Good murders and bad murders

They did this years ago on Columbo. Dick Van Dyke played a photographer who murdered his wife who was a terrible person. Everyone likes Dick Van Dyke, and his wife in the episode was so terrible, they didn't want people to get mad at Columbo for arresting him, so they had Dick Van Dyke murder an innocent, likable ex-convict he hired who was grateful that someone was willing to give him a job after getting out of prison. This seems to happen a lot in murder stories.

The Talented Mr Ripley murdered only obnoxious rich people. So at the end, they tacked on another murder, a victim who didn't do anything so we'd know that Mr Ripley was a very bad man.

The implication is that some murderers are perfectly nice and their victims deserve to die.

I guess there are people who believe this. There have been cases in the news where men try to impress women by claiming to have killed people. Mark Fuhrman was one example. Another was disgraced congressman Wes Cooley who wooed his common-law wife by telling her he had been an assassin for the CIA.

Slingblade was the only good movie about a good murder. The Slingblade guy killed a horrible person but he still needed to be locked up in the end.

There have been movies in which kidnappers were presented as perfectly nice, reasonable people. Thay had good reason to abduct someone for ransom. 

I've never understood these movies where professional killers are the heroes. There was a French movie where a hit man is so offended that he was hired to kill a child that he hunts down the people who hired him. The Mafia does murder children. The pope denounced them after two cases where they murdered preschoolers.

On Breaking Bad, they made that monster Mike Ehrmantraut into a sympathetic character. Viewers were actually unhappy that Walt killed him.

Kurosawa's Yojimbo arranged things in the end so the bad people could all be wiped out without Toshiro Mifune having to kill Seibe's wife, son or either of the old guys--the sake brewer and the silk merchant.

And one last thing about that episode of Columbo.

Columbo caught Dick Van Dyke in the end because he brought him to the police lab. There were several Polaroid cameras sitting on a shelf. Dick Van Dyke unthinkingly grabbed the right camera somehow knowing it was the one used to take the photo of his tied-up wife used in the fake ransom note he sent himself.

It was obvious that that was the camera. The print had a large tag on one end that was characteristic of the older Polaroids. That was the only camera that could have taken the picture. Even I knew that.