Oh yes, oh yes, it’s that time of year when we ask ourselves why we should dedicate a day to honoring a sociopathic genocidal tyrant when we could spend the same day enjoying the adventures of America’s favorite fictional detective, Lieutenant Columbo? Happy Columbo’s Day, everyone!
In previous years we’ve watched the good lieutenant break down the carefully laid plans of Leonard Nimoy and Johnny Cash. This year it’s Dick Van Dyke’s turn to be the beloved entertainer turned cold-blooded murderer, as we celebrate Columbo’s Day with “Negative Reaction,” which first aired on NBC on October 6, 1974.
We open under the glowing red light of a photographer’s darkroom, as a hunched figure puts the final touches on a hilariously stereotypical ransom note using letters cut from newspaper advertisements. A woman’s voice is heard outside the door, and he looks up. It’s Dick Van Dyke! The woman wants him to finish developing film or whatever he’s doing in there, because she’s tired of waiting around. He sets the time on a small electric clock and shoves it and the note into a camera bag.
Dick plays Paul Galesko, a famous and wealthy professional photographer—apparently “wealthy professional photographer” was a thing in 1974. As our eyes get used to normal light, we meet Frances (Antoinette Bower), Paul’s wife and the woman on the other side of the door. Waving around what is clearly not her first martini of the day, she slurrily browbeats Paul for buying a ranch without consulting her—not a ranch house, not Cool Ranch Flavored Doritos, an actual ranch with pigs and chickens and the like. I guess I can see her point. Paul eventually cajoles Frances into going to see the ranch. It has a certain rustic charm, but Frances hates it, as she knew she would. When she’s not looking, he quietly removes the clock from the camera bag and sets it up on the mantel. Seeing the clock, Frances berates him for not even knowing what time it is—why, the clock’s set for 2, and it’s not even 12:45!—which gives him time to retrieve a rope from the bag, overpower her, and tie her to a chair. “If you’re trying to frighten me, you’ve succeeded,” Frances says, though she seems more annoyed than anything else, as Paul takes a couple of pictures of her with a Polaroid Model 800 folding camera, the clock positioned prominently in the background. They continue the Bickersons routine for a few minutes—he feels chained to her, she doesn’t think he’s a real man, blah blah blah—and then he finishes her off with a pistol.
Paul sets the clock to the correct time and phones his pretty assistant Lorna (Joanna Cameron) from a gas station to establish an alibi. From there, Paul drives to a random out-of-the-way location for a meetup with Al Deschler (Don Gordon), who’s recently been released from prison and whom Paul is paying to be a straw real estate buyer for him, for some reason. It was Al who bought the ranch property for Paul, and is now looking into buying an abandoned junkyard. They agree to go visit the junkyard, and Paul extracts a commitment from Al to call him from Al’s hotel room the next morning so they can firm up the details. They’re about to go their separate ways when Al thinks of something else: “Mr. Galesko, I think I ought to tell you, someone broke into my motel room and took the camera you told me to buy [to take pictures of properties].” Paul tells him not to worry about it.
Al calls on schedule the next morning, and Paul puts on a show for the benefit of the maid in the next room, helpfully writing “$20,000 in small bills” on a pad next to the phone. Heading out, he breaks into Al’s motel room again and plants the Polaroid and the scissors and newspaper from the ransom note. From there he drives to the abandoned junkyard, shows Al the fake ransom note and photo so Al can get his grubby criminal fingerprints all over them, and then shoots him. Retrieving the gun from the ranch from his bag, Paul plants it in Al’s hand and then uses it to SHOOT HIMSELF IN THE LEG. In agony, Paul hobbles over to his car and is about to make his getaway—only to be confronted by a bum, who’s been boozing it up in one of the abandoned cars and wants to know what all the shooting was about. Dammit!! Panicking, Paul hastily tells him everything is fine and beats it.
Hooray, it’s time for Lieutenant Columbo to appear! The great detective drives his shitty car up to the junkyard crime scene, where one of the uniformed officers tells him the junkyard is closed and not buying junk cars anymore. Ha ha! Detective Sgt. Hoffman (Michael Strong) is on the scene, hovering over the body of one Alvin Deschler, recently released from San Quentin after 5 years for an extortion conviction. The two detectives confer briefly, but are interrupted by Thomas Dolan (Vito Scotti), the Foster Brooks-eque drunk who partially witnessed the shooting and jusht wantsh to tell theesh fine oshifers what he knowsh. The detectives promise to get back to him, and tell a uniform to take him downtown to get a statement.
From talking to Hoffman at the scene and, later, Paul at the hospital, Columbo pieces together the story: Paul received the ransom note and photo at home early Friday morning, and received the call at 10 from the kidnapper, who gave him the time, place, and amount. Paul borrowed the money from his publisher and took it to the junkyard with the money, but the kidnapper shot him. Fortunately, Paul had a gun of his own and shot the kidnapper in self-defense. Columbo heads over to Al’s motel room, where the cops have found the camera and the ransom newspaper. Inside the camera is the negative of the ransom picture. (Old Polaroids output both an instant positive image and a negative that could be used for enlargements.) The motel manager confirms that Al made a long distance call on Friday morning to Paul Galesko’s number. Sounds like an open and shut case to me. Shortest episode ever!
But Columbo’s not satisfied. Al Deschler would have to have been pretty stupid, he says, to have just left the camera and newspaper in his motel room like that. Um, Lieutenant, were you paying attention when Paul randomly selected Al to buy hundreds of thousands of dollars of real estate on his behalf, and ordered Al to buy a Polaroid camera but then didn’t care when it got stolen, and made an oddly specific demand for Al to call him from his motel room at 10 am on Friday, and Al saw absolutely nothing suspicious about any of this? I really don’t think Al was the brightest porch light on the block. As Columbo puzzles over this, Hoffman receives an update: the police have found the body of Frances Galesko at a property recently bought by Alvin Deschler. The detectives head out to the crime scene, and as the officers on the scene fill them in about the oodles of evidence pointing to Deschler, Columbo sees something that catches his attention. It’s the clock from the photograph. The mantel is covered in a thick layer of dust, but there’s no dust on the clock—and there is dust underneath the clock. The clock is the only new thing in the house. Dude moved in and the only luggage he brought with him was a cheap electric clock.
Columbo heads into town to the St. Matthew Mission to meet up with the now-sober Thomas Dolan and ask him a few questions about the statement he gave to the police last night. Naturally, the sister in charge of the place (Joyce Van Patten) mistakes the shabby detective for a homeless man, which leads into a whole Three’s Company bit where the sister won’t listen to a word of explanation until she can sit Columbo down with a big bowl of hot stew and maybe do something about that raincoat. It’s a funny bit, but it goes on too long. Playing along, Columbo takes his stew bowl and sits down next to Dolan for a chat. To hear Paul tell the story, he shot Deschler in self defense immediately after being shot in the leg. Yet Dolan’s statement seemed to indicate that there was a much larger interval between the two shots, anywhere from several seconds to a minute or more. So how long was the gap? Unfortunately, as you’ve probably guessed by now, Dolan neither remembers making the statement nor the shootings themselves. Great.
Undaunted, Columbo visits Paul Galesko’s house to query the photographer about another apparent discrepancy: The gunshot residue analysis suggests that when Al shot Paul the two men were less than a foot from each other, but when Paul shot Al, they were several feet away. Calmly, Paul explains that the two men were struggling when Al shot Paul in the leg, Paul knocked the gun away, and then Paul shot Al in self-defense as he was going for the gun. Seemingly satisfied, Columbo heads out to the camera store where Al bought the Polaroid. The clerk remembers him, and adds an interesting detail: the camera cost $20, but Al slipped the clerk an extra $10 in exchange for making the receipt out for $100. Hard to see why he’d do that... unless he were buying the camera for someone else and trying to pad his expense account. That Al would expect a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer to see nothing amiss with being charged $100 ($500 in today’s dollars) for a 15-year-old secondhand Polaroid is another clue that Al may not be the towering genius Columbo seems to think he is. But never mind that; Columbo’s got to run off to Frances’s funeral to annoy Paul by practicing his own photographic skills.
Apologizing for the interruption, Columbo tells Paul that he was taking pictures of all the funeralgoers in hopes of identifying the accomplice. What accomplice? Didn’t Deschler act alone? Well, Columbo explains, it’s funny how an unemployed jailbird five days out of prison had a couple hundred bucks in his pocket, paid for the motel room without any problem, took taxis everywhere, and kept blowing off his parole officer’s offer to set him up with job interviews. (Plus, let’s not forget, he bought a goddamn ranch.) Sounds like he was being bankrolled by someone. Paul reasonably reminds the detective that Al was a convicted extortionist, who may have squirreled something away for himself before going upriver. Columbo apologizes again, but oh, just one more thing, sir: Paul says the kidnapper instructed him to go to a phone booth in an unfamiliar part of LA at 5 pm to receive further instructions. Columbo has the note with the ransom amount that Paul wrote while he was on the phone that morning. So why didn’t Paul also write down the location of the phone booth at the same time? Hmm.
Back at HQ, Columbo learns that Al received a temporary driver’s license and rented a car the same day Frances was kidnapped. That’s cutting it awful close, isn’t it? What if he’d flunked the driving test, or the lines at the DMV had been too long? Then he wouldn’t have had any way to get Frances to his secret kidnapping ranch. Next to Paul Galesko’s studio, where he learns that Paul published a photography book about inmates at San Quentin penitentiary. In fact, Paul spent seven weeks living, eating, and sleeping with the prisoners at San Quentin, at the same time that Alvin Deschler was interned there. When Paul is questioned about this remarkable coincidence, he claims they never met at the prison and he didn’t recognize Al’s face—even as Columbo points out that Al appears in the background of nine pictures in Paul’s book.
To the DMV, to find Mr. Weekly (Larry Storch), the man who gave Al his driving test the morning of the supposed kidnapping. Through a series of contrivances, Columbo finds Weekly in the field and offers him a ride back to the DMV, at which point the high-strung driving instructor learns that the detective not only owns the worst car in LA, but may also be the worst driver in LA. Weekly ultimately demands to be let out of the car several blocks before they arrive, but not before confirming that Al took his driving test on Thursday morning, and not at any other time.
Time to lower the hammer. Columbo summons Paul to the evidence room at the station and tells him has absolute proof that the photographer faked the ransom and committing the two murders. Dramatically, he unveils an enlargement of the ransom photo and points to the clock on the mantel. The clock, he says confidently, shows a time of ten o’clock in the morning—when Al was taking his driving test, and when Paul swears Frances was at home with him.
Relieved, Paul bursts out laughing. The image was reversed during enlargement! The little hand is on the 2, not the 10! The photo was taken at two in the afternoon, not ten in the morning! What fools these mortals be! He demands to see the original, only to be told that it was inadvertently destroyed during the enlargement process. Oops, and too bad for Paul.
Now, there’s a lot that Paul could do here without letting on that he’s the guy who actually set the clock and took the ransom photo. He could say that he has a solid memory of the ransom note photo—which is hardly implausible—and knows it’s been flipped. He could demand to see the crime scene photos from the ranch, which he knows would show the fireplace tools and the lowboy table on the right side of the fireplace, not the left. He could even say that he knows his wife’s face well enough to know when he’s looking at a mirror image of it. Paul does not do any of these things. Angry, panicking at the loss of his carefully prepared exculpatory evidence, and entirely convinced of his own criminal genius, he takes matters into his own hands. “We don’t need the original snapshot,” he says, striding over to the evidence shelves and plucking Al’s Polaroid from a shelf full of cameras. “The negative will serve the same purpose.”
Triumphantly, he opens the camera and shows Columbo the unreversed negative, still on the film roll—and thereby incriminates himself by identifying, from among a dozen conventional and instant cameras on the shelf, the exact camera that was used to take the ransom photo, and proving that he knew the negative would be in it. Confronted with this unshakeable evidence that will absolutely hold up in court without question, Paul numbly allows Sgt. Hoffman to take him away for booking.
This is a fun episode. Paul’s murder plan, convoluted though it is, is actually a lot more well-thought-out than the ones a lot of other Columbo murderers dream up, and gives the detective a lot to work with. The scenes with the sister and Mr. Weekly are enjoyably humorous and help break up the episode with the typical Columbo comedy we like to see on this show. Tragically, scandalously, Columbo is taking what I hope is only a temporary break from Netflix and the other streaming services, but “Negative Reaction” can now be downloaded, presumably legally, from the Internet Archive, along with every other episode of both the 1970s NBC series and the 1990s ABC revival. Better go grab it before someone decides a mistake has been made.