Word: falke
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This one-man disaster area hardly resembles a detective lieutenant of police, much less the hero of a successful television series. But he is both. He is Peter Falk as Columbo, on the NBC series of the same name. Every fourth week, some 37 million viewers tune in avidly to watch him shamble, sniffle, fidget, mutter and gesticulate his way through a case. The fans may be slower to pounce on a clue than he is. But usually they anticipate their favorite Columbo routines-deceptively plodding, cunningly naive-and see them coming a mile off, which is half...
Rare Match. For the series pilot, the writers' first choice to play Columbo was Bing Crosby. Crosby yawned, and eventually they were left with the actor who was at the very bottom of their list: Falk. At first Falk, too, refused the assignment, unwilling to lock his career into the usual 13-week series schedule. He finally consented when the network proposed a seven-segment miniseries, rotating Columbo with three other shows under the collective title NBC Sunday Mystery Movie. When the show was aired in March 1971, "that rare match between character and actor made...
Says Actor Robert Gulp, a two-time heavy on Columbo: "In a series the one thing that matters is how much in love with the star the audience is; the rest is nonsense." The audience certainly seems to have fallen for Falk. He gets some 300 fan letters a week. Everywhere he goes, he is introduced to policemen who are nicknamed-or call themselves -Columbo. Currently, Falk heads TV Q, the TV networks' semisecret survey of stars ranked according to their familiarity and likability...
Sweet Animal. "All the women I know want to know about Peter," says Actress Lee Grant, Falk's co-star on Broadway in The Prisoner of Second Avenue. "He has something disarming that women feel is animal-sweet animal, not kick-the-stuffing-out-of-you animal. I've acted with a lot of supposed sex symbols, and I never had the kind of inquiry I get about Peter...
...Raymond Chandler every time I turn on the television. In Perry Mason reruns, in Frank Sinatra as Tony Rome, Peter Falk as Columbo, or brand new episodes of Cannon there are elements of Philip Marlowe. Somehow, (using Bogart, perhaps as media image, because we watch television now for the same kind of entertainment our parents looked for in the movies 25 years ago) someone has turned Marlowe into the average American, leading the slightly above average American life. And therefore into a cultural hero, because you should only be slightly above average. Marlowe is more viable than Ford...