Lieutenant Columbo, played with average Joe charm and unshowy, easy-to-miss dexterity by Peter Falk, is more than meets the eye — to the bad guys, not us, because we know how things will turn out.

The 1970s saw a young Steven Spielberg making films that felt both intimate and larger than life. There was the white-knuckle suspense of Duel (1971), where a man could only rely on himself to escape ...