This is still my personal favorite, due to van Dyke doing a slow burn during the whole investigation, and the expression on his face when he realizes how Columbo tricked him into giving himself away.
Now You See Him is a close second, mainly because Jack Cassidy plays such a smug SOB that you are just dying for Columbo to catch him.
Wasn’t this scene in “Negative Reaction” (the one with Dick van Dyke)?
This was also in “Negative Reaction.” Columbo was looking for the derelict who was passed out in a junkyard car when the murder was committed.
The nun who took pity on him was the murderer in another episode.
Thanks.
I tend to rank Columbo episodes based largely on the quality of the villain–I liked all of Robert Culp’s appearances for example ( I think he had at least four.)
I really like “An Exercise in Fatality”, that featured Robert Conrad as fitness mogul Milo Janus. The scene where Conrad is exercising on the beach and Columbo (breathlessly) tries to keep up with him to keep asking questions is great.
My favorite Robert Culp appearance is in “Double Exposure”, where he is the guy who is an expert in subliminal advertising, it features a lot of cool technology stuff for that era.
“By Dawn’s Early Light”, with Patrick McGoohan as a military school commandant, is also good–McGoohan won the Emmy for this appearance. McGoohan was in two other Columbo episodes–and won another Emmy for “Agenda For Murder.”
Anytime I think of Columbo retrospectively I’m struck by the “high quality” of the show’s production for TV at the time, when TV production in general was often low quality and cheap. They had tons of very high-quality actors as guest starring villains, they had a number of very big directors and writers behind many of the episodes as well.
I agree, and I did always wonder if a lot of that was Falk, who had a terrific film career, calling on people/resources other shows couldn’t get.
As an aside, some of the panoramic shots of L.A. left me aghast with the amount of visible smog in the air.
Part of the show’s high quality was due to it not being a weekly series—they had a lot of time and money to do things right.
One of my favorite murderers was George Hamilton, as the psychiatrist who programmed Lesley Warren to jump off a balcony. As in many other roles (like the Snob Man in MAD Magzine’s satire “The Guru of Ours”), Hamilton was excellent as a smarmy villain who was certain he could outfox Columbo.
I believe he was in a total of four—as the Commandant of a military school, a CIA agent and former fighter pilot, a funeral home director, and a Senator’s lawyer.
I would have loved to see a Monk/Columbo crossover episode for exactly that reason. How fun would it have been to watch Monk have to deal with Columbo’s messiness?
And a digital watch to establish an alibi in one episode (I forget which one).
^The one where Oskar Werner murdered his mother-in-law and used a doctored videotape to throw the cops off. Oskar owned a lot of different gadgets in this one.
One I know I saw but don’t remember much of had a woman murder someone by igniting a gasoline fire just as the victim pulled into his (or her) driveway. Columbo knew the accident had been staged because the trail of burnt gasoline was a long one.
Like the episode with Johnny Cash, I never see this one repeated any more.
That’s an early one, “Requiem for a Falling Star.”
How many Columbo episodes have murderers or victims who are intended to be recognized as versions of particular people. Johnny Cash is a special case, since he’s playing a murderous version of himself, but there are others.
Thanks for the ID. 
The killer in “Murder, Smoke, and Shadows” is said to have been based on Steven Spielberg, but given that he directed the first episode and all, it always seemed kind of too mean spirited to be true (at least to me).
In Mind over Mayhem one of the characters was named Steve Spielberg. He was the boy genius.