Word: falke
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...star both of Broadway's hottest play (Neil Simon's The Prisoner of Second Avenue) and television's highest-rated new series (the triweekly Columbo portion of NBC Mystery Theater). But Peter Falk is nobody's idea of a leading man, not even his own. "I'm a mutt," he says, "not a thoroughbred." A very New York mutt at that: uncurried, uncurbable, and bristling with street moxie and manners. His appeal as an actor is neatly summed up in his own description of the police detective he plays in Columbo: "He looks like...
...years, the public saw little but the dishevelment. Falk was admired in the trade as a compassionate, thoughtful character actor, but the mantle of mass appeal kept sliding off his round shoulders. In 1964, for example, TV audiences were not ready for his first series, The Trials of O'Brien, in which he played a lawyer who could not resist a crap game or meet an alimony-payment deadline. Now, after the troubled '60s, viewers seem readier to identify with a loser hero. In the ratings among TV's new law-and-order leading men, Falk...
Banal Lunch. To Falk, it long seemed impossible that he would ever be in the same league with the Glenn Fords. "I always romanticized that artists were a very special species and that ordinary people didn't become actors," he says. The son of a clothing retailer in Ossining, N.Y., Peter was ordinary people all right-a roughneck kid who dropped out of college to join the merchant marine in World War II, later got a master's in public administration at Syracuse University and spent three bemused, bored years as an efficiency expert in Connecticut...
...always with Simon, this is a situation comedy. Mel (Peter Falk) is a 47-year-old Manhattan executive. His corporate ship is sailing the rough seas of red ink, and members of the staff are being thrown overboard. In Act I, Mel has reached the fingernail-nibbling stage. Will he go next? Equally worried colleagues arrive at the office shortly after daybreak: "They're afraid if you get there late," Mel explains, "they'll sell your desk...
Righteous Lard. A line like that never sounds like a howler on paper, but in the theater it brings the house to a roar. Which is a tribute to the palpable miracles of timing and inflection that a director like Mike Nichols and an actor like Peter Falk can produce out of their sheer unfaltering professionalism. Falk is perfectly cast. He has just the right sag to the shoulders and a face that a mirror would wince at in the morning. Lee Grant is tart, perky and warmly sympathetic. Vincent Gardenia is a pillar of righteous, lard and quivers hysterically...