PLOT:
James Read plays dentist Wesley Corman, who murders one of his patients (who also happens to be his wife's lover) Adam Evans by putting a ground down compound of his wife's digitalis into a filling in his tooth. It seems he has committed the perfect crime. The poison is timed to enter the gums hours after the victim has left the surgery by placing a layer of timed release gel on top of the digitalis. Columbo is soon on the case. Corman has made it look as if his wife was the murderer in order to keep up his image and expensive lifestyle. She was with Evans when he died and Corman had left digitalis in the blender to make it look like that is how she administered it. However, Columbo disproves this by showing that the victim could not have drunk all the digitalis he did without it taking effect earlier. Corman encourages his wife's father to commit her, which he has done before, but he is reluctant to do so. Columbo thinks Corman's attitude is odd and begins to suspect him of the crime. The problem is Corman committed the perfect crime and left no incriminating evidence. In the end he stages one of his charades, trapping the murderer into confessing. He tells Corman that he put the poison in a porcelain tooth (not the tooth that was supposed to be filled). He takes a chemistry set and tells Corman that if you put a drop of liquid onto porcelain that it would turn any trace of digitalis blue. He then shows how it turns blue and then prepares to take the tooth from the body. Corman thinks the game is up and says there is no need to do the experiment with the tooth on the body and confesses. It transpires that the whole thing was a bluff. The liquid did not turn digitalis blue. The liquid was laundry blue from Columbo's shirt, though Corman's lack of knowledge of chemistry meant that he didn't know Columbo was bluffing.
VERDICT: Though the murder is clever, James Read's character Corman is not. There's no real spark between Corman and Columbo. In the end Columbo deceives Corman into confessing. One wonders how Columbo gets away with such blatant deception, but Corman believed it and Columbo got what he wanted- a confession.
Written by Mark Wilson
(C) Copyright Wilson/Young Enterprises 2006.
CAST:
Dr Wesley Corman........James Read
Lydia Corman...........Jo Anderson
Nancy Walker..........Nancy Walker
Dick Sargent..........Dick Sargent
Ron Cey....................Ron Cey
Adam Evans.......Marshall R Teague
David Sherwin..........Mark Arnott
Horace Sherwin..........Paul Burke
