Columbo: “Double Exposure” (Levinson-Link Productions, Universal, 1973)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

At 11 p.m. last night I watched a 1973 episode of Columbo on the Sundance Channel featuring a gimmick Charles remembered from watching the show when it first ran (when he was only 10 years old). As the show begun he even wrote the final gimmick on a piece of paper and showed it to me at the end just to prove he had remembered it correctly. Written by Stephen J. Cannell (who, like Steve Bochco, who’’d written the last Columbo rerun Charles and I watched, went on to be a major TV writer and producer in his own right, specializing in mystery and crime shows), this Columbo episode, “Double Exposure,” was clearly inspired by the 1958 book The Hidden Persuaders by sociologist Vance Packard. Packard’s book was an exposé of how advertising agencies were hiring psychological consultants to do research in humans’ basic needs, desires and drives in order to create ad campaigns potential customers would find irresistible. The main figure in The Hidden Persuaders was a man named Dr. Ernest Dichter (whose last name, by the way, is the German word for “poet”), who ran an elaborate operation to research human nature for the benefit of advertisers.

The comparable character in “Double Exposure” is Dr. Bart Kepple (Robert Culp, five years after the end of his star-making TV series I Spy), who has built a business mini-empire largely on the funding of ad agency owner Vic Norris (Robert Middleton). One of the techniques he’s working on is “subliminal cuts,” a technique advertisers experimented with in the 1950’s: the idea is if you spliced a single frame of film containing a picture of food – popcorn, a hamburger, a drink – into the middle of a movie, the audience would register that image and it would subconsciously make them hungry for that sort of food and they’d go to the theatre snack bar to buy it. Apparently, these attempts to affect audience members with subliminal cuts didn’t work – they actually confused audiences and made it more difficult for them to follow the movie – but in this story Dr. Kepple (he continually corrects Columbo (Peter Falk) when the police lieutenant calls him “Mr. Kepple” and says, “That’s Dr. Kepple”) uses the subliminal cutting technique as part of an elaborate murder plot … and Columbo uses it at the end of the episode to trap him.

The person Dr. Kepple wants to murder is his backer Vic Norris, whom he wants to kill because Norris is about to cut his funding for Kepple’s institute and Kepple figures that if he kills Norris and frames Norris’s wife (Louise Latham) for the crime, whoever inherits the agency will continue to fund him. He decides to kill Norris at a screening of the latest movie he’s made, an ode to salesmanship as the key factor in making the American economy work. Since he hasn’t recorded the film’s narration with a professional commentator yet, Kepple decides to create an alibi for himself by supposedly narrating the movie live – only he has a portable tape recorder with the commentary on it and he plays the tape and slips away from the mike during the screening. (His tape recorder is a cheesy cassette portable and there would have been a noticeable drop in sound quality when he stopped the live narration and turned on the tape – but that’s just one of innumerable plot holes in this program.) Before the screening he feeds Norris a plate of caviar, a salt-heavy food which will make him thirsty, and we’ve also seen him cut a single frame of film containing the image of a drink so Norris will be psychologically impelled to leave the theatre and get a drink, whereupon Kepple can shoot him. Charles questioned how Kepple’s aim could be so good he could drop Norris with a pistol from a substantial distance, but I referenced his I Spy role and said, “He was an international spy for four years! Of course he knows how to handle a gun!”

The way he sets up Mrs. Norris for the frame is to call her, disguising the voice, and tell her he’s the boyfriend of Tanya Baker (Arlene Martell), a hot-looking model Kepple frequently uses in his presentations (a still of her appears in his movie as an example of sex appeal and the narrator rather patronizingly describes her appeal as irresistible), and that Tanya is having an affair with Mr. Norris and if he meets her at a streetcorner she can catch them together. She duly drives to the corner where Kepple told her to go, and of course nothing happens and she’s stranded there for an hour, thereby ensuring that when her husband gets killed she won’t have an alibi. Dr. Kepple explains that in 70 percent of the cases in which a married person is murdered, their spouse is the culprit (a statistic that gets quoted in a lot of crime shows today, not by the killer but by the cops!), but as usual in the Columbo formula Lt. Columbo seems to intuit that Kepple is the murderer and continually nags and annoys him into confessing.

Midway through the story Kepple was subject to a blackmail attempt by his projectionist, and responds by going to the movie theatre where he works and shooting him during the running of a movie (High Plains Drifter with Clint Eastwood as both star and director, and like Columbo a Universal release). The murder is noticed when the film suddenly stops at the end of reel two, and of course the police assume the killing happened when the second reel was running – but Columbo deduces that Kepple actually killed the projectionist during the first reel and threaded and started the second reel himself. He knows this because the projectionist talked to Columbo and explained his habit of sticking a nickel towards the end of a film reel so when the reel was about to run out, the nickel would fall to the floor and the sound would signal him to change the reel. (He explained – and I’m sure this is real – that projectionists get bored running the same film over and over again during a theatrical run and look for other things they can do in the booth; in his case, he reads crime novels.) Later in the episode, Columbo gets into a golf cart and drives out on a course where Kepple and some of his rich friends are playing, getting in his way and spoiling his shots by making him nervous. One obstacle in Columbo’s attempt to nail Kepple for the crime is the killer used a .22 pistol, but Kepple’s two guns (stored in a glass-doored cabinet in his office and visible to everybody) are larger calibres and their ballistics don’t match that of the murder gun.

In the end Columbo essentially breaks into Kepple’s office and has a police photographer take photos of him in various poses, with the idea that by using subliminal cuts he will get Kepple to reveal where he’s hidden the device he used to commit the murder: a so-called “calibration converter” he could insert into his gun to make the barrel smaller so it could fire a smaller-sized bullet than it’s supposed to. I wondered if calibration converters were a real thing, and I found a Wikipedia entry that says they are – only the link, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caliber_conversion_sleeve, calls them “caliber conversion sleeves.” This source describes sleeves that go into the chamber where the bullet is stored before it is fired, and said that sleeves like the one in this story that shrink the whole barrel – not just the chamber – are rarer and require much more radical modification of the gun to work: “Sleeves that exceed the chamber length are generally used in break open actions, which allow easy insertion and removal. Like supplemental chambers, caliber conversion sleeves completely surround the new cartridge case, but cannot be ejected or fed from a magazine, so they only offer a single shot per barrel without manual extraction and reloading. The calibers supported by caliber conversion sleeves are limited by the difference between the calibers. The sleeve's barrel must be thick enough to provide structural integrity to the barrel, and so requires a large enough internal barrel diameter to hold the new barrel. One manufacturer has a .40 caliber (10 mm) minimum diameter for these inserts in .22 rimfire caliber.” That – .49 to .22 – seems to be what the character of Kepple used in the episode (though it isn’t a break-open gun and he just slips the sleeve in and out of the barrel), which of course ends with him being arrested during the latest screening of his movie.

I’m impressed that Charles remembers as much as he does of shows he saw when he was 10, and Columbo holds up pretty well largely due to the contradictions within Columbo himself – he’s an intelligent investigator who carefully cultivates the image of a proletarian doofus – though it’s also amazing this show lasted as long as he did (and earned Peter Falk a ton of money, much of which he used to fund the independent movies shot by his friend, John Cassavetes, most of which co-starred Falk and Cassavetes’ wife, Gena Rowlands) when essentially Columbo’s whole strategy was to intuit the guilty party at the beginning and then annoy them into confessing.