In ‘Guilty Conscience’ Anthony Hopkins Shows How Not to Contemplate Murder

Suffering from a bout of insomnia recently, I caught an old movie entitled “Guilty Conscience,” starring the incomparable Anthony Hopkins as a rich lawyer who is plotting to do away with his wife, played by Blythe Danner.

Hopkins’ character has every reason, in his own mind, to kill his wife. The wife is on the verge of filing for divorce and has enough goods on him to break the pre-nup and thus come away with a considerable amount of his wealth. Most of the movie, though, is Hopkins’ character spinning out various scenarios about how he would do the deed, making it look like either an accident or that someone else did it, he having formulated an air tight alibi. Swoozie Kurtz, by the way, played his ditzy mistress.

There are a few twists and turns, which we shall not reveal.

The fact that the creator of “Columbo” William Link is involved in this film shows. Every one of the murder scenarios Hopkins’ lawyer character contemplates is just the sort of killing that a character on one of the iconic movies starring Peter Falk would have tried to pull off, elaborate, painstakingly planned, and brilliant executed. They each have that fatal flaw that Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poroit, or Lt. Columbo himself would have uncovered without breaking a sweat.

The problem with these murder scenarios is that each of them involve the police finding a body with a crime scene full of clues that can be gathered and then examined. Hopkins’ more famous character, Hannibal Lecter, would have had no problem doing away with the wife and making sure that she was never found.

That is the key to doing a murder, at least we are informed by TV and the movies. Dexter Morgan, another skilled murderer, takes his victim to an undisclosed location, duct tapes them to plastic wrap, dispatched them, and then disposes of them off the coast of Miami, no one the wiser. No body, no evidence.

This method would likely have been too strenuous for Hopkins’ lawyer character to undertake, as it involves lifting, carrying, and chain sawing. It proves to be his undoing.