The Lt. Columbo Forum

An area where fans from all over can ask each other questions and voice their own ideas and opinions on anything Columbo.

This Forum is fondly dedicated in memory of  "cassavetes45"  (Carleen Zink),
Columbo's greatest fan and a great friend to us all.
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The Lt. Columbo Forum
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Re: Most unsympathetic and sympathetic victims

You are very welcome shomrig...I meant every word.

Re: Re: Most unsympathetic and sympathetic victims

I never felt too much sympathy for Jennifer Wells in "Etude in Black". She has an affair with a married man and is willing to ruin his life and the life of his innocent wife just to have what she wants. What a baby!! I guess that makes Blythe Danner a sypathetic victim. Just not a murder victim.

Re: Most unsympathetic and sympathetic victims

TFL, I have to agree with you. I never really thought about her in those terms until somebody posted on here about her....I believe it was Paul, and he pointed out what a witch Jenifer really was....very manipulative and controlling...and also she was allowing pathetic Paul Rifkin to be a hanger-on, instead of telling him to move on with his life and forget her. She wasn't a very classy broad!!

Re: Most unsympathetic and sympathetic victims

Most sympathetic victim: the Commodore Otis Swanson in "Last salute to the commodore": he was a proud old man who founded a prosperous company building ships in the old good way and was unhappy of how things were going in the present and worried for his company to end up in bad hands.

Most unsympathetic victim(s): the wife of Johnny Cash in "Swan song". How on earth could a man stand such a woman?

Re: Re: Most unsympathetic and sympathetic victims

As far as "unsympathetic," I don't know the episode well, but there was Nehemiah Persoff in Now You See Him. You'd think that any detective story where the killer is a former concentration camp officer would have a sympathetic victim, but that's where the story does something original. The victim is a blackmailer, who even has the nerve to very briefly get on the soapbox about that subject, even though HE'S the one keeping Cassidy out of trouble! But my real favorite is Martin Sheen in Lovely But Lethal. Not only does he steal poor Fred Draper's invention, but he toys with Vera Miles, not only by making her think that he can be bought off, but by making her think that she herself is part of his price. Then pulls the rug out, about BOTH things. Regardless of their past together, and who was guilty of what, this showed him in a really nasty light.