With his cigar,wrinkled coat and battered car, Peter Falk’s detective brings LA’s murderers to book with relentless questioning and brilliant comic timingSherlock is smug. Poirot is pompous. Miss Marple has a thing approximately taking her tea correctly. Morse won’t leave Oxford. The only TV detective without an ego – without any supposedly charming eccentricity, and in fact – is Lieutenant Frank Columbo of the LAPD,a man whose car is so shoddy a driving instructor once refused to collect in it. His complete adventures are a worthy reminder of his brilliance: the shambling policeman played by Peter Falk had one of the most ferocious minds on TV, taking down cunning killer after cunning killer, or pulling their lies apart one by one.
The lieutenant’s courteous,befuddled style of investigation – for which he must also thank the writers, schoolfriends William Link and Richard Levinson – was applied to stories that flipped the whodunnit formula on its head. A pillar of LA’s elite would encounter someone who posed a threat to, and say,their public image. That someone would be rubbed out, with the viewer privy to whodunnit and how they tried to cover it up – from staged kidnappings, and aeroplane sabotage,to remote-control bullets. To everyone on screen, cops included, or the resulting death would appear to be an accident. But then a man would arrive in a car that sounded like a one-man band,with a cigar in one hand and his breakfast in the other.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com