This Day in TV History (‘Columbo,’ Top TV Detective, Premieres)

Sept. 15, 1971—What many of its fans regard as the greatest detective series in television history, Columbo, premiered as part of “The NBC Tuesday Mystery Movie,” along with McCloud and McMillan and Wife.

I began watching Columbo in the sixth grade and it quickly became what later programmers would call “much-watch TV.” Like many other viewers, I chuckled at the personal touches that Peter Falk used to make the rumpled detective his own: the beat-up 1959 Peugeot 403 convertible, the basset hound, the foul-smelling cigars, and, of course, that raincoat.

But two other aspects of the show also endeared it to me: First, the weighing of evidence—not just hunting for clues, but also deliberating whether they were significant or even in keeping with the context of the scene. It helped cement a research orientation that eventually led me to become, at different times, a librarian, writer and editor.

Second, the murders that Columbo investigated were seldom committed by career criminals or gang members, but instead by the crème de la crème of society—a tycoon, a football team owner, an author, a movie star, a general or a politician, to name a few. It was a seemingly unending trail of villains with not just all the power and privilege someone could have, but enough craftiness to kill a human being and dispose of the evidence or manufacture a red herring.

Yet in each episode, the audience got to root for the underdog—an unglamorous detective who used not a gun or even his fists, but a carefully concealed intelligence that made the elite submit to the same forces of justice that everyone else had to do.

McCloud and McMillan and Wife, the other two occupants of the 8:30-10 PM Tuesday timeslot, have not lingered in the popular imagination to the same extent and are not seen as much today, even on vintage TV channels like MeTV and Cozi.

But Columbo endures—partly because of the genius of its format (a cat-and-mouse game between killer and detective) and partly because of the actor who brought the character to gloriously idiosyncratic life.

During this pandemic, I have watched and rewatched many of its 69 episodes, whether on cable or DVD. Others share my addiction, including the creators of the Websites “The Columbophile,” “The Columbo Podcast,” and the modestly titled “The Ultimate Columbo Site.”

I admit that, to some extent, using the September 1971 date as the starting point for the series is a bit arbitrary. Falk first appeared in the role in the 1968 TV movie "Prescription: Murder," then reprised it, in the spring of 1971, in the pilot for the series, “Ransom for a Dead Man.”

But the show began in earnest when NBC placed it as part of a rotating “wheel” with McCloud, starring Dennis Weaver as a fish-out-of-water New Mexico marshal brought to the streets of New York, and McMillan and Wife, with Rock Hudson and Susan St. James attempting to recreate the witty repartee of the “Thin Man” movie series of the Thirties and Forties.

Being grouped with the other two series satisfied one of the concerns of Falk, who wanted to keep his hand in movies and use the extra time between episodes working on scripts. (He had already been in a weekly meat-grinder of a series in The Trials of O'Brien, which lasted only 22 episodes in the 1965-66 season before being done in by The Man From U.N.C.L.E.) Like his character, he was dogged and obsessed with details, sometimes testing the patience of series creators Richard Levinson and William Link even as he helped improve the quality of individual episodes.

Longtime writing partners who had created the long-running private-eye series Mannix, Levinson and Link were inspired to produce a far more cerebral series by their youthful reading of Fyodor Dostoyefsky’s Crime and Punishment (featuring the detective Porfiry Petrovich), G.K. Chesterton’s “Father Brown” stories, and the “Ellery Queen” short stories and novels. Columbo would blend the quirky investigator of the first two sources and the relentlessly logical reasoner in the Queen stories.

Levinson and Link first outlined the character in 1960 in the live-to-air murder mystery “Enough Rope,” part of the Chevy Mystery Show drama anthology. The lieutenant, as in his later incarnation, went by no first name and pursued his suspect with initially innocent but increasingly relentless questions. But Bert Freed was a burly actor quite different physically from the shorter Falk.

Next, the writing duo reworked their script into a play for Thomas Mitchell (perhaps most famous for playing Scarlett O’Hara’s Irish father in Gone With the Wind). But the Oscar-winning character actor died of cancer before the drama could be taken to Broadway.

A few years later, Lee J. Cobb and Bing Crosby were suggested for the role. But Cobb’s schedule was too full, and Crosby was reluctant to come out of semi-retirement to accept the rigors of a series.

Highly regarded as a dramatic actor by Levinson and Link, Crosby would have made the character much like himself: smooth, laid-back, pipe-smoking. But Falk, in addition to the personal accoutrements I mentioned earlier, made the lieutenant a figure eminently ripe for underestimation by unwary criminals: so gravelly voiced, stooped, squinting (making use of the actor's glass eye), and shambling that his character was once mistaken for a homeless man in a soup kitchen.

You can still see Falk finding his way in his first appearance in the role, in Prescription: Murder. Like Leonard Nimoy in the pilot for Star Trek, he accentuates the intense, relentless aspects of his character initially. The passage of three years led him to emphasize Columbo's more offbeat traits in Ransom for a Dead Man. 

Nevertheless, this surface “half-assed Sherlock Holmes” (as Falk called him) didn’t miss a trick, finding an unusual bit of evidence as annoying as a bit between the teeth.

In one of the show’s great comic touches, these murderers fumed when Columbo would wheel around, just before departing, and say, “Just one more thing…” (A phrase that became the title of Falk’s autobiography.) No wonder: He was so implacable that Falk likened being targeted by Columbo to “being nibbled to death by a duck.”

But the actors playing the villains were even more likely to be thrown off guard by Falk’s ad-libbed tricks: a request for a pencil, fumbling for something in his pockets, going off on trivia, talking about his wife or another relative, or, on one memorable occasion, asking a suspect, “How much did you pay for those shoes?”

I have a confession to make here. Maybe this goes back to my Sixties childhood, when I delighted in each week’s “guest villain” on Batman, but I loved Columbo’s adversaries just as much as the detective himself. I practically hissed as these chic, wealthy, famous people carried out their killings in the most cold-blooded, cocky fashion possible, only to be brought to heel by their arrogance and by the investigator who wouldn’t let go of his quarry.

I’m sure every fan has his set of favorite baddies, but most, I think, would return to the actors who came back most often: Robert Culp, Patrick McGoohan, and my favorite, Jack Cassidy. (Yes, baby boomers: the father of David and Shaun.) These repeat offenders brought different characteristics to the roles (Culp, barely controlled resentment; McGoohan, elegant malice; and Cassidy, preening egotism), but all made memorable impressions.

Three other reasons why I liked the series:

*It gave memorable roles to middle-aged and elderly actresses. At a time when Hollywood often didn’t know what to do with actresses who were beyond the ingenue stage, Columbo provided them with multi-dimensional, if sometimes brief, roles, not necessarily confined to villains. These women included Lee Grant, Anne Baxter, Ida Lupino, Myrna Loy, Kim Hunter, Gena Rowlands, Martha Scott, Vera Miles, Ruth Gordon, Faye Dunaway, and Janet Leigh.

*It boosted the careers of rising talents, in front of or behind the camera. Steven Bochco (Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blue) first won wide attention with a Columbo teleplay that Falk publicly praised when the actor picked up the first of his four Emmys for the role, while Steven Spielberg and Jonathan Demme cut their teeth as directors with some of the series’ most striking episodes. Appearing on the show early in their careers were Blythe Danner, Jeff Goldblum, Martin Sheen, Kim Cattrall, Katey Sagal, and Jamie Lee Curtis.

*It blended realistic characterization and the clues of great detective stories into great scripts. The series ranks #57 on a list of “The 101 Best-Written TV Series” compiled by the Writers Guild of America West.

Just one more thing (where did I hear that before?) on this last point: The best scripts of the series were most likely to have been written in the original run of the series, from 1971 to 1978. After a decade-long hiatus, Falk revived the role in 1989, beginning a string of occasional two-hour TV movies that continued until 2003.

But be warned: the longer the series continued, the lower its quality sank. In no small part, this was because the scripts did not match the quality of the original series. (Another sign of a below-average episode: if one of the guest stars included Falk's second wife, Shera Danese.) 

By this time, Levinson had died while Link was busy with another long-running detective series, Murder She Wrote. As executive producer of the new movies, Falk was involved even more intimately with their creation than he was before. He might have taken on more than he could handle. 

One sign of it: two episodes that departed from the cat-and-mouse format of the show—meaning that any other detective could have been inserted into the space reserved for “Columbo” with no one in the audience being the wiser. Falk loved playing the character so much that he simply didn’t know when to stop.

But at its best, Columbo is virtually unrivaled among detective series. Falk enjoyed acclaim on stage and the big screen, but television gave him his greatest vehicle.

Hollywood Golden Age at Bergen (NJ) Revival Theater

For the past 20 years, I have mourned the passage of revival theaters in New York City. I spent most of the Eighties earning what was, in effect, a self-taught major in classic films. I hunted down these old films wherever I could: Theater 80 St. Marks, The Thalia, The Regency, The Biograph (and even unconventional venues: the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, with its mighty organ, was a memorable site for Lon Chaney’s silent The Phantom of the Opera). The VCR radically reduced the number of these temples of cinema, from a dozen to only about six today in the Big Apple. (I’m sorry: for all the care that host Robert Osborne and others at Turner Classic Movies lavish on vintage films, these are meant, as far as I’m concerned, to be viewed as originally intended: on big screens, with audiences sharing the experience in common.)

The way I figure it, if you don’t want to bemoan the closing of independent bookstores and other embattled cultural touchstones, you ought to go out and patronize them. And so, when I saw, in a mid-July article in my region’s major daily, The Bergen Record, that New Jersey had its first repertory theater in who-knows-when, I resolved to see it on the double.

If you don’t know it already, I’m not going to tell you the origin of the title of this cinematic outpost in the suburbs, The Rosebud Theater, in Westwood. Instead, I take pity on you and urge you to start seeing classic cinema, including a certain one about an early 20^th-century press titan that I hope will show up soon here.

As I discovered from reading several articles online (including this one from the Record), Rosebud owner Ray Walsh has a background almost as interesting as his intriguing film lineup. A retired New York Giants football scout, he had operated another revival theater (also named the Rosebud) in Ridgewood for a few years in the 1980s (though that was only half the size of this one). After finding a location on Kinderkamack Road in Westwood that he deemed favorable, he was briefly blocked by the Westwood Theater until a settlement was worked out. Part of the agreement is that the Rosebud must run films at least 10 years old.

Well, the Westwood Theater can have the new films, as far as I’m concerned.  They just keep making them dumb and dumber these days. In contrast, the films made in Hollywood’s Golden Age of the studio system weren’t made by film-school grads but by men whose first concern was story. They were creating the language of cinema as they went along, so their style has a freshness impossible to find nowadays.

So far, the accent at the Rosebud has been on largely on films that remain enduringly popular, despite (maybe even because of) repeated showings on TV: West Side Story, Casablanca, Top Hat, and Double Indemnity. But Walsh has promised to have at least one movie off the beaten track every month or so. Earlier this year, The Usual Suspects and The Earrings of Madame de... would qualify.

But what drew me to the theater finally last weekend was Alias Nick Beal, a 1949 movie directed by John Farrow (yes, that’s Mia’s dad—and Maureen O’Sullivan’s husband). I thought I had seen it 40 years ago on TV, but the details were so indistinct in my memory that I might as well have seen it for the first time. I was not disappointed. This overlooked Faustian tale in the film noir genre deserves to be far better known.

Paramount Pictures teamed Farrow once again with several collaborators from a far better-known film noir from the year before, The Big Clock: star Ray Milland, supporting player George Macready, and screenwriter Jonathan Latimer. Milland, a few years past his Oscar-winning role as an alcoholic in The Lost Weekend, was now taking on darker-shaded roles, with his first films—largely comedies that relied on his easy charm—increasingly a thing of the past.

“Nick Beal” is, in fact, as dark as he could possibly get—a being who, after materializing at a seedy waterfront dive, appears and disappears virtually at will, always with a sinister proposition for a listener.  

Farrow makes effective use of the moody cinematography as his Satan slips in and out of the shadows, especially when he comes in sight of what would be one of his greatest prizes: an honest, hard-charging D.A., frustrated in bringing down a political boss, who lets slip out that he would “give my soul if I could nail him.” No sooner said than done. The process of seduction of the D.A.-turned-politician (played, with his usual mastery, by the nonpareil character actor Thomas Mitchell, best known as Scarlett O'Hara's father in Gone With the Wind) is subtle and step-by-step.

Walsh tries, in a sense, to replicate the experience of early filmgoing by preceding his main feature with a cartoon or short. He did an neat bit of programming by pairing Alias Nick Beal with They’re Always Caught, an entry in MGM’s 1930s “Crime Doesn’t Pay” series of short films. This one, focusing on the power of the then-relatively new forensic science, deals with political corruption—the same subject as Alias Nick Beal. (One character—a crusading district attorney with political ambitions and a moustache—reminded me of Thomas E. Dewey, then much in the news for taking on the mob.)

I’m sure the other film aficionados felt as comfortable in their seats as I did in mine. We should have—Walsh had salvaged the seats from the old Giants Stadium, just before they were ready to be discarded.

The Rosebud will have one screening of a feature film Wednesday and Thursday evenings and two shows for Friday and Saturday nights. If the programming matches what I saw last week, I’m sure I’ll echo a famous statement by a certain heavily-accented action hero: “I’ll be back.”

Movie Exchange of the Day (“Only Angels Have Wings”)

Sparks, radioman (played by Victor Killian): She wants to know why you like flying.

Kid Dabb (played by Thomas Mitchell): I've been in it 22 years, Miss Lee. I couldn't give you an answer that would make any sense. What's so funny about that?

Bonnie Lee (played by Jean Arthur): That's what my dad used to say.

Kid Dabb: Flier?

Bonnie Lee: No, trapeze. High stuff. He wouldn't use a net.

Sparks: Not much future in that, either.

Bonnie Lee: Yes. We found that out.—Only Angels Have Wings (1939), story (uncredited) by Howard Hawks, screenplay by Jules Furthman, directed by Howard Hawks

Recently, while researching a post on Lou Gehrig, I concluded that Teresa Wright, talented as she was, was miscast as the Yankee slugger’s wife Eleanor in Pride of the Yankees. To evoke the real Eleanor Gehrig—someone less wholesome than all-American girl Wright, more inclined to laugh, belly up to the bar with the boys, see through life’s illusions even while contemplating impending tragedy—you really needed Jean Arthur.

Case in point: Only Angels Have Wings, a film likely to get lost in the crowd of classics released in 1939: Gone With the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Gunga Din, Stagecoach, The Old Maid…and my fingers are tired from typing these already. But don’t pass up your chance to see this terrific action movie.

In the South American port of call of Barranca, in the early, heroic age of commercial aviation, Geoff Carter (played by Cary Grant, at his most virile) and his crew of daredevil pilots live on the cusp of danger, trying to negotiate tricky mountain passes perpetually shrouded in fog.

But they also live in a close communion in which wisecracks and looking out for each other make for a kind of masculine paradise. It’s the kind of Eden, with thoughts unspoken but still understood, without a woman to introduce disruptive passions, that exists for Jake Barnes and Bill Gorton in The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway. (Instead of taking a crack at Papa’s melancholy take on the Lost Generation—one that, admittedly, might have posed censorship issues at the time—Howard Hawks tackled one of the novelist’s worst, To Have and Have Not.)

Change the phrase “novel-writing” to “filmmaking,” and I think Hawks would have let loose with a loud, oath-accompanied “Amen!” to this observation by novelist Willkie Collins in the 1861 edition of his Victorian thriller, The Woman in White: “It may be possible, in novel-writing, to present characters successfully without telling a story; but it is not possible to tell a story successfully without presenting characters; their existence, as recognizable realities, being the sole condition on which the story can be effectively told.”

In other words, the magic of this film doesn’t lie in special effects but in characters we come to care about, driven to their respective fates. The Sheila Variations has a great post on just one scene illustrating this.

Grant being Grant, there isn’t a woman who gets stuck in this godforsaken place who doesn’t swoon at the sight of him—or, in the case of Rita Hayworth, playing a former flame of his, hasn’t done so already. With her hard drinking, clever retorts and hard-bitten attitude toward fate, Arthur’s stranded showgirl Bonnie Lee would seem a natural for this masculine crowd.

But that catch in Arthur’s throat—one used, over the years, in vehicles as diverse as screwball comedies (Easy Living), populist Capracorn (Mr. Deeds Goes to Town), and westerns (Shane)—gives the game away. She’s stuck on Grant, which complicates life for him—something he can’t abide, since he has enough problems with getting the job done and making sure his crew survives till tomorrow.

So rent this to experience the best of character-driven action, or to savor the filmography of the versatile Hawks, or, as many people prefer, to catch the incomparable Grant as, still relatively early in his career, he crafts his persona of the effortlessly attractive, endlessly wry, deeply woman-weary hero.

But watch it, too, for the other great actors—not just Arthur, but Thomas Mitchell, as the visually impaired friend that Grant watches more like a mother hen than a hard-driving, results-oriented boss.

Somebody tell me—did any other character actor besides Mitchell appear in so many all-time great films in a single year? Count them—not just this, but also Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Gone With the Wind, and the film that netted him his highly deserved Best Supporting Actor Oscar, Stagecoach.