The TV Time Machine: 'Lee Grant Talks Columbo Peter Falk & Ransom for a Dead Man--Exclusive Interview!'

Source:The Time Machine talking to Hollywood Goddess Lee Grant about her appearance on Columbo.

"Lee Grant talks about playing a Columbo murderer in the classic 1971 NBC TV movie Ransom for a Dead Man starring Peter Falk as Lieutenant Columbo with Scott Skelton, co-author (with Jim Benson) of the upcoming book, The Ultimate Columbo.

Ransom for a Dead Man aired on the NBC television network on March 1, 1971. Lee Grant played Leslie Williams, a high-powered attorney determined to rid herself of her insufferably dull husband by devising a phony kidnapping scheme as a means to murder said hubby and collect the associated 'ransom.'

The character of Lieutenant Columbo was introduced in Dick Levinson and Bill Link’s stage play PRESCRIPTION: MURDER, which was itself an expansion of a teleplay they wrote for The Chevy Mystery Show in 1960 titled Enough Rope. Prescription: Murder later aired as an NBC World Premiere movie in 1968, with Peter Falk cast as the rumpled, seemingly absent-minded Lieutenant Columbo.

Written by Dean Hargrove (from a story by Richard Levinson and William Link), Ransom for a Dead Man was a suspenseful, stylish take on the Columbo character, marking the official pilot film for the popular, long-running TV series COLUMBO, a five-star classic if ever the medium produced one." 

From The TV Time Machine

To just talk about my own personal feelings about the Columbo TV/movie series and then I'll get into Lee Grant and her appearance on this episode as well. 

If you are a Gen-Xer or older (and I'm a Gen-Xer) you remember hearing about Star Trek conventions from the 1980s and perhaps even earlier. For anyone whose not familiar with Star Trek conventions, I don't feel sorry for you for that. but to give you an idea about them: 

Star Trek not when it originally aired in the late 1960s and early 70s on NBC, was not a popular TV series. I think it had 4 seasons and probably only did well enough to last that long. But go up to the late 1970s, by then it was very popular in syndication to the point that the Star Trek creators started a movie series about the TV series, with I believe 4 or 5 Star Trek films. By the late 80s, 

Star Trek became so popular and the merchandise became so popular that a lot of fan groups and organizations were put together for the Star Trek the TV series and movie series. It gets to the point that these folks look like they were part of a national cult or something and became very easy to make fun of in pop culture.

To make a long point shorter, I'm not a Columbo version of a Trekkie. I think it's one of the best, as well as funnest TV detective series ever. Peter Falk for me at least, is one of the best TV comedians ever. But, there's only about 10 episodes from the entire series, including the original on NBC and the movie version from ABC in the 1990s, that I really love and can see over and over again, to the point that I now have 10-15 Columbo episodes on DVD and watch them whenever I have the time and want to watch them. 

If I had to put a list of top 5 episodes all time in the entire Columbo series from both NBC and ABC, I think Ransom For a Deadman is not just top 5, but top 1. It's between this episode and Murder By Book with Jack Cassidy, also from 1971, and Exercise in Fatality with Robert Conrad from 1974. 

Lee Grant explains herself very well about what made her character so great and interesting to play and she plays Leslie Williams so perfectly. She plays a woman who almost seems like she doesn't care if she gets caught or not. Too much confidence and as Lieutenant Columbo (played by Peter Falk) says so himself, she has no conscience. It's almost as if she hated her husband and her stepdaughter that he gave her, to the point that she made it easier for Columbo to catch her. 

But despite playing such a cold and evil woman, Lee Grant is not just Lee Grant, but she'll always be Lee Grant. The only two people that Leslie could never get past, were Columbo and her stepdaughter Margaret. (Played by Pattye Mattlick) But, she had the rest of the Los Angeles Police Department and all her associates and colleagues fooled, because again she's Lee Grant. 

I think the best, or at least most interesting TV killers, are the killers who lack conscience, but who are also highly intelligent, but just from the outside you think: "Come, on, she can't kill anybody." And that's what you get from Leslie. To the outside observer, she's just too cute and sweet physically, to even swat at a fly that flies in her face, let alone not just murder someone, or her own husband, that she supposedly is in love with. 

But this all gets back to Lee Grant being Lee Grant. She's so good of an actress, that she can fool anybody. And because she looks so cute and sweet from the outside, she can fool anyone into thinking that no way she could murder someone. 

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