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

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

Last night my husband Charles and I watched the Columbo rerun on the Sundance Channel – an intriguing episode from March 25, 1973 called “Double Shock.” I was already struck by the opening credits, which announced that the show featured two actors who’d worked with Orson Welles: Paul Stewart, who played the butler in Citizen Kane; and Jeanette Nolan, who played Lady Macbeth in Welles’ 1948 Macbeth film. As Charles noted, it also featured Martin Landau, who just over a decade later would play Bela Lugosi in Tim Burton’s biopic Ed Wood, in which Orson Welles appeared as a character in a brief scene in which Vincent D’Onofrio played him. Paul Stewart played Clifford Paris, a wealthy man who was proud of his health and physical fitness (he had a fully outfitted workout room in his home) and Jeanette Nolan played his housekeeper, Mrs. Peck, who was so fanatically devoted to keeping the place in immaculate shape she chewed out Lt. Columbo (Peter Falk) when his cigar dropped ashes on the bathroom floor.

In the opening sequence we see a man show up at the house with gloves on, get in and march to the bathroom where Clifford is taking a bath. He announces that for Clifford’s upcoming wedding to a woman much younger than he, Lisa Chambers (Julie Newmar, obviously thrown in the cast as cheesecake – her most memorable sequence is a pan shot of her doing an exercise that requires her to lay on her back and stick her legs in the air, and the camera starts at her feet and then pans down), he has got them a hand-held electric mixer. He plugs it in, turns it on and throws it in the bathtub, instantly electrocuting Clifford – thereby explaining the word “Shock” in the episode title – and incidentally causing Mrs. Peck’s TV to black out for a few seconds until someone replaces the fuse. (This show is technologically dated enough that they’re still using burnable screw-in fuses instead of circuit breakers, and also the house has a red dial phone, though when they’re called from an office the person calling them is using a touch-tone with the push-button dialing familiar to us today. Also Mrs. Peck’s TV has the old-style remote control that used sound bars instead of light or radio signals) and it comes back on – only the outage has permanently thrown the color out of whack and made the faces on the impossibly badly acted doctor show she watches turn purple. (I remember my first color TV, an inheritance from my grandfather, that turned white people’s faces purple and Black people’s faces green: I have often described watching the first episode of Roots on this TV and being moved by the scene in which Kunta Kinte stood tall and proud, his green skin glowing in the light of the African jungle.)

We soon learn that Martin Landau is playing Dexter Paris, Clifford’s nephew, a flamboyant playboy who hosts a Galloping Gourmet-style cooking show on TV (in one of this episode’s best scene he enlists Lt. Columbo as an audience volunteer and has him separate eggs on camera), and we assume he’s the killer since we actually saw Martin Landau commit the murder. Only Dexter has an identical twin brother, Norman Paris, who comes on the scene to claim his share of Clifford’s estate – since he died without a will and he hadn’t yet married Lisa when he croaked, the two brothers are his joint heirs – and he’s also played by Martin Landau. At this point I was wondering if the writers – Jackson Gillis co-wrote the story with Columbo creators Richard Levinson and William Link, but the script was written by the young Steven Bochco (who would later become a major television producer on his own and would be responsible for the ghastly serialization of prime-time dramas; after Bochco, no longer could one-hour TV series dramas be discrete episodes with only the characters carrying over from one to the next; now they all have to have continuing “story arcs” and worship at the shrine of the Great God Serial) – were going to put Columbo in the same dilemma as the cops and prosecutors of a later Law and Order episode that also used the gimmick of having two twins accused of a crime and the authorities unable to prosecute either of them because they couldn’t determine beyond a reasonable doubt which one was the culprit. (I also ran through in my head the predecessors for stories involving murders committed by throwing a live electrical appliance in the victim’s bathtub: pioneering Queer mystery writer George Baxt did it in his 1966 novel A Queer Kind of Death using a radio, and Charles was sure there was an Alfred Hitchcock Presents TV episode that did it even earlier with a space heater.)

The Sundance Channel’s promos pulled a bit of deceit on us by showing a clip of Julie Newmar being interrogated by Columbo and asking, “Am I some kind of suspect?” – making it seem as if she were the killer we’d be on to from the get-go but Columbo would have to work to prove guilty – but in the end she’s killed herself halfway through the episode when she turns out to have a will Clifford had drawn up, but never legally registered, leaving his entire fortune to her. Norman’s business manager, Michael Hathaway (Tim O’Connor), offers to go to Lisa and extract her copy of Clifford’s will so he can destroy it and enable the brothers to claim the estate, in exchange for an employnent contract allowing him to continue in the job. (In a more nurmal whodunit this would lead is to believe that he had been embezzling from Clifford and had killed him when Clifford found out – but Columbo almost never did whodunits.) Only when he goes there she’s already dead, pushed off her balcony to her death below. Charles also noticed future star Dabney Coleman as Columbo’s assistant, Detective Murray. At Dexter’s insistence, Columbo and Dexter trace Norman on his weekly trip, supposedly to San Francisco on business but actually to Las Vegas to gamble – at which he’s so bad he already owes over $35,000 to the casino we see him patronize (and goodness knows how much to others) – thereby establishing that despite his job as a banker he needs his uncle’s money to bail him out (though in a nice bit of writing he says that if he wanted to obtain money illegally, it would be far easier for him to embezzle than to knock off his uncle). Eventually Columbo realizes that, despite their professed enmity, the two Martin Landaus actually committed the murder together – he realizes this by subpoenaing their phone records and documenting that in the two weeks before their uncle’s death, they called each other regularly (in today’s crime show it’s utterly routine for the police to obtain the “luds” – the records of phone calls made to or by a suspect – but I guess in 1973 that was considered something exotic to do.) Columbo arrests both Landaus and takes them into custody as one of the better Columbo episodes of the period ends.