Biagio Cocuzza

Wilder recruited the famous Texan transvestite Barbette as a consultant to Curtis and Lemmon. Barbette ... was now in retirement. He'd had a glittering circus career before it ended prematurely due to poor health.-- Aubrey Malone, The Defiant One, p 80

Columbo's "Forgotten Lady", as written by Bill Driskill, is the only one of the original episodes to veer off the conclusions viewers expected of the series-- and is also one of the few episodes that immediately locates me back home watching it as a kid, not then nuanced enough to realize the regal Janet Leigh was here taking a rough 75 minute opportunity to vainly attempt to refute what Hitchcock did to women in the creation of the slasher genre. While not to be taken as a promotion of censorship, I tend to agree with the old lion's hostility to Psycho, whose legacy can be traced straight through to rap lyric misogyny, that jump cut butcher knife and shower curtain of which we'll never be free. It is an amoral thrill, the master's tease with his audience's hostility to feminine withholding. This is how Leigh utilized her stardom. If Monroe dripped with with lascivious intercourse, Leigh was another cup of tea entirely, despite the fact that daughter Jamie not only exists but carried on, even cheapening mother's legacy. For Janet Leigh, sexual energy is restrained. The pageantry of gazing on her looks and social grace comes first. Her style was the cake, as opposed to the exercise of love in and of itself, and Hitchcock with real malicious portents said "I'll show you," and eviscerated the shields of womenhood so well we never fully came to terms with the consequences, despite the fact that her foil against Falk isn't so much her crime as mercy for it against an aging medical impairment of which her character was unaware. The aneurysm, from which the patriarchy which she removes attempts to protect her, might be taken as a very early warning sign for Alzheimer's, which would ultimately kill Falk, whose eye cancer never advanced beyond its singular ravage which gave him his quixotic facial expression, a humane persistence for the sake of moral sanction, and even prefigures Leigh's end of life battle with vasculitis, with both actors barely making it into this century with any relevance, Falk only because he was beloved, and our nostalgia for that granting permission for Columbo to carry us forward on the back of twentieth century icons sending us off to a new century still trying to find itself, discontent with the price of the modern civilized world much closer the IRA of Hennessy than the other doomsday scenarios that preoccupied us at the time, including "global warming". Both then, and now, the west looked on the Troubles as the localized problem of a dead empire, but those guerrillas of the hot thrillers of my era were more than successful instructors for the turbulent horrors of these last two decades, while those of us who make for the fading Grace Wheeler's, desperately clinging to tarnished capital, are told the best we can do is transfix to the past, with the same passive intensity with which we try to break it.