It was up a ebay a few months back and I put a bid in and then I forgot to check it at the last hour....I would have raised my bid....but sadly I lost.
I would like to see Robert Vaughan or Robert COnrad to return in future episodes. They might play a better guest murderer. Both George Hamilton and William Shatner played a better guest murderer than their first try out. They can't all be great like Jack cassidy and Patrick McGoohan
I had a choice to make this afternoon. The Most Crucial Game on channel five, or Columbo Goes to the Guillotine on Sky. I decided to go for sky as I have the most crucial game on dvd, and I had never seen the Guillotine. It was pretty good...although hard to imagine that the US government would even consider that kind of thing. A pretty big risk columbo took at the end...put, as with Laurel and Hardy, he pulled it off.
"Clodumbo" can be found not only in its original run (the one with "Fiddler Made a Goof" on the cover), but also in some of the larger reprint magazines. And, more helpfully, it's in one of the MAD books currently available at bookstores -- I forget whether it's "MAD About the 70s" or "MAD About TV" (I think it's the latter). So, with luck, you can find it by looking around in your local bookstore.
Meanwhile, you can find a description and some scans of it on this site, as part of the Scrapbook article about "Columbo Parodies".
Big weakness of this episode. No motive is
ever given and we are not told why Columbo
suspected Hanlon from the beginning. This is
one of the weakest story lines (along with
"Any Old Port in a Storm") but the good acting
makes it a tolerable episode to watch.
Columbo started to suspect Hanlon when he turned the radio off when there was the suggestion that Eric had been murdered. Columbo thought he had "struck a chord." It is a very weak clue and really not a sound basis for Columbo's suspicions.