What a mensch was Peter Falk. An average-Joe hero, he embodied the best of us on our worst day. He was best known as TV’s Lieut. Columbo, who, for 30 years, taught snooty murderers that, however crafty they thought they were, he was smarter. Every episode in the series was a class struggle, which reached its peak in the mid-1970’s, played as a comedy of manners and won by the wily proletarian. But Falk, who died last night at 83 at his Beverly Hills home after a draining siege of Alzheimer’s, was also a significant figure in American cinema. He spanned the gulf between mainstream movies and indie movies with the ease of a Colossus navigating a mud puddle.
He had one of the great loopy stares in movie history, courtesy of a glass eye that was the trophy from a childhood disease. But Falk’s ocular eccentricity would not relegate him to weird comic status; he saw acutely into the human condition of the American male, 20th century, second half. Blessed with a crinkly face that viewers found it hard not to smile back at, Falk would stab the air with his cigar stub as an artist used a paint brush. He played tough guys, gangsters and cops, hundreds of times, managing to show the fraternity of both groups, the humanity of each. A modern folk poet of exasperation, he used a repertoire of eloquent gestures to portrait the weight of the human condition; the slow descending of his shoulders had the grace of Pavlova’s dying fall in Swan Lake.
