The Enduring and Endearing Greatness of Columbo's "Any Old Port in a Storm" (1973)
A favorite episode for many Columbo fans, for good reason.
Whenever I mention Columbo, the 1970s (and early 90s…and late 90s) detective show to anybody, I always say something along these lines: “It’s a really slow-paced show by today’s standards.” This mostly remains the case. The classic 70s episodes, brilliant as they are, move slowly compared to any kind of TV show you’d find today. But when the show is at its absolute best, it’s worth it. And such was the case for the season 3 episode, “Any Old Port in a Storm”, an episode so beloved by the fanbase that it still tops fan polls wherever you may find them. Is it a slow episode? Honestly, not really, especially when you take everything into account. From the acting to the premise to the episode’s climax, the episode is peak television, a glimpse into storytelling almost bygone at this point, and just fantastic entertainment. Spoilers ahead!
Columbo, starring the always-good Peter Falk, was notable for its structure as a “how-catch-em” show rather than a “whodunnit”. Viewers almost always see the episode’s murder happen within the first ten minutes and know who the murderer is and their motive. “Any Old Port in a Storm” was no different. The episode’s story focuses on how Lieutenant Columbo of the LAPD solves the murder, and how the murderer reacts to being put under Columbo’s microscope.
In this episode, Adrian Carsini (played by Donald Pleasence of Halloween fame), an affluent, pretentious, and snobbish winemaker, is hosting wine critics at his vineyard outside of LA and eavesdropping to hear they’re about to make him Man of the Year. He’s interrupted, however, by the presence of his younger half-brother Rick (played by Massachusetts native Gary Conway, whose Boston accent slips out once or twice). They shared the same father, who originated the business; upon his death, Adrian got the finances, but Rick got the property. Rick doesn’t care for the art of winemaking like Adrian does and cares more about the winery’s money, which Adrian has been wasting. After telling Adrian he needs money so he can get married for a fourth(!) time, Rick announces he’s selling the land that Adrian cherishes and has nurtured for twenty-five years. An outraged Adrian bludgeons Rick in the head with a trophy, knocking him out. Oh no! After pretending everything’s fine and hurrying his secretary Karen out the door, Adrian sticks an unconscious Rick in the vineyard’s wine cellar, ties him up, turns off the cellar’s AC so Rick will die faster, hides the guy’s car, and departs for New York for a week for a wine auction.
Already, there’s been a lot of high emotion, especially in the explosive fight between Adrian and Rick. Pleasence is already playing his role to perfection, giving authenticity and being to the high-brow wine aficionado, who spouts phrases such as “muscle-bound hedonist” without a hint of irony. As viewers, you can already feel sympathy for Adrian, given how much he cares about the vineyard compared to how little Rick does, and Rick has the power in his hands to ruin Adrian’s life and livelihood. Adrian reclaims the power, but now he has to conceal a murder, a fratricide no less. What will happen next? Well, Adrian, who had told Karen on the plane to make a check out to Rick for $5,000 as a wedding present (equivalent to roughly $36,000 today), promptly spends that $5k on a wine bottle at the auction. “Life is painfully short,” after all!
Columbo is soon visited by Joan, Rick’s fiancé, after Rick fails to show up in Acapulco for their wedding. Joan also has the $5k that Adrian sent. Columbo works in homicide and not in missing persons, but he takes interest in Joan’s concerns, especially when he learns this disappearance seems out of character for Rick and that Rick’s Italian. (“We Italians have to stick together,” Columbo tells her, even after he learns Rick’s family’s from up north.) Once Adrian arrives home, he finds Rick’s corpse in the cellar, puts him in his scuba diving equipment, drives out to a ravine in Rick’s fancy car, tosses Rick’s body over a ravine, and bikes home.
It looks like Rick died in a scuba accident, and when Columbo finds Joan to break the bad news, he tells her it appears that several days prior, Rick hit his head while diving, went unconscious, ran out of oxygen, and suffocated. (There’s a WEIRD moment right before this where you see people in bathing suits dancing around a patio at the country club where Joan is. #okay.) Columbo learns from Joan’s friends that Adrian and Rick weren’t close. He’s also picking up on details that bother him; Columbo’s observant nature is what makes him such a good detective, and it’s often what he observes in every episode that gets his sights onto the murderer. In this case, Rick’s car, which has its top down, looks spick and span, but Columbo thinks it might’ve rained earlier in the week. Why would Rick have left the top down if it was raining, and why no watermarks on the car? He learns from Joan that Rick loved his car, and he also learns that Rick hadn’t eaten for two days prior to his death, which, according to Joan and his friends, he never would have done. Columbo’s also able to confirm with the weather bureau that it did rain on the day Rick was supposedly scuba diving. Things aren’t adding up!
So Columbo finds Adrian to talk about all of this and **glean some more information**. This is typical of the show, where Columbo will get close to his murder suspect under the pretense of getting more information about the victim, and usually the murder suspect thinks they can play along and still be out of Columbo’s sights. (A common sentence from the murderer, including in this episode, is telling Columbo, “If there’s anything I can do…”). It seems Adrian’s totally in the clear, as he was in New York when Rick died and has a stone-cold alibi. But Columbo’s not convinced. After brushing up on his wine knowledge, he has Adrian show him the wine cellar, to Adrian’s combined annoyance and amusement, to prove that nobody could possibly get trapped in there. Sure enough, Columbo is able to get out, as there’s no lock on the inside. He finds Karen the secretary at her house that evening and gets one more piece of information from her: Karen saw Rick leaving the winery the day she and Adrian left for New York. A LIE!!! But Columbo buys it. Wait, is Columbo going to lose here!? Columbo never loses. Or is this perhaps a trick up the detective’s sleeve?
To apologize for intruding on Adrian and Karen, he offers to buy them dinner at the nicest restaurant in town. Adrian obliges. They have a nice meal even though Adrian initially orders them to be sat a different table because it was too close to the kitchen. (I’m unsure why this moment was written in. Showing Adrian’s snobbery again, maybe.) For dessert, Columbo asks the sommelier for Ferrier Vintage Port, 1945. This is an extremely rare wine and Adrian, who knows it, is convinced the restaurant isn’t going to have it. BUT THEY DO! Adrian gets super excited, because why wouldn’t he? Columbo and Karen try the wine and love it, but Adrian tries it and gets extremely upset. It turns out the wine has been oxidized by overheating. This is the sort of thing only someone with an experienced palette like Adrian is going to be able to detect, and he flies into a RAGE over the mishandling of this very precious wine. Perhaps one of the best lines in TV ever is uttered to cap off his tantrum: “An exciting meal has been ruined by the presence of this…LIQUID FILTH!”
The servers quickly say there will be no check for the table, but Columbo shoves some cash in their hands as he follows the exiting Adrian and Karen out the door. Hmm…Columbo marvels at how Adrian could’ve picked up on that oxidation, then **remembers** there was an extremely hot day in LA while the two were in New York. HMM…and somebody had turned off their wine cellar’s AC. Now—and this isn’t made super clear in the episode—if it had been even in the 80s or 90s, the wine, without AC, still would’ve been fine. But as we later learn, it hit over 100 in LA while Adrian and Karen were gone. The precious wine in his precious wine cellar is ruined. And this is when he knows it. OH NO. Turns out he had to sacrifice more than just his half-brother to keep the company. To cap it all off, Columbo thanks Karen for helping her close out the case by mentioning, with Adrian right there, that Karen told Columbo she saw Rick depart the vineyard. Adrian knows it’s a lie, and knows she knows it’s a lie. Then Columbo bids the two adieu. What an eventful evening!
Adrian and Karen have a very cold exchange on the car ride home. It turns out Karen’s in love with Adrian! And now she’s going to blackmail Adrian into marriage because she knows Adrian killed Rick. She does tell him, “I wouldn’t blame you for it. He wanted to take away the one thing you ever loved.” Key point here: the one thing you ever loved. Adrian does not love Karen. He tries to get her to go to Paris for another auction but she knows he’s just trying to get rid of her.
Well, now he’s midkey screwed. In the meantime he can go throw away all his ruined wine, which he does, off the same ravine(??) he tossed away Rick’s body. He heads back to his car to collect more wine to discard and finds Columbo waiting for him. “They were all ruined,” Columbo says definitively. Adrian tries to bypass it as getting rid of some inferior wines but Columbo calls his bluff. (Pun intended, they’re kind of on some bluffs [the geographical location] right now.) Adrian knows the jig is up. He asks Columbo, “How did you know?” And then we begin to see one of the most beautiful conclusions in all of television.
First, Columbo, a smoker throughout the show, pulls out his cigar, asking Adrian, “Do you mind if I smoke?”. Twice in the episode, Adrian had asked others around him not to smoke around wine, as he felt the fumes ruined the taste. Now, around the overheated wine, the taste is already ruined. Adrian says he doesn’t mind, and then has to laugh. He’s aware of this small irony. Little does he know bigger ironies are to come. This moment is, I think, overlooked when people talk about this episode. I have a feeling Pleasence might’ve even ad-libbed that laugh. But it adds depth to the character and to the gravity of the moment. It shows just how freaking good of an actor Donald Pleasence was.
So then Columbo makes his own confession. That Ferrier Vintage Port was actually Adrian’s wine, stolen from the cellar when Columbo pretended he didn’t know if he could get out. The restaurant and wine steward were in on it, hence the cash tip. He needed someone with a delicate palette to confirm that the wine was ruined, and Adrian “did the rest.” This isn’t stated by Columbo, but there was zero reason Adrian would’ve ever shut off that AC in that kind of weather if he was there…or knew it was going to happen…so it had to have happened before that day…and for what reason? Not to cut the electric bill, that’s for sure.
This is the bigger irony, and it’s not lost on Adrian. “I must be one of the few men in the world who could’ve told you that wine was spoiled,” he tells Columbo. He’s not mad about what Columbo did, and even tells Columbo he’s willing to confess, mentioning that Karen had figured everything out. He’s free from her clutches, but he muses, “I suppose freedom is purely relative.”
They drive away from the ravine and back to the vineyard. Adrian, downtrodden, asks, “Who’s going to look after all of this? The grape and plant?” It’s a valid question, especially coming from a man who literally killed to keep the winery alive. But Columbo assures him, “It will go on, sir.” Adrian tells Columbo, “This is the only place where I was ever truly happy.”
That one sentence means more, to me, than the writers ever knew. Adrian Carsini is one of the very few Columbo villains/murders to not have a wife, or a girlfriend, or an affair partner, or to be motivated by lust. I’ve head-canoned, personally, that Adrian Carsini is closeted, and that the vineyard was where he could escape the cruelties of the world. Pleasence did not make Adrian a caricature or a character of any laughable—or horrible—nature (except for the murderer part, but hey, queer people kill too). I believe Pleasence gave the most genuine, non-comedic performance of a gay man to that point in television history. What other show was going to do that in the 1970s, overtly or otherwise? Portray a gay man as a real one, with authentic thoughts and feelings and motives? It’s what makes me love the episode even more, that even if that was never the intention, you can easily interpret it as such. Adrian Carsini is an LGBTQIA+ icon! You heard it here first!
But now here’s the final, gorgeous moment. Columbo pulls out a bottle of dessert wine for “the final course”. Normally Columbo is not this nice to the murderers, but he understands Carsini. He knows how much time, effort, and love went into the winery he’s about to lose forever, and he knows that Adrian is as hard of a worker as he is. And Adrian knows this too. “You learn very well, Lieutenant,” he tells Columbo. Columbo replies, “Thank you sir. That’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me.” Adrian chuckles, and THAT’S THAT!
The writer of the Columbophile blog (I think his name is Peter???) put it best when he reviewed the episode:
“The final scene – a mutually respectful exchange in Columbo’s car as he drives Adrian away from his winery to a life behind bars – is a beautiful thing. Two perfectionists, from completely different sides of the tracks, have found a genuine understanding and appreciation of the other. It’s the sort of TV moment that almost doesn’t exist any more and is all the more poignant because of it.”
I couldn’t have said it better myself. And this is also why the episode holds up after all these years. It’s drama, it’s great acting, it’s a fantastic story, and it’s a grisly murder with a super clever gotcha. It’s just that good.
So there it is. The absolute best Columbo episode ever. Can you tell why it’s so loved? Can you tell why I love it? If anyone’s looking to watch just one episode of Columbo, it should be that one. I wouldn’t recommend it for someone to start with to actually get into the show, because it’s among the absolute best, and they should wait to watch it until they’ve seen other, not-quite-as-good episodes. If you’re looking to watch it yourself, it’s available for free with commercials on Amazon prime!