“How could I have known that murder could sometimes smell like honeysuckle?” (Walter Neff, Double Indemnity)

The film Double Indemnity plays quite a bit in the background of Columbo’s second pilot episode, “Ransom for a Dead Man.” Why not? It contains one of the most fascinating murderesses to appear onscreen. Ace attorney Leslie Williams may be no Phyllis Dietrichson, but as played by the marvelous Lee Grant, she’ll do. Leslie watches Double Indemnity to relax after murdering her husband, dumping his body over a cliff, and faking his kidnapping. Later, her sullen stepdaughter Margaret (Patricia Mattick) watches the movie (which seems to play on a loop on some fictitious TV channel) attentively, as if she hopes that by studying the noir classic, she might uncover the truth about her father’s death.

“Ransom” premiered on TV screens in March of 1971, three years after the success of the initial pilot, “Prescription: Murder.” Richard Levinson and William Link had hoped to turn their one-off teleplay-turned-stage-play-turned-teleplay-again into a series. So did the movie’s star, Peter Falk, who was eager to evolve the character into something beyond a hard-boiled cop. For Lee Grant the stakes were even higher. After making a huge splash in her film debut, 1951’s Detective Story, Grant had been labeled a Communist by the House Un-American Affairs Committee and blacklisted from making movies. From the mid-60’s on, she began to put her career back together with appearances onstage and on television, but the opportunity to establish herself as one of the leading ingenues in Hollywood had been lost. The role of Leslie Williams helped jumpstart a decade that would see her success rise steadily and even earn her an Oscar (for Shampoo.)

All in all, most of “Ransom” is an improvement on the previous pilot, from the evocative Billy Goldenberg score to the higher production values. Grant embodies the cleverness and the hubris necessary to be a murderer in Columbo every bit as well as Gene Barry did, and she seems to be having more fun at it. And if you like the character of Lieutenant Columbo, Falk here makes great strides toward crafting the finished product – the rumpled raincoat, the seemingly confused mind that makes everyone underestimate him while it endears him to audiences. As for me? Well, I think the Columbo “persona” was part of my problem: at the risk of alienating fans of the show, I found him to be a bit much

The detective makes his first appearance outside the Williams mansion searching for a lost pen. He asks to use the bathroom and marvels at the decorator soaps in Leslie’s guest bathrooms. We learn a lot about Columbo in this episode: how much he loves his wife and chili con carne, how he hates flying, and how well his trademark roundabout interrogation technique works on the guilty and the innocent. It’s great, but even at this early stage, it starts to veer toward parody. In fact, my favorite incarnation of the character is this one:

“Ransom” doubles down on the idea of an inverted mystery by also being a sort of inverted retelling of Billy Wilder’s film. In Double Indemnity, Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck form a poisonous partnership to kill her husband and make it seem like an accident. Standing helplessly on the side is the husband’s loving daughter who wants to prove her stepmother is responsible for her dad’s death but unfortunately turns to the wrong person for help. On the other hand, Walter Neff’s growing fondness for the girl does contribute to the souring of his relationship with the evil Phyllis. In “Ransom,” stepdaughter Margaret proves a worthy adversary against Leslie when she teams up with Lieutenant Columbo. When she comes to him convinced that Leslie somehow killed her father, Columbo manipulates the girl to go to work for him. The plan they come up with turns out to be the most disappointing aspect of the pilot: after all of her cleverness and care, Leslie is brought down by the stupidest of mistakes.

As much as I enjoyed the give and take between Falk and Grant here, at ninety-five minutes the whole thing feels a little padded. But “Ransom for a Dead Man” enjoyed great success, even to the point of being released as a film in Europe, and six months later, the character of Lieutenant Columbo would finally head a series that continued, albeit sporadically in one form or another, for over thirty years. The first episode of the series proper, “Murder by the Book,” is only 75 minutes long and directed by a 24-year-old Steven Spielberg, and it is recognized as a shining start to a classic detective show.

But as no woman figures in its criminal plan, we’re going to move to Episode Six, “Suitable for Framing.” Like “Prescription: Murder,” this case features a male killer with a female accomplice. Ross Martin plays Dale Kingston, a snooty art critic who murders his kindly uncle when the old man inconveniently changes his will to leave his priceless art collection to his still-loved ex-wife Edna (Kim Hunter). Kingston shoots his uncle and then gets assistance from Tracy O’Connor (Rosanna Huffman), a besotted art student, to provide him with an alibi.

I have been a fan of Ross Martin since he played the delightful Artemus Gordon, master of disguise, in The Wild Wild West. After that show ended, Martin appeared in countless TV shows, often playing a character much like Kingston. None of his villainous turns were ever as effective as his terrifying performance in Experiment in Terror, the tense thriller where Martin played an asthmatic psychopath preying on Lee Remick, but the actor knows how to infuse his bad guys with charm.

Here, Martin plays a typical Columbo antagonist, a preening, overly clever murderer who plays right into the Lieutenant’s hands. The structure of the crime is awfully similar in its beats to Gene Barry’s murder of his wife in the first pilot, even if the details of how the girlfriend provides an alibi are different. The major difference is that, fairly early on, Dale commits a second murder of Tracy herself – which means that the presence of a female accomplice is brief and hardly merits inclusion in our “distaff” draft.

What elevates this episode is the supporting cast. Kim Hunter, who could have easily excelled as a Columbo murderess, here plays the victim’s daffy ex-wife whom Dale tries unsuccessfully to frame for his uncle’s murder. There’s also a gentle turn by Don Ameche as the victim’s lawyer, with a funny cameo by Joan Shawlee as an art maven and a not-so-funny one by Vic Tayback as a pretentious artist. Plus, the great Mary Wickes appears here too, sadly underutilized as a witness. As much as I’m not a huge fan of Falk’s Columbo shtick, his interactions with the innocent in both these episodes goes far to humanize him and balance the fake humility he pours on against his adversaries.

Early on, Columbo established its formula (it was the most formulaic of the Mystery Movies of the Week): the murder is committed, Columbo begins his cat and mouse game, the murderer is caught in a trap or mistake. That formula is more than evident here, making this feel . . . not bad, just ordinary. Nothing particularly stands out in the script by Jackson Gillis, who wrote many episodes of Perry Mason, and as I stated, the minimal presence of Rosanna Huffman tends to disqualify it, at least in my mind, from ranking on our list.

I’ll be back soon with a review of two more episodes. In the meantime, if you’re looking for something to watch, may I make a suggestion, courtesy of my friend Scott K. Ratner. In a comment on Facebook to my post, Scott mentioned a Pre-Code film from which Columbo could have certainly been inspired.

Guilty as Hell (1932) is an inverted mystery from Paramount that has a lot to recommend it. Henry Stephenson, known for playing dozens of kindly old gentlemen and noble historical figures, gets to play a fiendish killer in this early role. At the film’s start, Dr. Ernest Tindal (Stephenson) murders his much younger wife (the killing is cleverly filmed and might remind you in a significant way of the much later murder of Miriam in Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train.) Another man discovers the body and comes under suspicion, but with the case being investigated by the earnest Detective McKinley (Victor McLaglen) and the sardonic reporter Russell Kirk (Edmund Lowe), it would be well for Dr. Tindal not to rest easy.

It’s a fun film, although Lowe’s character grated on me. The most fascinating thing was watching Elizabeth Patterson, whom I grew up knowing as Mrs. Trumble, the Ricardo’s grumpy old lady neighbor in I Love Lucy, play a similar role twenty-five years earlier here.

Patterson’s true acting gifts were displayed on the Broadway stage; she didn’t even make her first movie until she was 51. She’s 58 here – which means she debuted as Mrs. Trumble at the spry age of 77!! That was meant to be a one-off role – Patterson’s second in the series – but Mrs. Trumble proved to be so popular that she appeared in sporadic episodes for the next three years.

And, for some reason, this is more interesting to me than the Ross Martin episode of Columbo, which I think I would have enjoyed a lot more had Elizabeth Patterson played the murderer!