Filed on 6.24.11, or the day after Peter Falk died: “I was milling around a Hollywood hardware store sometime in the early ’80s, looking for a screwdriver or something, when I heard raised voices. Two or three Joe Sixpack meatheads were having fun at the expense of poor Peter Falk, who was poking around like me, just wandering down the aisles.
“‘Aaaaay…Detective Columbo!,’ one of them was saying with the rest joining in. They just had to treat Falk like some kind of visiting celebrity alien. They couldn’t be decent about it. They had to be assholes.
“And I remember how Falk walked by me as these jerks were taunting him and making their little nickle-and-dime, lame-ass cracks, and how he was trying to ignore them but at the same time was fiercely cussing and not all that quietly, going ‘Jeezus!….Jeezus!’
“I remember thinking to myself and trying to telepathically say to Falk, ‘Yes, yes…keep going! Turn around and let’ em have it! You can do it, Peter!’
“Did Falk ever have a movie role in which he hit it out of the park? Did he ever even hit a long triple? Yes — in Raymond De Felitta and Paul Reiser‘s The Thing About My Folks (’05). Which nobody saw, of course.
“He was also memorable in a relaxed and settled and kindly way in Wim Wenders‘ Wings of Desire (but less so in Far Away, So Close). And he was especially fine (and perhaps delivering his career best) in John Cassevettes‘ Husbands and A Woman Under The Influence.
“Falk’s peak run was from ’69 to ’74, when he was 42 to 47 years old. He began the streak in ’69 when he costarred as Sgt. Ross in Sydney Pollack‘s Castle Keep, and then played Archie Black in Husbands (’70) and did A Woman Under The Influence (’74) , and all of this while starring as Lt. Columbo from ’68 to ’03.