Columbo: “Negative Reaction” (Universal Television, 1974)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two nights ago I caught a rerun of a fascinating curio from the 1970’s, a state-of-the-art crime show for the period, a quite engaging episode of the Columbo TV series (which actually wasn’t a weekly series but one of three or four series characters alternating on Sunday nights in what was called the NBC Sunday Night Mystery Movie), which starred Peter Falk as Lt. Columbo (we never got his first name), the terminally rumpled-looking Los Angeles homicide detective who solved crimes basically by annoying the principal suspect into confessing. This episode was from 1974 and was called “Negative Reaction,” referencing the occupation of the principal character, Paul Galesko (Dick Van Dyke), as a photographer and also the stratagem Columbo uses to nail him for killing his wife Frances (Antoinette Bower). In the opening scene the Galeskos are having an argument and Paul is telling Frances that he’s lived under her thumb long enough and is now taking steps to do something about it. The something involves tying her up to her chair (absurdly sloppily) and then shooting her and framing the murder to look like she was kidnapped and killed by Alvin Deschler (Don Gordon), an ex-con Paul had hired as an assistant to purchase an out-of-the-way ranch where the killing would take place and, since it was in Deschler’s name, the cops would assume he was guilty. Paul also used Deschler as an agent to buy a gun for him and also buy him an antique (even then!) black-and-white Polaroid camera to take the pictures the alleged “kidnapper” would send him to document the crime and prove he had Paul’s wife. And as a final gimmick Paul shoots it out with Paul outside the ranch house, killing Deschler. Though she’s killed early on, the scene between the Galeskos is one of the most delicious elements of this story: at one point she, who has a level of upper-class hoity-toityness and sang-froid that makes Margaret Dumont look like Joan Jett by comparison, says to him as he’s tying her up, “If this is some sort of a joke, must I remind you that you have no sense of humor. And you never had, none at all!” That’s a bizarre thing indeed to say to a character being played by an actor who was one of the 20th century’s best-known comedians.

One of the gimmicks of Columbo was that we always knew who the criminal was up-front — indeed, we generally got to see the crime go down in act one even though usually Columbo himself didn’t arrive until act two or even act three — and the suspense was going to be in just how Columbo would unravel the crime scheme and what psychological strings he would pull to get the guilty party either nailed for the crime or doing himself in with a last-ditch attempt to escape. Directed by Alf Kjellin (a major filmmaker with some important features to his credit) and quite effectively written by Peter S. Fischer, “Negative Reaction” has a few too many rural schtick characters for my comfort but otherwise works quite well. Of course, the major attraction is getting to see Dick Van Dyke play a cold-hearted villain (he’d played a crook before, but that was in the 1969 film Fitzwilly, in which he was a butler turned criminal staging elaborate burglaries and robberies not for his own gain, but to preserve the lifestyle to which his once wealthy but now impoverished employer had become accustomed) — which he does quite well by effectively underplaying the role, going about his bad business with the same I’m-just-a-normal-guy demeanor with which he handled the normal suburban mini-discontents as the lead in The Dick Van Dyke Show on TV. In the 1970’s apparently quite a lot of prominent actors desperately pleaded with Universal for the chance to appear as the guest murderer on a Columbo episode, and Van Dyke was one of the best, being chillingly effective by portraying the murderer in the same matter-of-fact tones with which he’d played decent guys in most of his film and (especially) TV appearances. There are quite a few of the charming bits Columbo fans, then and now, have come to expect: when Columbo drives to the crime scene, an abandoned junkyard, the former proprietor tells him the junkyard is no longer in business and therefore they’re not interested in buying the ancient Peugeot convertible Columbo drove. There’s also a nice scene in which Columbo traces the one independent witness to the crime, an alcoholic street person, to a mission in Los Angeles and the nun who runs the place immediately takes him for just another homeless person needing a meal. When he persuades the Sister that he’s in fact a cop, she says, “Oh, you’re undercover.”

Eventually Columbo hits on the stratagem that undoes Paul’s elaborate cover-up when he visits the camera store where Paul got the old Polaroid camera (or, rather, Deschler got it for him) and he sees one of those elaborate photo layouts in which the left side is a photo printed normally while the right side is a negative image of the same photo, only “flopped” so left is now right, and vice versa. (I did a similar idea on one cover for my community newsmagazine Zenger’s as a way of illustrating that the not especially hot-looking Leatherman I’d interviewed for my cover story was a sadist with his partners but a really nice guy, intelligent and charming, when I interviewed him.) Columbo manages to have one of the ransom photos reproduced and enlarged, but has the negative “flopped” so the clock in the photo reads 10 a.m. rather than 2 p.m. (it’s one of those modernistic clocks with lines indicating the various hours but no actual numbers). To prove that the image was “flopped” Paul opens the back of the Polaroid camera with which the photo was taken originally to show the chemical negative which still remains inside the camera — and Columbo has him because the only way he’d know that the so-called “ransom” photo was shot with that camera was if he had shot it himself or someone else had under his direction. The character of Columbo wasn’t quite as innovative as we were led to believe in the 1970’s — Universal, the same studio that did Columbo in the 1970’s, had done a lot of films in the 1940’s in which the main strategy of the cops seemed to be to hang around the suspect and annoy him into confessing — notably Thomas Gomez’s character in the 1944 Phantom Lady — and I remember when Mad magazine did a Columbo spoof in the 1970’s they called both the spoof itself and the character “Cobumble.” But the show and Peter Falk’s indelible characterization of the role both hold up beautifully (like Raymond Burr, Falk was a character who before his TV success as a lawman was generally known as a villain; probably his most famous pre-Columbo credit was as Abe Reles in the 1960 film Murder, Incorporated), and I also admire what Falk did with much of the small fortune he made from playing Columbo: he gave it to his friend John Cassavetes to make independent films like A Woman Under the Influence and The Killing of a Chinese Bookie in which Falk would appear opposite Cassavetes’ wife, actress Gena Rowlands.