Drugged Detectives

In “The Flip Side,” the 20th episode of NBC-TV’s The Outsider (originally broadcast on February 26, 1969), Darren McGavin--playing ex-con-turned private eye David Ross--is drugged by actress Carrie Snodgress. As the authorized Darren McGavin Web site explains, “The psychological drama involves Ross with a plain sister [Snodgress] who hires him to find her missing sister, a glamorous model involved in an underworld ring dealing in narcotics, and gets involved in an extortion racket.”



Jigsaw was a 1968 film originally produced for NBC as a movie of the week. “However, due to content NBC refused to run it, so Universal gave it a theatrical release instead,” says this write-up in the Internet Movie Database (IMDb). TV Guide offers the following synopsis of that now-cultish motion picture:

This drug-related mystery has [actor Bradford] Dillman finding himself in someone else’s apartment with a dead woman submerged in the bathtub. Discovering dried blood on his hand, he wonders if he was responsible for her death during an accidental LSD-induced blackout the night before. He hires [Harry] Guardino [playing private detective Arthur Belding] to find out what really happened. Under Guardino’s supervision he takes a dose of the drug, attempting to recall the previous night's events. They discover Dillman’s co-worker [Pat] Hingle had slipped LSD into his coffee as part of an intricate blackmail scheme. In order to get Dillman’s girlfriend and his job in a government think tank, Hingle set him up.

Amid many special camera techniques which try to approximate the drug’s effects, it turns out that Dillman’s superior, [played by Victor] Jory, had been involved with the dead woman. She had been blackmailed as a result, and when she threatened to go to the police, Hingle killed her, and Jory was complicit. In a confrontation with Dillman, Hingle gets his, plummeting to the pavement from a high-up window of their think-tank office building.

Three of the people in the cast are better known for their TV work: Susan Saint James for McMillan & Wife (with Rock Hudson), James Doohan for Star Trek, and Kent McCord for Adam 12.

As the second clip above shows, at one point a bad buy portrayed by Michael J. Pollard arranges to send Belding on a hallucinogenic trip of his own.