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"Forgotten Lady" is the fifth-season premiere episode of Columbo, and the thirty-second episode of the show overall. It is also one of the two episodes of the series, "It's All In The Game" being the other, in which Lt. Columbo does not, in the final sequence, arrest his leading suspect in the murder. Harvey Hart directed this episode, whose script William Driskill wrote, and it was transmitted on September 14, 1975.

Season 5

Summary[]

When elderly physician Henry Willis (Sam Jaffe) refuses to finance a return to the spotlight for his wife, aging former movie star Grace Wheeler (Janet Leigh), she kills him in his sleep, passing it off as a suicide. Their elderly butler (Maurice Evans) believes Grace was in a private screening room the entire time, watching one of her classic films.

Clue[]

Final clue/twist: Columbo believes that a discrepancy between the length of the movie and the time it had taken Grace Wheeler to watch it, including the few minutes it had taken her to fix the film after it had broken, proves that Grace had spent some time away from the screening room. It had been then, Columbo concludes, that she had been out committing Willis's murder.

This is one of the only two episodes in which the perpetrator is not arrested (the other being "It's All In The Game"), as Ned Diamond (John Payne), Wheeler's longtime song and dance partner who has always loved Grace, falsely confesses to save her after Columbo informs him she is suffering from a degenerative brain aneurysm, a disease (the primary reason her husband refused to finance her return; the strain of performing could cause its rupture and kill her at any moment) that interferes with her memory, and that she likely no longer even remembers the murder. Nonetheless, Columbo is prepared to arrest her. Diamond makes his false confession to Grace, who briefly becomes very upset. Columbo instead arrests Diamond, both realizing that by the time he is cleared, Grace will be dead. His normal instincts thwarted, Columbo makes several half turns – as though to enter the screening room – where Grace, lost in the past, is watching the film, having already forgotten Diamond's confession. Columbo then leaves the mansion, following Diamond.

The episode features excerpts from the actual 1953 musical comedy Walking My Baby Back Home, which starred Leigh. It is Grace's favorite film, the one playing when she was committing the crime and the one she is watching, mesmerized, at the end of the episode.

Columbo (season 5)
1."Forgotten Lady" 2."A Case of Immunity" 3."Identity Crisis" 4."A Matter of Honor" 5."Now You See Him" 6."Last Salute to the Commodore"
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