Reviewed by Guy Clapperton
Stars Peter Falk | UK certification 12 | UK RRP £29.99 | DVD Region 2 | Runtime 716 minutes
There are two sorts of Columbo viewers in the world, I suspect; the people who were grabbed by it when they were young and the people who weren’t. I’m one of the ones that was, which makes writing an objective review difficult.
I’m hard-wired to like this stuff. Half of me, mind you, is asking why we need to worry about objectivity? Peter Falk’s central performance remains one of the most likeable on TV even this much later. It’s probably an old-fashioned view but the cop who won’t carry a gun is too much the rarity in American dramas; even scarcer is the leading man who’s not obvious beefcake material. Falk shuffles, stumbles and squints his way through ten episodes of this series with a memorably endearing, but not over-sentimental, performance.
And that’s half the problem – he’s so often the only memorable thing in it. The first episode is a case in point. Two smart-arsed students decide to kill a professor who’s going to ruin their careers. They are good looking, they are athletic and good grief they are wooden. Neither made it particularly big after appearing in this and it’s easy to see why not. The appearance throughout the episodes of the odd ‘big’ guest – Robert Culp is in the first one, for I-Spy fans – does little to lift the sense that many of the supports could be reading the script from idiot boards, as if it were a shopping list.
Watching these episodes wonder whether Columbo’s actually had too many series by this stage. The contemptuous glares of the glamorous waiters, the sneers at his car, they’re really ladelling it on by this stage but the audience knows he’s scruffy already. There’s nowhere to go with this, and the production team knows it. Oh, and he’s a genius and everyone thinks they’re getting one up on him when actually they’re not, he’s playing them for fools the whole time. It’s a good formula but it’s been done too many times by now.
For all that, it works. It shouldn’t, not only because of the performances and formula but also because of the budget; once you’ve realised they’ve only got one camera on location it’s hard to forget. It still holds up because it’s held together by the shambling warmth of Peter Falk’s performance. He just carries the thing along, and it’s to the detriment of some of the longer episodes that he’s introduced so late into the game.
I have no idea how people who don’t remember this series from first time around will react to these DVDs. But as a release timed to coincide with Father’s Day in the UK, it should do pretty well.
EXTRAS None