BIG SCREEN TV - WHAT MR. OUSU SAW

‘COLUMBO’
“MURDER UNDER GLASS”

From the IMDb:
Food critic Paul Gerard, who has been extorting money from restaurant owners in exchange for good reviews, murders one when threatened with exposure.  

During his investigation, Lt. Columbo stopped by Gerard’s house while the critic was hosting a dinner for a special guest, a fellow food critic from Japan….

EVE PLUMMER:
I'm Eve Plummer, Mr. Gerard's assistant.
LT. FRANK COLUMBO:
Pleased to meet you, ma'am.
PAUL GERARD:
My distinguished colleague from Japan, Kanji Ousu.
LT. COLUMBO:
How do you do, sir?
PAUL GERARD:
The two modest maidens are professional entertainers. Geishas.
KANJI OUSU:
Are you a lieutenant with the American Army?
LT. COLUMBO:
No, sir. Los Angeles Police.
KANJI OUSU:
Homicide. Right, Lieutenant?
LT. COLUMBO:
That's right, ma'am.
KANJI OUSU:
There was a murder movie on the plane. Brilliant! I'm afraid I bored Paul with the details all the way from the airport.

This episode was first broadcast on January 30, 1978.  It is standard practice to assume that the episode seen here in the Trueniverse is set in the same time period as when it actually happened in Toobworld unless otherwise specified by the dictates of the script (for instance – Westerns and other shows set in the past or sci-fi shows in the future.) 

So at some point in January 1978 is when the events of “Murder Under Glass” took place.  And just as Inner Toob did for “The Most Dangerous Match”, we’re now going to look for the movie that Mr. Ousu saw on that flight.

First off, I’d like to apologize to anyone who saw this post in the five hours it was originally up on the blog.  I had a whole different premise for my “wish-craft” due to my faulty vision.  I saw the broadcast date for “Murder Under Glass” as 1975 rather than 1978.  That led me to choose “Chinatown” for the in-flight movie and then fellow Columbo-phile Timothy Meier suggested that the movie could have been the 1974 adaptation of Agatha Christie’s “Murder On The Orient Express”.

I wish “Murder Under Glass” had been broadcast in 1975!

So instead I started my research again for “murder movies” released in 1977 which could have been seen on that flight.

Using the IMDb search features, I searched within the parameters of 1977.  And I was looking for movies in the mystery genre.  (The algorithm returned the category as “murder”.)

Three possibilities came up:

• “The Late Show” starring Art Carney and Lily Tomlin
• “Double Murder” an Italian movie starring Marcello Mastrionni, Ursula Andress, and Peter Ustinov

and

• “Sweet Revenge” which was a Japanese movie based on a Japanese novel. 

None of them really excited me to explore further.  Of the three, I only saw “The Late Show” which I thought was sweet and funny, kind of a gentle mystery, but not what I thought Mr. Ousu would consider “brilliant”.  (Of course, Mr. Ousu’s tastes in movies might not have been as refined as his taste in cuisine, so who knows how accurate his opinion was?)

I expanded my search for the whole year and included thrillers to the categories of “mystery” and “drama”.  Of those movies which I found to be of interest and even “brilliant”, none of them I considered to be primarily “murder movies” as Mr. Ouso described the in-flight movie.

So rather than grasping at anything that might have stirred the imagination for writing this post, I decided to accept the O’Bvious choice instead.  And it’s the logical one as well.  Which in my slightly unhinged mind translates to “boring”.

As the flight began in Japan, probably Tokyo, I would think the majority of passengers would be Japanese citizens going to the United States on either vacation or, as was the case with Mr. Ouso, on business.  So the choice of an in-flight movie would be geared to a Japanese clientele.  Therefore, “Sweet Revenge” was probably the movie which Mr. Ouso saw.

Here’s the IMDb summary:

Masao is falsely accused and jailed for the murder of a loan shark to whom he owed a lot of money. His sister Kiriko makes the long trip to Tokyo, specifically to accost Otsuka, Japan's top criminal defense lawyer, and plead with him to take her brother's case. They live in Kita Kyushu which, though a city, she contends that the local lawyers are not up to the job. Otsuka contemptuously brushes her off. A year passes. Masao has suicided in jail, his appeal having failed due to the lack of interest and competence of the local defense lawyer. Kiriko returns to Tokyo, planning revenge on Otsuka for refusing the case and causing her brother's death. Meanwhile, through the actions of a crusading young journalist, Otsuka is informed of Masao's death. His curiosity piqued, he requests the file and reviews the evidence. Otsuka also has an adoring mistress who owns a bar. By coincidence (?), the real murderer is an associate of one of her employees. Kiriko, now working as a hostess in a different bar, is asked by a friend to tail her boyfriend, whom she suspects of cheating. The boyfriend is murdered in the bar owner's flat, and Kiriko grabs the chance to set her revenge plan into action. Kiriko rigs the crime scene to falsely incriminate the bar owner, who is subsequently jailed. Otsuka's mistress out of the way, Kiriko sets out to seduce and entrap Otsuka, against the advice of the crusading journalist.

If you'd like to read a review of it, click here.

Mr. Ouso may have read the original 1961 novel and if that was any good, then perhaps that played a role in his judgement of the movie.  He also appears to be a man who enjoyed some status in Japan; perhaps he knew the director or somebody in the cast.  He may have even invested in it. So it could have been to his advantage to chat it up as being brilliant whenever he was presented with the chance.  (Not that Columbo would probably ever see it.  He liked Westerns.)

I also considered keeping the choice of movie limited to a fictional film to be found only in some other TV show.  (‘Columbo’ had a few fictional movies mentioned in other episodes – “The Loves Of Frankenstein” in “Mind Over Mayhem” and “Walking My Baby Back Home” in “Forgotten Lady”, but neither of them fit Mr. Ouso’s description of a “murder movie”.  Nor were they timely – I’m sure airlines prefer to show recent movies.) 

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any TV show from that time period which might have mentioned a fictional movie.  If I do come up with one, I can always go back and do a rewrite of this post.

I’m getting to be good at that….

So I’ll stick with “Sweet Revenge” – it’s a Japanese movie, it was a recent release (December of 1977), and it involved murder.  It just doesn’t have the panache that “Chinatown” and “Murder On The Orient Express” had to inflame the imagination.

Oh.  Just one more thing….

Could that flight have been an Oceanic Airways route?

BCnU!