Peter Falk’s appeal was no mystery

June 25, 2011 at 12:00a.m.

By Robert Lloyd

Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES

Just one more thing.

Peter Falk, who died Friday at age 83, was an actor of great and invisible skill who played many parts over a five-decade career.

He was a late bloomer but quickly embraced the stage and screens big and little — by 1962, he had been Oscar-nominated twice, for gangsters respectively chilling and comical in “Murder, Inc.” and “Pocketful of Miracles,” and won an Obie playing Eugene O’Neill opposite Jason Robards. Later, he acted troublesome characters for director John Cassevetes in “Husbands” and “A Woman Under the Influence,” was brilliantly funny as a reckless CIA agent in “The In-Laws,” and narrated, grandfather-to-grandson, “The Princess Bride.”

Falk also became an artist later in his life. An exhibition of his work was displayed at the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown in the fall of 2006.

But of all his roles, the one he played the longest will be the one longest remembered: Lt. Columbo, of “Columbo” — of all American television detectives certainly the greatest, and the greatest in a time of great television detectives including James Garner’s Jim Rockford and Telly Savalas’ Theo Kojak.

From beginning to end, the show cleaved to its formula: There is no mystery in “Columbo.” We know whodunnit from the beginning, and we presume that he does too. All the pleasure comes from the slow springing of the trap, the unraveling of the game the victim imagines he is playing, and Columbo’s final minor variation on the phrase, “There’s just one other thing,” delivered with a hunched half-turn upon his arrested exit.

“Columbo,” which became a series in 1971 after a Falk-starring 1968 TV movie, was of course, a team effort — it was a particularly well-written series, whose feature-length running time allowed for extraordinarily long scenes between the detective and the week’s guest killer — but television is in the end predominately an art of personality, and episode after episode Falk was the product the show sold and the artist who sold the show.

Columbo’s rumpled, broken-down aspect did not betoken world- weariness; the show, indeed, was a comedy — a comedy of human frailty in which the murderers almost always were people of means, substance and power.

It was never Columbo’s job to punish the unfortunate, and even in victory, he was never superior or censorious, merely satisfied and somehow amused. That humor we took to be the actor’s own.

Falk was on the face of it an unlikely hero: Old World ethnic (his people were Eastern European Jews), short of stature, with a glass eye and an impudently thick head of dark hair that finally went to gray — Falk’s last “Columbo” appeared in 2003, when the actor was 76, and he continued to act until he began to suffer symptoms of dementia in 2007. But all these things worked ultimately to his advantage, making Falk seem not so much “relatable” as familial: a sort of beloved, room-brightening uncle. It also accounts in part for the universality of his appeal — through “Columbo,” he was famous everywhere.