Columbo - Development and Actors Who Played Columbo

Development and Actors Who Played Columbo

The character of Columbo was created by William Link, who said that Columbo was partially inspired by Crime and Punishment character Porfiry Petrovich as well as G. K. Chesterton's humble cleric-detective Father Brown. Other sources claim Columbo's character is also influenced by Inspector Fichet from the 1955 French suspense-thriller Les Diaboliques.

The character first appeared in a 1960 episode of the television-anthology series The Chevy Mystery Show, which was itself partly derived from a short story by Levinson and Link, originally published in an issue of the Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine as "Dear Corpus Delicti". Levinson and Link adapted the TV drama into the stage play Prescription: Murder, and a TV-movie based on the play was broadcast in 1968. The series began on a Wednesday presentation of the "NBC Mystery Movie" rotation: McCloud, McMillan & Wife, and other whodunits. According to TV Guide, the original plan was that a new Columbo episode would air every week, but Peter Falk refused to commit to such an arduous schedule, which would have meant shooting an episode every 5 days. The high quality of Columbo and McMillan & Wife was partly due to the extra time they could spend on each episode. After one season, the series moved as a group to Sundays. Columbo aired regularly from 1971–78 on NBC, and then less frequently on ABC beginning in 1989. The final episode was broadcast in 2003.

The first actor to portray Columbo, Bert Freed, was a stocky character actor with a thatch of grey hair. The teleplay in which he starred, Enough Rope, was adapted by Levinson and Link from their short story "May I Come In" (been published as "Dear Corpus Delicti" and which had no Columbo character ). Freed wore a rumpled suit and smoked a cigar to play Columbo, but played the part with few of the familiar Columbo mannerisms. However, the character is still recognizably Columbo, and uses some of the same methods of misdirecting/distracting his suspects. During the course of the show, the increasingly frightened murderer brings pressure from the district attorney's office to have Columbo taken off the case, but the detective fights back with his own contacts. Although Freed received third billing, he wound up with almost as much screen time as the killer. Columbo appeared immediately after the first commercial. This teleplay is available for viewing in the archives of the Paley Center for Media in New York City and Los Angeles.

"Enough Rope" was adapted into a stage play called Prescription: Murder and was first performed at the Curran Theatre in San Francisco on January 2, 1962, with character actor Thomas Mitchell in the role of Columbo. Mitchell was 70 years old at the time. The stage production starred Joseph Cotten as the murderer and Agnes Moorehead as the victim. Mitchell died of cancer while the play was touring in out-of-town tryouts; Columbo was his last role.

In 1968, the play was made into the two-hour television movie that aired on NBC. The writers suggested Lee J. Cobb and Bing Crosby for the role of Columbo, but Cobb was unavailable and Crosby turned it down because he felt it would have taken too much time away from his golf game. Director Richard Irving convinced Levinson and Link that Falk, who wanted the role, could pull it off even though he was much younger than the writers had in mind.

Originally a one-off TV-Movie-of-the-Week, 1968's "Prescription: Murder" has Falk's Columbo pitted against a psychiatrist (Gene Barry). Due to the success of this film, NBC requested that a pilot for a potential series be made to see if the character could be sustained on a regular basis, leading to the 1971 hour and a half film, Ransom For a Dead Man, with Lee Grant playing the killer.

The popularity of the second film prompted the creation of a regular series on NBC, that premiered in the fall of 1971 as part of the wheel series NBC Mystery Movie. The network arranged for the Columbo segments to air once a month on Wednesday nights. Columbo was an immediate hit in the Nielsen ratings and Falk won an Emmy Award for his role in the show's first season. In its second year the Mystery Movie series was moved to Sunday nights, where it then remained during its seven-season run. The show became the anchor of NBC's Sunday night line up. After its cancellation by NBC in 1978 Columbo was revived on ABC between 1989 and 2003 in several new seasons and a few made-for-TV movie "specials".

Columbo's wardrobe was provided by Peter Falk himself; they were his own clothes, including the shabby raincoat which made its first appearance in "Prescription: Murder". Falk would often ad lib "Columbo-isms" (fumbling through his pockets for a piece of evidence and discovering a grocery list, asking to borrow a pencil, becoming distracted by something irrelevant in the room at a dramatic point in a conversation with a suspect, etc.), inserting these into his performance as a way to keep his fellow actors off-balance. He felt it helped to make their confused and impatient reactions to Columbo's antics more genuine.

A few years prior to his death, Peter Falk had expressed interest in returning to the role, announcing in 2007 that he had chosen a script for one last Columbo episode, Columbo: Hear No Evil. The script was renamed Columbo's Last Case. ABC declined the project. In response, producers for the series announced that they were attempting to shop the project to foreign production companies. However, Falk was diagnosed with dementia in late 2007. During a 2009 court trial over Falk's care, Dr Stephen Read stated that the actor's condition had deteriorated so badly that Falk could no longer remember playing a character named Columbo, nor could he identify who Columbo was. Falk died on June 23, 2011, aged 83.

Read more about this topic:  Columbo

Famous quotes containing the words development, actors and/or played:

    If you complain of people being shot down in the streets, of the absence of communication or social responsibility, of the rise of everyday violence which people have become accustomed to, and the dehumanization of feelings, then the ultimate development on an organized social level is the concentration camp.... The concentration camp is the final expression of human separateness and its ultimate consequence. It is organized abandonment.
    Arthur Miller (b. 1915)

    To save the theatre, the theatre must be destroyed, the actors and actresses must all die of the plague. They poison the air, they make art impossible. It is not drama that they play, but pieces for the theatre. We should return to the Greeks, play in the open air: the drama dies of stalls and boxes and evening dress, and people who come to digest their dinner.
    Eleonora Duse (1858–1924)

    The trouble with Freud is that he never played the Glasgow Empire Saturday night.
    Ken Dodd (b. 1931)