You'll know who the murderer is, of course, but you might rather not know much about his motivation and character in advance. Hence the spoiler alert.
"How To Dial a Murder" is one of the last entries in the original Columbo series, but it's driven by unflagging creative energy. To begin with, it's a pleasure to look at. The villain's home, which provides the main setting, is built on a wooded hillside in what must be the greatest concentration of leafy, moist-looking greenery in Southern California. The house itself shows how money in the service of good taste can produce, not mere opulence, but an opulent coziness. It seems designed as a retreat for the weary soul. As the story progresses, we learn how weary that soul must be under the cross it has to bear.
Eric Mason (Nicol Williamson), our star villain for the nonce, is a self-help guru riding the crest of that wave in 1970s California. He struts and frets his hour upon the stage of a great hall that's wired to supply him with running feedback on the responses of his listeners, which he then uses to bully them into ever greater vulnerability. They have come to him to learn self-mastery. Lesson 1, it seems, is to endure being mastered by the teacher. Mason strips them of everything but physical garments while teaching by example just how overpowering a personality can become.
The possessor of such mental muscle, you will say, was cut out to be lord and master to his wife (now deceased). Alas, no. Far from kneeling before her husband, she had taken to assuming positions no less compromising with his chief assistant. Mason, bless his prophetic soul, knew that he was a cuckold, perhaps having heard it whispered by the ghost of an overbearing father. We don't see that part. Now, at any rate, the unfaithful wife is dead, the brakes of her car having given out at an awkward moment. All that remains is the destruction of the other man, not only to satisfy Mason's hunger for vengeance, which is evidently great indeed, but also (we can assume) to silence one who knows the awful truth about him: that his career as a teacher of self-confidence has been a career of denial; his own self-confidence, a front built to conceal a painful sense of inadequacy.
Herein lies the brilliant premise of the episode. After nearly seven seasons of villains whose self-confidence is never in doubt, the makers of Columbo now take that very type as their theme and open up one specimen of it to reveal a complex inner mechanism. Here, the villain does not merely live the type, he makes his living at it. He's not just another privileged Southern Californian, but the embodiment of the privileged Southern California subculture. To the extent that his dominant persona exceeds what we've seen before in this series, the reality falls tragically short. His hobby, collecting movie memorabilia, gives this episode more than just the usual richness of texture. Nearby Hollywood, with its engines of make-believe, is the true center of gravity in Mason's life. He emulates Hollywood, both in his dazzling charlatanism and in his own dim existence behind a façade. It's in a disused movie village, a ghost of a ghost town, that he trains his two Doberman Pinschers to become murder weapons.
Unlike most episodes of Columbo, this one keeps back all but the barest intimation of the motive for a while after the crime has been committed. Then we see evidence of the adultery that has been alluded to. And then Williamson, in concert with the writer and director, takes us further into Mason's world. Scene by scene, we approach the confirmation of the anguish and fear that have eaten him hollow while hardening his exterior. This outwardly masterful man is inwardly intimidated by men and women alike. His household includes a troubled but attractive young woman, played by Kim Cattrall, who has been taken in to receive special care. The very fact that Mrs. Mason had consented to live with such an arrangement should have tipped us off at once that her husband's love life was of no consequence to her and probably of none to him. The truth comes to the surface one stormy night when a nervously sweating Mason, sitting alone with the young woman on a bed, explains his passivity toward her by saying he controls his own space. It's about the last time his professional vocabulary will serve him before he applies it admiringly to Columbo in the closing scene.
Mason continues to put up a brave front, but Williamson's performance signals that the tide has turned within this character. As the force of his self-made personality ebbs, so does the strain of maintaining it. Instead of dramatically breaking down, as such a character might have been made to do, he gradually settles down. All his charms having been overthrown, what strength he has is his own, which is a faint one. Psychological power recedes. A rump of id remains to make a desperate last stand, but then the game is up and the false master mildly submits to the true one.
The murder scheme in this episode may be a bit too audacious in conception and reckless in execution, but those faults are consistent with Mason's headlong career through a threatening world. Anyway, the scheme's not the thing, here. The play is. Character writing and character acting, images and music, surface and undercurrent -- these are the things that come together to make "How To Dial a Murder" highly satisfying.
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