In honor of the death of Peter Falk, I have been rewatching Columbo on Netflix.
What a panoply of guest stars! Very fun to see people like Leslie Nielson and Eddie Albert. A young Valerie Harper playing a high class prostitute! She certainly didn’t have the weight problem she was always complaining about as Rhoda.
Seems like everyone who was anyone in the 70’s was on that show. They used all the great character actors, and had a lot of stars from earlier eras on the show. Noticed that Stephen Bochco was the story editor. That young man really went places!
Another thing I noticed was that WITHOUT EXCEPTION the richie riches that Columbo was investigating were always smoking and pouring hard liquor. Probably nothing to comment on at the time, but now it looks funny.
Anyway, I am halfway through season two. Most of the episodes are up there for streaming, so have fun. It truly was a great, great show and would love to hear some comments from the other dopers on this amazing piece of american television.
One more thing…their lust of guest stars is unmatched in television history imho - John Cassavetes, Ray Milland, Roddy MacDowell, Dick Van Dyke, Robert Culp, Robert Conrad…many more; one of my favorites is Jamie Lee Curtis - tiny role, playing a waitress in a diner.
I’m not going to have much to say, but this is one of my favorite shows ever since I started watching reruns on A&E while I was in high school – I’ve been collecting the DVDs since they’ve been releasing them (only one DVD collection left, the last few movies, which should be coming very soon now) and now they’re all on netflix!
Anyway, Spielberg directed the first episode, of course. His strategy of outwitting the killers via his excessive manners and his rumpled appearance was a revelation to me, and the fact that Falk played that character for over 30 years (off and on) was really something special.
One of my favorite shows of all time. I have every episode of the original series on VHS tapes, taped off the TV when they were showing them late at night on one of the local stations. This is from way before the era of DVDs and DVRs.
My favorite episode is probably the one with Dick Van Dyke as the photographer. His crime seems foolproof, and the way Columbo catches him is ingenious.
I did this about three months. I had seen the series off and on over the years. It is a little tiring the see the same routines if you watch two movies a day. But that is not how they were menat to be seen originally…they made maybe four a year.
One thing that is always interesting to to look back and see then-new technology. There is one from about 1976 when William Shatner is showing Columbo a video camera (a big huge thing). Columbo remarks that it costs $3,000…the same as a new car. That has changed radically. In an earlier one with John Cassevetes as a rich symphony conductor, Columbo remarks that he makes $18,000 with the LAPD. Cassevetes remarks he pays that much in property taxes where Columbo estimates that this mansion costs $760,000. Of course his constant cigar smoking everywhere would not be tolerated now.
One thing I wish they had done was to cast Vincent Price as a murderer. He has a couple scenes in one were he and murderess Vera Miles are cosmetics rivals..the hissing and snarling they do at each other is great. Charlie Sheen is also in the episode.
If you are interested in the DVDs, some of them have an episode from the absolutely dreadful "Mrs Columbo" that NBC tried with a 23 year old Kate Mulgrew (complete with a 10 year old daughter). To think that Fred Silverman probably ended the series a year early to give us that as "his show"..not to mention that Falk got about $2 million for four episodes a year!! It could have been worse: according to an article that is on the kate Mulgrew totallykate website, one of the actresses Silverman sent to the producers to test for the part was Carol Wayne.
nice. I was very sad – usually I don’t care about these things – to hear of Peter Falk leaving the planet/world/whatever. He was a terrific actor (my book on Cassavetes is due to be published Spring of this coming year, in collaboration with another cinephile and fellow companion in arcana), but I’ve only seen a few episodes of his TV work.
I shall relish seeing these TV episodes, and, as always, keeping your commentary in view. Thanks!
I also had a Columbo memorial-fest over the weekend and this was among the ones I watched. It only then occurred to me that if Dick had kept his head and remembered the badly composed other photo Columbo had shown him earlier instead of grabbing the incriminating evidence, he could’ve dodged this trick and gotten away with his murders.
Season 3, episode 5 was pretty poor, but episode 6, oh my. Brainy kid, Robbie the Robot, pretty much abandons Columbo existing in real Los Angeles. I has a sad.
The one I enjoyed most was the 1990 episode “Columbo Cries Wolf” where Columbo is after a playboy-type magazine publisher whose partner has disappeared but he can’t find her body.Columbo Cries Wolf (TV Movie 1990) - IMDb
When we were kids, my sister and I had the Columbo board game. I don’t really remember the specifics of the play but there were the typical board game components (cards, tokens, etc.) We played it quite often–I wish I remembered the details!
This would have been in the mid to late '70s I think.
I remember reading at the time (not sure if it was in the board game promotional materials or another source) that Peter Falk was the highest-paid actor ever (at the time) for a TV series.
That wasn’t a good one, I agree. But there are a lot of great ones afterward., IMO. Don’t give up. Including some of my favorites:
Season 4, Episode2: “Negative Reaction” – That’s the one with Dick Van Dyke I mentioned above.
Season4, Episode5: “Playback”
Season5, Episode5: “Now You See Him”
I also have a good feeling for:
Season4, Episode 6: “A Deadly State of Mind”
even though the plot doesn’t make much sense.
I became enchanted with Columbo with the newer episodes produced in the late 80’s to early 90’s. When I look at them now, I can’t help but notice that the writing is a lot more dreadful than I noticed at the time. But I take that as a testament to how well Falk carried the show that I didn’t notice at the time. These days, I am often bothered about the implausability of actually convicting anybody using Columbo’s traps, or a guy busting that many celebrities while remaining a Lieutenant all that time, but whatever the problems with the writing, Falk always delivered a perfect Columbo.
The most memorable episode for me was “Identity Crisis” – the one with Patrick McGoohan as a spy. The words “homoerotic tension” get thrown around a lot these days, but when McGoohan is leering from his car window at Columbo fishing for change as he tried to buy as much gas as he could get for whatever he had in his pocket I knew just how he felt, because I wanted to fuck Columbo right then, too. Later, when he had Columbo at his house, offering him a fine cigar, confessing that he had bugged the Lieutenant’s house, and making mysterious, sly references to what he had learned about Mrs. Columbo, you can’t tell me these two weren’t macking on eachother.
I remember watching the original series during the NBC Sunday Mystery Movie. I also caught late-night reruns with my grandmother.
Definitely my favorite one. Van Dyke does this amazing slow burn that builds and builds through the episode, it’s hilarious. There’s an amusing aside with Larry Storch as a driving test instructer whom Columbo interviews while driving. It ends with Storch begging to be let out of Columbo’s car on some random street because Columbo is the worst driver in the world! “Do you HAVE a license?”
The ending is the best part. It demonstrates how Columbo is a fast learner, using his suspect’s skills against them. And the look on Van Dyke’s face – God, you could frame that and hang it on the wall.
Other classic episodes: “Now You See Him” with Jack Cassidy as the magician/ex-Nazi, and “An Exercise in Fatality” with Robert Conrad as the Jack Lalanne-esque exercise guru. That one has the rare moment when Columbo loses some of his cool with a suspect, getting in Conrad’s face a bit.
That was perfectly ordinary adult behavior up through the 1970s and 80s, and not really associated with wealth. Smoking was certainly ubiquitous, and drinking hard liquor was common among men anyway, if not so much women.
Ashtrays used to be everywhere, to accommodate smokers. There were ashtrays in car doors. Every table in most restaurants, even McDonald’s, would have an ashtray. Non-smokers would keep ashtrays on their tables at home, or at least handy in a nearby drawer, for the times when smoking guests would visit. Cigarette vending machines were almost as common as soda machines in public places. Cigarette butts, tossed to the ground by litterbugs, would wash up and accumulate in drainage ditches.
And smokers did not scurry outside to take deliberate cigarette breaks. They lit up wherever they were, and puffed away.
Although some people are distressed by Columbo’s cigars–the suggestion is, however, that that’s because they’re cheap and stinky. Ladies in a beauty salon in one episode, and in an art gallery in another had particular objective to the Lt. puffing away on their premises.
Interestingly, that one and the episode where he likewise flies off the handle with Leonard Nimoy both involve someone else getting hurt or killed while Columbo is slowly plodding along with his irritatingly-wearing-'em-down-at-a-glacial-pace technique. I can’t help but hope that was intentional.
