In honour of the passing of the late Peter Falk, I watched the first series premiere episode of Columbo. Now, there'd been two Columbo TV movies prior to this, 'Prescription: Murder' and 'Ransom for a Dead Man' (I love Columbo titles, they should always be read in the voice of Troy McClure), the first of which starred an incomparably suave Gene Barry as a murderous Doctor. Prescription: Murder is a clever film, heavy on the murderer, light on the Columbo, and it has some neat twists despite the viewer's knowledge of who-dunnit. It is, however, a story too long. At 99 minutes it ambles along at a leisurely pace. Enter the series - a fast paced gripping opening episode that... well how about that? Gee. Well, well, well. Y'know, funny thing. Funny thing how time plays tricks on you. Like my wife, she always says that when she's waiting for her toast to, y'know, toast, it seems to go on for ever. But when she's got things on her mind, you know how it is now, when she's thinking about bills and stuff and she gets distracted... it burns. Just like that. Now, y'see, there I was, thinking the episode was about forty-five minutes, maybe fifty. Turns out it was eighty minutes. Yeah. That's right. Makes you think, don't it? Sorry, I won't take up any more of your time.
...
Just one thing though... the awesome.
Murder by the Book kicks off with a man clacking away on his typewriter. The camera cuts in on the words he's getting down - some kind of mystery novel. Below the glass fronted skyscraper office he works in, down in the parking lot, a car pulls up. A man inside pulls out a gun and checks the barrel. He gets out the car and heads to the lift. All in silence - except the sound of the typewriter, clacking away. It kicks off with tension, superbly and concisely shot. And then we see the villain's face - the sickeningly smarmy Jack Cassidy as shitty writer Ken Franklin. This guy is superb. You're just itching for Columbo to get him. He's venal, womanising, smug, superior and arrogant - and yet he masks it all under a false air of joviality and friendliness. The other principal player - and Columbo is as much about the actor playing the murderer as the raincoated one himself, it's always a double act in this show - Peter Falk plays Columbo perfectly from the off. The hunch. The distracted fiddling around of props. The maddening refusal to get to the point. And there's the element that marks the genius of the actor - he acts superbly an actor doing a near-superb performance. For Columbo is himself an actor, he has to play the role of this shabby, shambolic, rambling, wooly schlub of a cop in order to trap the villain. But if he fooled everyone all the time he'd be tedious to watch. So Falk sometimes allows Columbo to slip, to display subtle hints of keen intelligence that the audience picks up - but thrillingly - the villain doesn't. And then the mask is fixed back into place, and we watch with the gratified knowledge that the villain thinks Columbo is an oaf, and that we, the audience, know his days are numbered.
All that you know of course. Did you know how much the direction makes Columbo? And the tight writing? Columbo looks like a movie. There's a shot of Franklin on the phone from his lakeside retreat. Beautifully framed, you see the lake out the window and an island - and there, rolling in behind the island, is a bank of mist, perfectly timed. This is a show that masks a tight schedule well. There's the shot of Columbo and Franklin, discussing a false lead that Franklin is throwing Columbo's way. Columbo is submissive, scratching his head and rubbing his jaw, nodding dumbly. He's crammed into the bottom left of the frame. Franklin is feeding Columbo shit from a wide, paternal, punchable grin - overbearing, confident, slick and looming over Columbo upper frame right. The background is underlit, the faces becragged in harsh study desk lamplight. Everything about the way this is shot tells you to root for Columbo and down with that bastard Franklin. It's taut film-making I admire. Too many film-makers shoot the baddy and the hero as if they're just two fellas. They're not. They're good and evil - lord and underdog fighting it out. It's up to a director to give us emotional cues. So yeah, it's good direction. And you can tell that the studios thought so too. Why, they thought so much of this young director with only one prior TV episode to his name that they gave him money to shoot his own movie. You may have heard of it. It's called 'Duel'. And the director? Why, you may have heard of him too... only STEVEN FUCKING SPIELBERG!
Ahem, sorry. But the name only came up in the end credits and I was reduced to dancing a pokey jig on my arse on the sofa, flapping my jaw with soundless excitement and waving my arms and legs.
Direction don't mean a thing without a good writer though. And it's written superbly well, nearly all of it in the little details and the fleshed out characters. And you get a twist too at the end. Not a big one, as we knew who did it all along, but a satisfying one that makes the viewer smile. Well done, Mr Scriptwriter. What's your name again? Why... it's only STEVEN FUCKING BOCHO!
Ahem.
I used to be one of the idiots who decried Columbo without ever having watched an episode. A murder story without a mystery? What? Are they stupid or something, or what? But I was wrong. Columbo is the perfect format. It was revolutionary in America at the time for it's rejection of the conventional who-dunnit format, as much there as it was here. It also tragically spawned some really shitty wannabes. Murder She Wrote roped Angela Lansbury as the lead, but with the fatal flaws of Lansbury being a punchably smug, smuggity smug woman from Smug City, with all the humanity of Anne Robinson throttling a puppy, whilst pitting herself against C-list actors. Columbo punched above its weight by pitting unknown but obviously ace schlub Peter Falk against the cream of the TV crop. Robert Culp! Leslie Nielsen! Patrick McGoohan! Roddy McDowall! John Cassavettes! Leonard Nimoy! Robert Culp again! Martin Landau! Donald Pleasance! Jack Cassidy again! (Bizarrely in another tale about a murderous writer. Talk about recycling, season 3 was probably running low on ideas.) Johnny Cash - JOHNNY FUCKING CASH! (Playing a murderous, um, country western singer. Er, I guess season 3 really was running low on ideas.) But never mind - Dick Van Dyke! The awesomely named
POUPEE BOCAR! Oskar Werner! Jack Cassidy AGAIN! Robert Vaughan! William Shatner! (Wow, gotta love Shatner's insecurity. Nimoy directs a movie, so Shatner's got to direct a movie. Nimoy releases a single, so Shatner has to release a single. Nimoy murders a guy, so Shatner has to murder a guy. He plays a murderous egotistical television actor by the way, I'm not making this up.) Faye Dunaway! Rip Torn! George Wendt! ("Hey Norm!" BLAM BLAM BLAM!) Billy Connolly! Patrick McGoohan Again! William Shatner again! Robert Culp AGAIN AGAIN AGAIN!
So yeah, that's one justifiably proud casting director right there. Columbo, it's great. Even when it's slightly ridiculous. All those cocky actors and actresses, waiting to be taken down a peg or two. Homicide: Life on the Street it ain't, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have merit. Falk worked hard to keep it plausible and keep it all about the characters and the wordplay, even fighting executives and writers when they tried to inject sex and violence into the format, and notoriously demanding rewrites of sub-par material.
Of course, Peter Falk had a few other fine roles. He was a restless actor. Most people when pressed for another role reach for his character of the grandfather in Princess Bride, but he was also in riskier stuff like Wim Wender's superb 'Wings of Desire', grounding a strange tale about fallen angels with his own well-worn humanity. He made his broadway debut playing Joseph Stalin in The Passion of Joseph D. It's a shame he wasn't used more once Columbo finished its main run, but by then he was seen as a liability by many serious film-makers owing to audience over-familiarity. The irony was that he played Columbo too well for his own good; everyone forgot that Falk was playing the role of a man who was playing a role, and automatically thought of him inseperable from the vision of the raincoated, cigar waving, confused bum detective himself.
But that's what people remember, and what he'll ultimately be remembered for. Everyone feels the loss of Columbo because he was one of the little people, one of the quiet good guys of the world, and Falk seemed to embody that weary, unshowy, unheroic decency that we like to think exists in the real world, where a good, dogged man faces a villain down not through gun play and explosions, but just by uncovering the truth. He's one of us, as Falk was one of us. An unpretentious guy who had the unforced honest charm of a regular joe.
Rest in peace, Peter Falk. Now everyone fill a chunky 70's style glass tumbler of whiskey and go and watch a Columbo.
(Heh heh, 'Poupee Bocar'.)
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