Columbo: Forgotten Lady (1975) Directed by Harvey Hart

(Review originally written at 27 July 2008)

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

This is one of the best and also most enjoyable Columbo movie to watch out there. It's also original with its story and features some great actors as well. Even though it's one of the longest Columbo movie, it still is one of the best flowing ones and its 97 minutes simply fly by and it's over before you know it.

Harvey Hart seemed to be a director who knew how to handle the Columbo character and all of its usual ingredients that made the Columbo movie so great to watch. He handles especially the humor of the movie well, making his Columbo movies among the most entertaining ones to watch. But this doesn't mean that the mystery also doesn't get handled well.

It's a Columbo movie with a great story, with solid characters and as well an original ending to it. It's after all the only Columbo movie in which the killer gets away with the crime, for an humane reason. It's perhaps also the Columbo movie with the best ending because it's so surprising as well as original. It's a story that works as well on some more dramatic levels than any other Columbo movie perhaps. It's an engaging movie that really sucks you in and makes you care about its characters. It shows a real humane side of Columbo.

The story provides its movie with some great characters and settings, in the showbiz world. Columbo has an obvious respect for the main suspect, since it's an actress and performer he and his wife admirer. This gives the movie some great sequences in it, in which Columbo of course realizes very well that she committed the murder but is still reluctant to show this and confront her with it, since deep inside it's obvious that he wishes that it really was a suicide instead of a murder, or at least that it would had been committed by someone totally else.

The movie has a great cast, with mostly actors from the old days. Something that isn't anything uncommon for a Columbo movie. Besides Janet Leigh the movie also features movie veteran Sam Jaffe, as the movie its victim. Janet Leigh also is great, in a role in which she basically plays herself. The musical movie constantly featured throughout the movie also is an old unknown movie starring Janet Leigh, called "Walking My Baby Back Home" from 1953, by Lloyd Bacon.

Really one of the best and most enjoyable Columbo movies out there.

9/10

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