Extra Information Unlike most Columbo cases "Death Lends a Hand" centers on murder that is not premeditated and carefully planned. The killing is an accident. Still, Brimmer lacks the monumental vanity of Jack Cassidy’s Ken Franklin, yet there is a controlled fury about this character that makes his somewhat more threatening. There is a nice moment, Levinson said, when "Culp is eating in his office, and Peter leans over the table and gets his tie in the food. Culp just picked it up and mopped it off. That’s not in the script. It just happened on the set." Gracing the episode with his presence is Oscar-Winning actor Ray Milland ( The lost Weekend ), a veteran of such suspense films as The Ministry of Fear and Circle of Danger, The Thief and Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder, Cast as an iron-willed publisher, he is nonetheless lets great love and sorrow show through Arthur Kennicut’s stern exterior. Levinson , Link and Falk had argued about Columbo being introduced as a police officer with an expired driver’s license. Falk thought this was taking Columbo’s sloppy nature too far. Ironically, the scene Falk agreed to shoot was cut out because of time considerations. But a scene left in the final cut shows Columbo on line at the motor vehicle bureau.
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