Just One More Thing: Murder, A Self Portrait

A retrospective by Brooks Rich

Eccentric artist Max Barsini lives in a beachside house with his wife Vanessa and his live in model Julia. Next door to them lives Louise, Max's first wife. The three women are essentially Max's three wives, even though Max is only officially married to Vanessa. When Louise announces she is leaving to move in with her former psychiatrist now her lover, Max fears she will reveal that years ago Max murdered his business partner. He and Louise were living in a small apartment above a bar and were impoverished. So under the guise of painting in private, Max sneaks away and drowns Louise. It looks like an accident. But a homicide lieutenant with a cigar isn't sure about that.

This episode has really grown on me. At first I found it kind of weird, with it's bizarre borderline creep of a killer and it's artsy film school dream sequences. But over time this one has become one of my favorites. Actor Patrick Bauchau does a fantastic job with the character of Max. He plays him as a sort of modern Don Jon with a touch of sleaze but doesn't go over the top. There's something interesting about Max. Yeah he's a bad guy but I wouldn't call him evil.

As with any good Columbo episode, I love the chess match between Columbo and Barsini. As Columbo begins to move in, Barsini tells him he wants to paint his portrait. So during their sittings Columbo plays tapes of Louise's frightening recurring dreams, which all imply that Max murdered his old business partner. The back and forth between Falk and Bauchau are stellar in these sequences.

This is very much a second run Columbo episode. It's the standard formula but there's a more cinematic feel to it. The second run gets a bad rap. I think there's a lot of fantastic episodes from '89 to the end of the series in 2003 and this is one of them.

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