A lot of actors play angels at some point in their careers. When Peter Falk did it, he wasn’t really acting.
Falk, who died at his Beverly Hills home Thursday, had been sequestered from the world by his family after an Alzheimer’s diagnosis. He was 83.
Though he’ll most often be cited for his long-running performance as the dogged detective Columbo – a role that brought him two Golden Globes and stretched from the character’s debut in a 1968 TV-movie to his final appearance in 2003 – Falk had a remarkably flexible career for someone who started out as a generic tough guy. He was just too lovable to stay in that box.
Think of him in The Princess Bride, quietly and patiently wearing down his cranky grandson (Fred Savage) by reading him a kissing book. Not only is Falk the perfect narrator for William Goldman’s off-kilter fable, but his devotional reading of the movie’s last line – “as you wish” – guarantees the audience leaves the theatre misty-eyed.
And consider his genial, self-aware performance as “the movie star” in Wim Wenders’s 1987 fantasy Wings Of Desire – essentially himself, if the real Peter Falk was a former angel who’d chosen mortality in order to fully experience the pleasures of human existence (and craft services). Wenders, who wrote the part specifically for Falk, captured the man’s sweet-natured charisma perfectly he really got the guy.
So did John Cassavetes, who met Falk when they both worked on the 1969 Italian gangster picture Machine Gun McCain that also co-starred Cassavetes’s wife, Gena Rowlands. The three became close friends, and Cassavetes immediately cast Falk opposite himself and Ben Gazzara in his 1970 film Husbands, a movie about American male bonding that now plays like the thematic forerunner of The Hangover.
Cassavetes next cast Falk as Rowlands’s gregarious but inattentive husband in A Woman Under The Influence – a performance much more complex than it initially appears, and which might be his best work on-screen. (They also collaborated on what would be Cassavetes’s final film, Big Trouble, which all involved subsequently disowned.)
Cassavetes and Falk co-starred in Elaine May’s memorable buddy comedy Mikey & Nicky, which feels so similar to Cassavetes’s own films that people frequently credit him with writing and directing it there’s also that one great episode of Columbo where Cassavetes turned up as the murderer of the week, an egomaniacal orchestra conductor. Everything they did together was appointment viewing, even when it was a TV procedural.
Husbands, A Woman Under The Influence and Mikey & Nicky are screening next month in TIFF’s comprehensive Cassavetes retrospective. Maybe they’ll find room for that episode of Columbo, too.
I had the chance to meet Falk in the summer of 1992, at a Disney press event celebrating the studio’s acquisition of five long-unavailable films from Cassavetes’s catalogue (including A Woman Under The Influence) now preserved for posterity in an excellent Criterion Collection DVD box. Rowlands and Falk were there, along with Seymour Cassel, another of Cassavetes’s repertory players, and producer Al Ruban. Falk, who was paired with Rowlands, was positively boisterous in his storytelling. He also made sure his glass of red wine was filled at all times.
This was almost two decades ago, but I remember it vividly. This was a man who loved what he did, and had grown into an actor who saw his job as a way to tour the world, meet interesting new people, try new foods. He was enjoying himself immensely, and after that, every time I saw Falk turn up in a walk-on role in some forgettable European mob drama, I’d remember him saying how much he loved Italian wine, French food and German hospitality.
There was a twinkle in his eye, so he might have been kidding about that last one. But that was the thing about Peter Falk there was always a twinkle in his eye.
