't think I was in this play. But as I mentioned, this was turned into a play, and I can think of at least three people that are not in my kitchen that were in this play that I went to high school with.

This was one of our high school plays. So I do remember helping out with the stage dressing because I went over to a local resale shop and they had this amazing poster for a movie called The Hypnotic Eye. And I managed to talk them into allowing me to borrow that poster. I might have even donated our couch from the basement, this Naugahyde couch. So I was invested in this play.

Not an investor. I didn't make any money back from all of those tens of people that went to see this high school play. But it was great seeing my friend Leon, who's been on the projection booth before. He was the Hal Holbrook character. Mark Zdunzik was the Barry Boswick character.

I think Sue Salvato was the Catherine Ross character. So this... really meant a lot to me when I first saw that this was on VHS. And I was like, mark my natural causes. That sounds really familiar. I had no idea.

I backed into this one. I didn't know that this was a movie. I didn't know it was Lincoln Levinson. I just knew the stage play that said Tim Kelly on it. And Tim Kelly, I don't know what it was, but we did a ton of Tim Kelly plays in high school.

So it's just a trip down memory lane for me to watch this movie. I guess your teacher in high school was a huge fan of Saugus, Massachusetts own Tim Kelly. That could be. Yeah. I mean, Tim Kelly has over 300 plays.

So, you know, it's not like there's not a large body of work to pick from. It feels like he might've been like the Bob Ross of playwrights or something where it's like you, you get a Tim Kelly who puts his name on, the company, and then you have a whole bunch of people that are just working and transcribing things and making plays out of them. I could be selling him short. I don't know, but. The Life and Times of America's Most Prolific Playwright by Ben Omert, titled Tim Kelly, Master of Stage Fright.

The Life and Times of America's Most Prolific Playwright. You might be right. Our friend Ben Omert of Bear Manor Media, the publisher of Otto Bruno's amazing book about Barney Miller. Yeah, so you might be right. He's prolific to the extent that there's books written about him.

I don't know, over 300 plays is a lot. But this is also prime for being turned into a play. A lot of Columbo episodes are as well. This has a really novel hook. That's the thing that I think works for this so much, and obviously Hal Holbrook is so great.

Catherine Ross is great. Barry Bostwick is great. But The hook being, oh, he's a mentalist, and they don't understand how he knew ahead of time, and the explanation is mundane. He just has a lot of money and can pay a private detective. I like the Barney Miller contrivance, possibly, instead of the paranoid with proof.

I like to believe he can actually read their minds. That's just me. But again, I always like a flight of fancy or whimsy or two. But I also do the very casual, obvious explanation of he just had a lot of money and that's it. And he just had the means, which is a lot.

And a story like this, and that's what's shown so much in Columbo is so many of these people have the means. So many of these times it's the rich killing the rich because they have the means to do so. This is the rich preventing himself from being killed by other rich because he has the means to do so. And there's going to be another Columbo that we talk about when we get to the newer Columbo's where there is another fake mentalist. So I don't know if Lincoln Levinson wrote that episode, but it definitely feels similar to this as does the great Santini that I already mentioned.

But, You're right, as far as this does feel very stage play, especially so much of this plays out. Basically, it's like, what would you call it? Like a chamber drama kind of thing. All of these things taking place in a living room, pretty much. Bottle episode?

Yeah. You could approach this from a bunch of different directions as even a locked room mystery. If you had it take place at a certain time and when this was happening. But yeah, I would say this is a bottle episode of... Again, yes, parts take place elsewhere, but not much.

Most of this takes place in this room or these two or three rooms, and that's it. We should talk a little bit more about the plot, which is contrived, but it works. And it's basically Catherine Ross is the wife of this mentalist played by Hal Holbrook, and she is... dating this younger man, dating as in sleeping with this younger man, Barry Bostwick, who I believe he's an actor. In fact, I know he's an actor. Very full of himself, really likes her.

Catherine Ross is absolutely gorgeous in this. And she basically is setting up this whole thing because she knows that her husband has a weak heart. She wants to use a gun filled with blanks, initiate a heart attack, and have... Barry Boswick be the one that does this thing. He sets himself up as a fake reporter, comes in, starts interviewing Holbrook.

Really, he reminds me of the cat in the hat a little bit, the way he comes in. He just starts to upset the entire life of the Holbrook residents. And then we find that things aren't necessarily the way that they seem. And we'll probably get into some spoilers here. We definitely can say that Richard Anderson... is involved in this.

And so there's a double cross, and then there's another double cross, and then there might be another double cross on it. And it's just all of these reveals. And that's what we like so much about Columbo. So you really feel that Lincoln Levinson presence in the script. They have an eye for the dramatic and the flair for the dramatic when it comes to doing these kinds of stories.

And the best episodes of Columbo hit the notes that this hits. This is really good. This is really fun. I think it's really well done. And I like how Holbrook, what's funny is, again, at the beginning of the episode, you're meant to think, oh, he's just like this old man and he's in feeble and, oh, he can't do pushups and whatever.

By the end of it, it's like, no, that is not in fact the case. But I like that he leans into it intentionally because he already knows when the episode starts what's going on. That's what's so fun about this episode is we don't know that he knows until, what, the last 10 minutes? And even then, it's so smart because Lincoln Levinson can play with our expectations even then, which is a very meta thing. That's just a meta expectation.

The how Ketchum's is a meta expectation subversion in and of itself. And so I like that Lincoln and Levinson are just, they're writing in such a forward-thinking, future-proofing way that makes things like this still exciting and fun to watch. However, 50, almost 50 years later, is that where we're at now, 1979? This still holds up, and I think anyone who's into murder mysteries of a certain kind, of a certain era, would find this to be novel and fun and interesting because Levinson and Link are committed to the bit, as far as I'm concerned. They're always playing with the audience's expectations at a meta level.

I won't go so far as to say this is up there with like a sleuth or a death trap, but it's pretty darn close when it comes to just the number of twists and turns and that it is a very solid mystery. And I really like the energy that all of these actors are bringing to these roles. You can make fun of Barry Boswick as much as you want. He's got that great alliterative name as does Hal Holbrook. Brad Majors, everybody calls him asshole kind of thing, but I really like him.

And I think that when he's in the right role, maybe Ace Hunter wasn't the right role, but I'll be revisiting Megaforce later this month just because I still love that movie. Maybe that wasn't the best role for him, but He can really do a good job. And I think he plays a himbo really well. I haven't seen him in a lot of things, admittedly, outside of Rocky Horror Picture Show. So I didn't know what to expect seeing him in this.

So he's a very good looking guy in 1979. He's not bad looking when he's in Rocky Horror Picture Show either. Again, not to say he's not bad looking now. It's just, like you said, you can see the... younger good-looking guy angle that they're playing with him and he's really good I do like that confrontation at the end when he's pretending to be this reporter with Hal Holbrook in the back and forth and oh do some push-ups oh yeah I can do 50 or 60 oh how many are you I've not counted he's such a perfect smarmy smug asshole and that's such a fun kind of counter to Hal Holbrook's Because Hal Holbrook is an unreliable narrator because we don't know that he knows. So he's playing this up so much that you realize by the end of it, The only person who may have been on the level in any of this is Barry Bostwick, is ultimately what ends up happening.

He, I think, genuinely loves Catherine Ross and wants to run away with her, but he's the patsy, he's the fall guy for everybody else. Because even by the end, Hal Holbrook's like, I'll just pin it on him. You guys were going to pin my murder on him, so I'll just pin your murder on him. And it's like, whoa. What the fuck?

But at the same time, it's like this guy is trying to steal Hal Holbrook's wife, gets found out, scurries off like a rat without realizing that he is a patsy, and then we don't know how it ends, may end up being a patsy ultimately anyways for somebody else. Yeah, he's very much like the Elijah Cook Jr. character in The Maltese Falcon, especially the way that they talk about him while he's in the room, especially. And there's a moment, too, where Richard Anderson and Catherine Ross are talking later on as well, and I don't think Bostwick's in the room, but they're talking about Hal Holbrook, as if he wasn't in the room either, which is always just a real power move to do that. But at the same time, like you said, Hal Holbrook, or Halbrook, as I like to say, he holds all the cards.

They just don't know that he holds all the cards. And I have to say that I'm not familiar with Robert Day, the director's work. He directed for a long time and did a lot of stuff, but he does some really good things in here. There is a match cut right towards the beginning where you see Bostwick and Ross and they start making out. And then there's a match cut to her at the airport picking up Hal Holbrook. and they are in that same embrace.

So you cut from one couple kissing to the other couple kissing with Catherine Ross in the exact same angle. Really smart. Catherine Ross, by the end of it, you realize who the real string puller is, other than Hal Holbrook. Because again, Hal Holbrook could have stopped any of this at any point. I honestly didn't know if you would go all the way through it.

I thought you would stop at some point. And... I like that he had to be convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt of their guilt. And ultimately like how Holbrook is just as devious as the rest of them, but it's only because he's been put in that position. Catherine Ross is truly like the manipulative character throughout.

And I enjoyed that. I enjoyed that character because she, you know, by the end of it, you're like, man, I can't wait to see her get hers. And yeah, We don't really see her get hers, but we know that there is no way out of this situation where she doesn't. Yeah, she is the perfect femme fatale in this. Even though this isn't really very noir, she is playing that role of that spider woman so well.

Yeah, and you can see why all these men are so... enamored with her and willing to throw their lives away, because even Hal Holbrook is willing to go all the way to the edge for her love. And then, you know, by the end of it, he's like, I clearly don't love you anymore if I'm willing to shoot you. But he has to be pushed to that point, like by her and her animatronics. actions. So it's very, it's very interesting because again, like this fits right into the Columbo world. It feels like, you know, how they have like, this is a Cloverfield lane or the Cloverfield project.

Like this is in the universe of Columbo. Sometimes in the universe of Columbo, it doesn't need to be the one stopping the murders. Day does a really good job of double-crossing us a few times by showing us that Boswick is outside the window looking in at people, and you're just like, oh, what's he hearing that he shouldn't hear? It's really good, too, that I feel that Catherine Ross is a different person with each person that she's with. She gives different energy to each of these three men.

And I think that's really smart as well, because she can turn on a dime and just suddenly be that, sorry to keep going back to the Maltese Falcon, but she can be that Mary Astor type character where she's vicious and rude and conniving to Gutman, and then she'll turn around to Sam Spade and be like, oh, it was Sam, save me this kind of helpless babe in the woods type of thing. Don't hit me with the babe in the woods routine, Karen. You know what was in those. But that's what's so great about her character, is that kind of juxtaposition between her, the way she acts towards all three of them, frankly. Do you notice what play Gil Weston is in?

No, which one? Prescription Murder is the name of the play that he's in this. Which, obviously, what is that other than the first time Columbo ever showed up? So the play in this is not similar to the play, the thing that we see, thankfully. It would have been a little much if it's like, oh, who's he playing?

Lieutenant Columbo. That's a nice rug pull, too, that they start us off in the play and we don't know that we're watching a play. I think that what they're doing in this episode is subverting expectations all the way to the kind of I think the only thing I would compare this to at the end is like Clue-style fake-out endings, where there's three fake-out endings in this. Because you think Barry Boswick dies, and then you think Hal Holbrook dies, and then it turns out neither one of them are dead, and it's actually Hal Holbrook has all the cards. Does anybody die in this?

Nobody dies, which is the funny part. It ends up being like, well, that's kind of the thing by the end of it where he goes, where Catherine Ross goes to Hal Holbrook, and she's like, you know, what are you going to tell anyone happened? Like, Nothing here happened that has any meaning. And he's like, but I have this recorder. And it's, you know, the intention of going to murder him that they caught on tape.

He never said anything about any of that. And that ends up being the only crime that they can get kind of punished for. There is the implication at the end that she might be shot. But yeah, there is no murder, no nothing, a rather bloodless venture into the world of not Columbo. Maybe that's why this is a Columbo-less thing is because there is no murder at any point.

It's pretty funny because you keep saying the word episode. So not movie, and it was a TV movie, but because, yeah, it feels like an episode. I agree with you completely. Every time you say episode, I just laugh to myself a little bit because I'm like, technically it's not, but it feels like it. It so feels like it.

We've talked about this before with another Lincoln-Levinson property, Murder, She Wrote. We have those episodes without Jessica Fletcher. I fail to see how this is not just an episode of Columbo without Columbo. And let's see what my cousin Hal Holbrook's up to. This guy could be related to Columbo with that kind of mentalist shtick.

Because, again, we don't we're never given a reason as to why Columbo is such a gifted detective. He just happens to be a gifted detective in this episode or TV movie. they kind of try to explain it, but then they kind of wiggle their way out of it at the end. I think this would have been a little bit more interesting if there had been no, Oh, there's a private detective. It's like, no, I can just read your mind. It's the seventies.

That shit was all in the rage. Then Bermuda triangle and all that stuff. Give me a little bit of that. We were doing, again, to mention Barney Miller, we had all kinds of that stuff in Barney Miller, the paranoids with proof, go back to Kenneth Tygar, pretending to be a, alien or a ghost or a demon. Again, we have an episode about a mentalist.

That alone, that smacks of a certain time and place in this country when those kinds of characters, Uri Geller and folk, were in the pop culture spotlight a lot more than they ever have been since. That you can say those names still and know who you're talking about, it's pretty remarkable. And Hal Holbrook, he was just so good. He was in so many great movies and great TV movies. He's one of those guys.

We just talked about this recently with Idris Elba and Michael Fassbender, where they can be in shit movies, but they're always good. I really feel that Hal Holbrook is very much the same. But when he was in good movies or great movies, holy shit, look out. Things like magnum force his little role in all the president's men i loved him in capricorn one he was in this movie from 1979 same year this came out called natural enemies this is one year before the fog which our friend father malone obviously loves a lot and took his name from it natural enemies i had to watch that when i was going to interview the director that was jeff canoe the guy that did Revenge of the nerds. He directed this movie with Hal Holbrook and Louise Fletcher.

And it's about this guy plotting to kill his wife. So somewhat adjacent to this. And he's looking for advice by this. He's covering it up because he is saying that he's going to write a story about this for his business. I need all these details and stuff.

And he hates his wife. He hates Louise Fletcher so much. And it is so fucking depressing because he keeps having these fantasies about murdering her. And I'm just like, it's not funny. You could imagine that in a black comedy.

There is no comedy in this movie. It is devastating. And I'm just going to assume the 70s of it all. It doesn't have a fucking happy ending. It feels very much like him in Creepshow.

Tell it to call you Billy. Okay. Yikes. But Creepshow is fun, though. It is.

It's very fun. And I can empathize with him in Creepshow because Adrian Barbeau plays such a just horrible, harpy, harridan type of character. Louise Fletcher is not that bad. You know, Louise Fletcher, Nurse Ratched, can get really bitchy. She's a nice person in that movie.

And you're just like, wow, this is really dark. Family Annihilator, Hal Holbrook. we would have had no reference point for this before. Cause it's not a movie that you had seen prior to us doing the Chevy chase podcast, but we did Fletch lives. And he, again, Fletch lives, not particularly a great movie, not particularly a great Fletch movie, frankly. But Hal Holbrook is great in that movie as the southern villain who, by the way, Hal Holbrook from Cleveland, Ohio, which I did not know for the longest time because growing up I saw him in Fletch Lives and that was it.

So I thought he was just fucking from the south. No, not from the south. His accent is probably closer to that of our friend Jess Byard than mine. fucking, I don't know, any Creole anything or whatever he's doing in that movie. And so, yeah, I just, I love how Holbrook and anything I've seen him in because he, like we've alluded to, never phones it in. And that's why he's as well regarded as he was.

That's why he was nominated for a body of work. Was it? No, I guess he was. Did he ever win an Oscar? Did he win one of those customary Oscars, the ones that they give people for just being a great actor?

Yeah, that I'm not sure about because he definitely you see, that's the thing with him. I can't point to one performance where I'm just like, oh, this stands out as the best Hal Holbrook performance because they were all very solid. No, he was just nominated for one of those. Your body of work, work in film Oscars like David Lynch, right? to be fair like a harry dean stanton type like you're just great in everything or james hong like i don't know if james hong's ever going to win the oscar for anything but he's been like when they were casting you as recently as like 2010 how holbrook was in sons of. Anarchy he was in the sopranos i.

Always forget about that but that's because it's just again so fucking weird that he's in it because it's not he's not in it much but again like you just said like he's great in it. When we get to that point in the show, he's great in it, but he's, yeah. Same like Barry Bostwick, right? I haven't everything I've seen him in. He's pretty good.

Yeah. I mean, he plays a dick perfectly in Rocky horror. So, you know, and he's a silver Fox. Now he looks fantastic. He does not look the age that he is.

Another thing that you mentioned it and I mentioned it, but we didn't mention it together. So let's say it all together. Now. No, is, is, the use of technology, because we've talked about that so many times with Columbo. And here you mentioned the TV. and that he comes in and the TV's on and it's Holbrook there.

It's like a digital ghost. It's so good and creepy that I'm like Levinson and Link. made a little horror segment in their movie by accident. Not by accident, but again, if you could have blown that up into something else, I really wonder what they could have done. But that scene is great. Oh, yeah.

And yeah, it is super creepy because it's just basically an empty house with a man on a television talking. Five rooms away. And then I mentioned the whole thing with the tape recorder and stuff, with the different tapes, with the different cards. So yeah, it's like technology runs through this whole thing as well. He goes to the one reading at what looks like a cocktail party, and again, he's up on television, and he's, okay, well, if you add this number and then take this away, okay, your number's 11.

And everybody in the room is just like, oh. How amazing. We get to see him do a live reading, but that's after we see Phil Leeds, who's just giving all that information to him. So it's very nightmare alley as far as using investigative techniques in order to claim that you know this knowledge that you don't happen to know. Like i said i really enjoyed this this was a lot of fun it didn't need to be more than a movie in terms of like i didn't need any more of these characters and i did like that the ending also felt in a lot of ways a more modern touch with things like the way it ends with this kind of cliffhanger ending is read my mind.

Maybe again, maybe I'm just oversimplifying the kinds of things I've seen from then. But this it feels a little bit more contemporary in its storytelling, which I would say has been the case with most of the Lincoln Levinson stuff we've seen. None of it really feels old fashioned, even though we're watching stuff that was mostly in the 70s. But the one that we saw with Martin Sheen, where it was the what was it, Private Slovak, the storyteller about violence on television. That is still something that we talk about today.

So yeah, it feels very contemporary, even though this was coming out in 79. And what I really like, too, is that this thing is, what, 95 minutes? So in, out, three acts, boom, you're done. And for that reason, too, it makes one hell of a stage play. No, I really enjoy the fact that this went along at a really reasonable clip by the time it ends.

I like, I like you just alluded to, like, I didn't need any more. I felt like I had the right amount and there were no, again, cause it's not Columbo, but it's so close. There were no Columbo isms. There were no Peter Falk forays into weirdness, which I appreciated. I didn't need them.

But if we had Columbo, that's what we would have gotten. So it's maybe better off for not having been a Columbo thing, because at this point, like Columbo is this is much better than a lot of the episodes of Columbo from that last season we saw. And I would wager just making a educated guess here based on the information you've given me. So this is an inference. This is probably better than a lot of those Columbo is back episodes, too, I'm assuming.

Right. I really want to walk into those with a fresh mind because it's been so long since I've seen a lot of them. Though I will tell you that there are some pretty bad ones out there. So it definitely tops those. With your previous way of viewing them, would you say that this is better than the way you remember those?

Yes, absolutely. I think that's the right way to go into the future Columbo episodes is with, you know, because again, let's suspend as much as we can. I have no prior reference. You have plenty. But yeah, no, I just, by the way, you've talked about them.

It's like, this is just something that's very indicative of a time and place when TV movies were a thing and you could do a TV movie and Levinson and Link just had this script that wasn't a Columbo episode, but it happened to be close enough where it's, oh, okay, this will probably hit with that audience or maybe a bigger audience. And yeah, I think it works like gangbusters for me anyways. I'm so glad to hear it because it was, really fun. And it's one of those things where I do have that personal connection with the story. And I remember the whole thing of like, how many pushups can you do?

That was a big bone of contention because the, the poor actors, Mark and Leon, even though they're 17, 16 years old or whatever, they're up there and they have to do pushups. And especially during rehearsals. So it was like, okay. So we would always say, How many pushups can you do? So became a little bit of an inside joke for us.

But yeah, I'm so glad that this hit with you because it still hits with me, but I'm tainted. But I don't think if someone watched it, they would go, oh, you like this because of nostalgia. I think this stands up on its own. And again, I think the Levinson and link of it all is probably for me. the clearest indication of quality. Like, Levinson and Link do good work.

We know that. Like, their Columbo episodes that have their names on it are some of the better ones. They created these shows so they had the idea to begin with that other people ran with. But when you get the two of them together to do something, you get really good work. Not surprising.

Really not surprising. As we're in this period in the wilderness, as it were, We're going to look at a few other Lincoln-Levinson films that I have never seen. So I believe we're going to be covering Rehearsal for Murder, Guilty Conscience, and Vanishing Act, at least. All of those sound like Columbo episodes. Right?

Exactly. So I'm very curious how those go. But next month, we're going to come back and do something completely different, as Monty Python would say. We are going to look at the comedy film, also from 1979. We've done four things from 1979 over the last, or will have by next month, four things.

Mrs. Columbo, Uncle Marin, Murder by Natural Causes, and The In-Laws. 1979 was a big year for all things Columbo and Peter Falk related. So until we come back to talk about The In-Laws, Chris, what are we up to these days? You can find everything that you and I work on over at weirdingwaymedia.com, where this show and so many other great shows can be found, like What No Fuckin' ZD, our Sopranos show that we do once a month.

This show, which we also do once a month. We used to do a Chevy Chase show, but we don't do that anymore because that one's done. But we did talk about it here, so if you want to go listen to that, you can find it over there. Also, we're doing a little Harrison Ford show called Never Tell Me the Odds with our friend Richard Haddam. You can find that over there as well.

But hey, if you want to hear that show early and ad-free, my Patreon at patreon.com slash culturecast, Mike's Patreon at patreon.com slash projectionbooth, and Richard Adam's Patreon at patreon.com slash richardadam are places you can go to do that. So that's what we're doing, and that's where you can find us. I want to thank John Walker for our opening theme and Cullen Gallagher for our closing theme. Always appreciate hearing... both of those but especially that cool bossa nova beat that cullen goes out on so until we come back and talk about the in-laws and learn how to serpentine check out cullen gallagher's modern silent cinema band as well as all of john walker's work and thank you so much for listening we'll talk to you next month So Thank you.