Peter Falk Versus Columbo (ZED, ARTE France, American Public Television, PBS, 2019)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

On Monday, August 14, my husband Charles and I returned from the Spreckels Organ Pavilion concert (https://musicmagg.blogspot.com/2023/08/san-diego-civic-organist-presents.html) and watched a quite intriguing little program on actor Peter Falk called Peter Falk Versus Columbo. It was produced in France and directed by Pascal Cuissot and Gaëlle Royer (Royer is also credited as the writer), and the show’s title made it seem like Peter Falk had hated playing Columbo, the rumpled Italian-American homicide detective who solved crimes among Los Angeles’s rich and powerful, off and on between 1971 and 2003. In fact he loved the show, not only because it gave him money, fame and standing in the movie industry actors who aren’t conventionally attractive physically rarely get, but because he was able to put a lot of his own quirks into the role. Columbo’s famous raincoat, which he almost invariably wore on the show, had come from his personal wardrobe, and the equally iconic Peugeot convertible he drove had been left behind on the Universal lot by a French actor who’d brought it over and then abandoned it when he went home. Peter Falk was born in New York City, in The Bronx, on September 16, 1927 (just 10 days after my mother!), and as a child he got a tumor in his head that he survived but cost him his right eye. That gave him a squint that he used effectively in a lot of his roles, including as Lieutenant Columbo. Falk played high-school sports despite his disability, and also toyed with accounting as an alternate career choice (he briefly worked as an efficiency expert for the Connecticut Budget Bureau) before he settled on acting as his life’s work. Falk studied with legendary actors and acting teachers Eva Le Gallienne and Sanford Meisner.

His rumpled looks and ineradicable Bronx accent seemed to “type” him as gangsters; he played a real-life character, Abe Reles, in the 1960 semi-documentary film Murder, Inc., about the legendary gangster Albert Anastasia (Howard I. Smith) and his decision to turn murder into a for-sale commodity. Falk was discovered by the great director Frank Capra, who cast him in what turned out to be Capra’s last film, Pocketful of Miracles (1961), and both Murder, Inc. and Pocketful of Miracles won Falk Academy Award nominations (though he never won). In 1965 Falk played an attorney in a TV series called Trials of O’Brien, which lasted just one season, and the grind of having to do a new episode every week got to him. So when Universal shot a TV movie in 1971 called Murder by the Book which introduced the Columbo character – it was about the lesser talent in a mystery writing team who kills his writing partner when the man threatened to leave him and go solo – it was such a hit that Universal wanted to turn it into a series. Murder by the Book was written by Steven Bochco and directed by the then-young (just 24!) Steven Spielberg, who said he deliberately shot it like a feature film, with a mix of long shots, medium shots and close-ups, rather than the heavy emphasis on close-ups common in TV shows of the time because most people’s TV’s were pretty small and low-resolution, so close-ups were what the small screen did best.

Because Falk didn’t want to commit to the weekly grind of a TV series, Universal coupled Columbo with two other mystery shows – including one called Arrest and Trial which was essentially Law and Order before Law and Order: the first half showed the crime and how the police apprehended the criminal, while the second half showed how the criminal was prosecuted – and therefore Falk only had to do eight episodes of Columbo per year. One of the gimmicks of Columbo was that you were always shown the crime in progress before Columbo made his entrance – which the “suits” at Universal complained about but which became one of the show’s trademarks. At a time when most police officers who played leads on cop shows were action heroes, Falk was quiet, thoughtful, taciturn. At a time when most crime shows on TV focused on the lower classes, Columbo seemed to investigate almost exclusively murders among the rich and powerful. And at a time when most TV crime shows ended in shoot-outs, episodes of Columbo finished with Falk essentially annoying the criminal into confessing, often with his trademark line, “Just one more thing … .” (This wasn’t as innovative as many Columbo fans, and many who worked on the series, seemed to think; in the 1940’s Universal had frequently cast homely actors, including Thomas Gomez in the 1944 film Phantom Lady, as police detectives who similarly annoyed killers into confessing.) Indeed, Columbo became such a cultural phenomenon that actors fought hard for roles as the guest-star villains, many of them (including country-music legend Johnny Cash) essentially playing themselves but with murder on their minds.

While Falk was working on TV he also hooked up with a long-time friend, actor John Cassavetes, who was building a reputation as a director with independent shoestring productions like Shadows and Faces. Falk and Cassavetes met on a project directed by Elaine May (which became one of the biggest film disasters of all time, Mikey and Nicky, largely because May decided to use two separate recorders for the sound, and she literally spent two years trying to mix the film so audiences could hear the dialogue), but they hit it off. With Cassavetes directing, him and Falk each putting up half the money, and Ben Gazarra joining the project as the third lead, the three made a movie called Husbands in which three unhappily married men take a vacation in London and more or less revert to their childhoods. Later Cassavetes and Falk would join for a more prestigious project, A Woman Under the Influence, in which Cassavetes’ wife, actress Gena Rowlands, played a wife suffering a nervous breakdown and clinical depression. Falk played her proletarian boor of a husband, and Falk recalled that at a college film screening at the height of the women’s liberation movement, he was booed and called names by an audience who identified him too well with his character. Falk died in 2011 of complications from Alzheimer’s disease, but he left a fascinating legacy of accomplishment both in mainstream TV and independent film, and even 20 years after Falk filmed his last Columbo show the series still holds up well as engaging high-quality entertainment. Charles made a joke about why Columbo producers Richard Levinson and William Link didn’t think of having Peter Falk play a dual role on the show as the celebrity murderer and as Columbo bringing him to book, which reminded me of my own joke when I saw the film Brief Interviews with Hideous Men of how Christopher Meloni played an asshole who seduced women he met at airports whose husbands or boyfriends were supposed to meet them there but didn’t, and my joke was precisely the same: Meloni as the seducer of Brief Interviews loses his cool and beats to death a woman who resists his slimy advances, and then Meloni as Elliott Stabler from Law and Order: Special Victims Unit solves the crime and arrests him.