Post by Ron Howard Voice on Jan 22, 2014 19:10:31 GMT -5
Few series establish themselves—premise, setting, style, tone—as quickly as Columbo. It takes all of one scene. The very first shot is a long one with flair, pulling back from a view of LA traffic to reveal an office where a rather modest-looking man is typing out his latest novel. A murder mystery. Close-ups show the letters forming on the typewriter: the detective, one Mrs. Melville, is accusing the murderer based on an impossibly arcane clue she gleaned through her powers of observation. And then the door opens and a real-life murderer puts a gun in the writer’s face.
There are a few catches. The gun in the face is a prank—which helps set Columbo’s tone in another way, since so much of the show is built on humor. And the other catch: this is beginning of the series, but it’s by no means the beginning of Columbo. It came after three TV movies and a stage play.
Still, if you were tuning in to NBC’s new Mystery Movie series in 1971 to catch the sort-of-pilot of the show, you’d be witnessing the Columbo formula already fully set. We see the murder plot laid, the clues set, and the scheme put in action. We see the queasy interactions between murderer and victim. Then we see the deed done and are plunged into momentary suspense: the scheme looks hare-brained; how’s he going to get away with this? And then a shabby-looking detective shows up and chases the truth.
In this case, the murderer and victim form a writer team much like the Christpocalypse duo who created Left Behind: one does all the writing, and the other takes all the credit. But they have insurance policies on each other, the writer wants to go solo, and the attention hog (played by Jack Cassidy) isn’t ready to give up his income. Cassidy convinces his partner to come along on a getaway jaunt to his cabin, arranges the office to look like it’s been rather inattentively ransacked, and then drives his partner to his doom.
The scheme seems crazy because Cassidy carefully engineers matters so it looks like the murder takes place in their office, but of course the police will show up to find no body, since the body’s at his cabin. There’s also no blood in the office anywhere, although nobody on the show mentions this. We only get in on the plan slowly: he’s staging it like a mob hit, the body left at his own house as a “warning”.
The hero doesn’t show up until 18 minutes in. When he does, he introduces himself this way: “I’m just another cop. My name’s Columbo. Lieutenant.” Just another cop? His uniform is remarkably shabby, particularly the giant trench coat he wears like it’s his skin. His posture is reprimand-worthy. In the very next scene, he tries to make an omelet and drops an eggshell right in.
Peter Falk was the third actor to play Lt. Columbo, and if you include the first two, he was the fifth choice for the part. But his influence was tremendous: he invented, and often improvised, Columbo’s mannerisms and eccentricities, and he provided all the character’s clothing. Some stars have their wardrobes by Edith Head. Peter Falk pulled his wardrobe out of, well, his wardrobe. Columbo often rattles his suspects by asking unwanted questions, but they also look harried because Falk improvised distractions which made him all the more irritating (and, to those of us who aren’t murderers, adorable).
With this show, we don’t talk about the quality of the mystery but the quality of the solve: how satisfying is the means with which Columbo springs his trap? In this first series episode, alas, the solve is pretty crummy. The lieutenant finds a scrap of paper with Cassidy’s murder scheme jotted down, for use in a Mrs. Melville mystery novel. It feels arbitrary and unsatisfying, and it’s also the clue Hercule Poirot uses to solve possibly Agatha Christie’s crappiest mystery, The Clocks. (In that one, a dead body is found in a room surrounded by clocks, which is a scene taken from a novel-within-the-novel. Spoilers, I guess, but don’t waste your time.) If this episode of TV is more fun than The Clocks, that’s because everything else is the show already at the top of its game.
It’s fun because you get to see some glorious 1971 home decorations. It’s fun because Jack Cassidy really hams it up as a nattily-dressed ladies-man villain. It’s fun because Barbara Colby has a minor role as a woman who’s amusingly bad at blackmail and falls in love with her target. (Later on, Colby would be murdered in real life, in a parking garage; the case has never been solved.) It’s fun because of the flashy, stylish directing, by a 25-year-old director trying to catch his first big break. (Notice some handheld shots when the police swarm into the fake crime scene.) The whiz kid would use this Columbo to sway Hollywood into offering work, until four years later he earned job security for life by directing Jaws. And most of all it’s fun because Peter Falk owns the screen. You know how sometimes we say that somebody grows into a role over the first few episodes? Falk looks, sounds, and feels like he’s been Columbo forever. It’s fair to say he will be.
One more thing count: 2 (though not the classic “just one more thing” wording)
Just-gotta-tie-up-loose-ends count: 1
Just more than one more thing:
There are a few catches. The gun in the face is a prank—which helps set Columbo’s tone in another way, since so much of the show is built on humor. And the other catch: this is beginning of the series, but it’s by no means the beginning of Columbo. It came after three TV movies and a stage play.
Still, if you were tuning in to NBC’s new Mystery Movie series in 1971 to catch the sort-of-pilot of the show, you’d be witnessing the Columbo formula already fully set. We see the murder plot laid, the clues set, and the scheme put in action. We see the queasy interactions between murderer and victim. Then we see the deed done and are plunged into momentary suspense: the scheme looks hare-brained; how’s he going to get away with this? And then a shabby-looking detective shows up and chases the truth.
In this case, the murderer and victim form a writer team much like the Christpocalypse duo who created Left Behind: one does all the writing, and the other takes all the credit. But they have insurance policies on each other, the writer wants to go solo, and the attention hog (played by Jack Cassidy) isn’t ready to give up his income. Cassidy convinces his partner to come along on a getaway jaunt to his cabin, arranges the office to look like it’s been rather inattentively ransacked, and then drives his partner to his doom.
The scheme seems crazy because Cassidy carefully engineers matters so it looks like the murder takes place in their office, but of course the police will show up to find no body, since the body’s at his cabin. There’s also no blood in the office anywhere, although nobody on the show mentions this. We only get in on the plan slowly: he’s staging it like a mob hit, the body left at his own house as a “warning”.
The hero doesn’t show up until 18 minutes in. When he does, he introduces himself this way: “I’m just another cop. My name’s Columbo. Lieutenant.” Just another cop? His uniform is remarkably shabby, particularly the giant trench coat he wears like it’s his skin. His posture is reprimand-worthy. In the very next scene, he tries to make an omelet and drops an eggshell right in.
Peter Falk was the third actor to play Lt. Columbo, and if you include the first two, he was the fifth choice for the part. But his influence was tremendous: he invented, and often improvised, Columbo’s mannerisms and eccentricities, and he provided all the character’s clothing. Some stars have their wardrobes by Edith Head. Peter Falk pulled his wardrobe out of, well, his wardrobe. Columbo often rattles his suspects by asking unwanted questions, but they also look harried because Falk improvised distractions which made him all the more irritating (and, to those of us who aren’t murderers, adorable).
With this show, we don’t talk about the quality of the mystery but the quality of the solve: how satisfying is the means with which Columbo springs his trap? In this first series episode, alas, the solve is pretty crummy. The lieutenant finds a scrap of paper with Cassidy’s murder scheme jotted down, for use in a Mrs. Melville mystery novel. It feels arbitrary and unsatisfying, and it’s also the clue Hercule Poirot uses to solve possibly Agatha Christie’s crappiest mystery, The Clocks. (In that one, a dead body is found in a room surrounded by clocks, which is a scene taken from a novel-within-the-novel. Spoilers, I guess, but don’t waste your time.) If this episode of TV is more fun than The Clocks, that’s because everything else is the show already at the top of its game.
It’s fun because you get to see some glorious 1971 home decorations. It’s fun because Jack Cassidy really hams it up as a nattily-dressed ladies-man villain. It’s fun because Barbara Colby has a minor role as a woman who’s amusingly bad at blackmail and falls in love with her target. (Later on, Colby would be murdered in real life, in a parking garage; the case has never been solved.) It’s fun because of the flashy, stylish directing, by a 25-year-old director trying to catch his first big break. (Notice some handheld shots when the police swarm into the fake crime scene.) The whiz kid would use this Columbo to sway Hollywood into offering work, until four years later he earned job security for life by directing Jaws. And most of all it’s fun because Peter Falk owns the screen. You know how sometimes we say that somebody grows into a role over the first few episodes? Falk looks, sounds, and feels like he’s been Columbo forever. It’s fair to say he will be.
One more thing count: 2 (though not the classic “just one more thing” wording)
Just-gotta-tie-up-loose-ends count: 1
Just more than one more thing:
- Columbo accepts a glass of bourbon on the job in this episode.
- One of the Mrs. Melville novels is called Prescription: Murder. Hey, that’s also the name of the very first Columbo TV episode!
- Barbara Colby says she learned to cook from her ex-husband, a chef in the merchant marine. In real life, Peter Falk was once a chef in the merchant marine.
- I love that Jack Cassidy’s car has a giant bumper sticker saying HAVE A NICE DAY.
