One of the most accomplished television, movie, and stage actors to ever create a pop culture icon, Peter Falk was Columbo, and he was also a helluva a lot more than that, too. His work in movies such as The Princess Bride, Wings of Desire, and The In-Laws, and especially in the proto-indie films made by his pal John Cassavetes, such as Husbands (1970), was superb. His stage career included marvelous performances in plays ranging from Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh to Neil Simon’s The Prisoner of Second Avenue, for which he won a Tony. But Falk will remain best known as Lt. Columbo, one of the greatest of all TV characters. With his rumpled trench coat and wet stub of a cigar, Falk entered a scene as though he was a bum who’d wandered onto the set. He played Columbo as a wily bumbler, the sort of guy who seemed not to be paying attention, only to spring a precise, devastating question on a suspect and solve a case with startling ease. The ritualistic just-one-more-thing pattern to Columbo’s interrogations became a pop culture cliché itself (and the title for his 2006 memoir). But coming from Falk, the words were never clichéd: He delivered them every time as though they’d just occurred to the distracted police lieutenant. Falk was a highly unlikely TV star. He had a glass eye and a face that was as rumpled as Columbo’s raincoat. He’d achieved success in the theater and had carved out quite a film career in the early 1960s, nominated for an Oscar for his hoodlum role in Murder, Inc. (1960), and starring in Frank Capra’s last film, Pocket Full of Miracles (1961). At the time, moving from the stage and film to TV was viewed as a step down in a career. Morever, the Columbo character was by no means a guaranteed success; Lt. Columbo had his first life in a play, Prescription: Murder, that folded out of town before it made it to Broadway. Thomas Mitchell portrayed Columbo there, and Bert Freed played Columbo in a 1961 TV episode of The Sunday Mystery Hour. But then Prescription: Murder became a 1967 TV movie—and Falk wasn’t even the producers’ first choice: They wanted Bing Crosby to play the role, but Crosby passed, and Falk signed on. Columbo was the finest creation of producer-writers Richard Levinson and William Link, who also brought us Mannix and Murder, She Wrote, among many other shows. Levinson and Link manufactured a marvelous hybrid: Columbo took elements from literary detective fiction such as the locked-room mystery and the eccentric detective (think Ellery Queen or Miss Marple), and grafted it onto the police procedural and, sometimes, the hard-boiled pulp genre. Levinson and Link claimed Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, with its detective Petrovich, as one inspiration; Sherlock Holmes was another. Out of this mongrel parentage came a purebred original. In 1971, Columbo became a regular production that rotated with other shows in the NBC Mystery Movie series; there were 90-minute and two-hour episodes of it. It became its own series soon after. By the time Falk and Columbo had become household names in the mid-1970s, Columbo was as much Falk’s creation as Levinson and Link’s. The actor helped produce the show, and invited friends such as Cassavetes and Ben Gazzara to work on episodes. Falk himself picked out the battered Peugeot car that Columbo rattled around L.A. in; its tan color matched his character’s coat. When the weekly run ended in 1978, the character was later revived in a number of TV movies. There was also a short-lived Mrs. Columbo spin-off. It became a mark of honor to play a murderer who was doomed trying to outwit Columbo, and some of the most beloved of these were Jack Cassidy, Robert Culp, William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, and Patrick McGoohan. Ken Tucker
https://ew.com/article/2011/06/24/peter-falk-columbo/
In his memoir, entitled “Just One More Thing,” after Columbo’s most famous line, Peter Falk wrote: “My idea of heaven is to wake up, have a good breakfast and spend the rest of the day drawing.” Falk discovered life drawing in 1971 while acting on Broadway in Neil Simon’s “The Prisoner of Second Avenue.” His schedule left him free in the mornings with nothing to do. On a whim one day, he walked into the Art Students League on West 57th Street in Manhattan, opened a classroom door and was transfixed. Falk became a regular, sitting on a folding wooden chair with a big pad of newsprint paper propped in front of him and a stick of charcoal in his hand. Along with classmates, he warmed up with quick sketches of poses that lasted only a few minutes and then worked on more finished drawings of poses that lasted an hour or more. Everyone knew a famous actor was in class, but no one bugged him. Steven Litt https://www.cleveland.com/arts/2011/06/my_interview_with_peter_falk.html
Loch Ness is a large, deep, freshwater loch in the Scottish Highlands extending for approximately 37 kilometres (23 miles) southwest of Inverness. Its surface is 16 metres (52 feet) above sea level. Loch Ness is best known for alleged sightings of the cryptozoological Loch Ness Monster, also known affectionately as "Nessie". It is connected at the southern end by the River Oich and a section of the Caledonian Canal to Loch Oich. At the northern end there is the Bona Narrows which opens out into Loch Dochfour, which feeds the River Ness and a further section of canal to Inverness, ultimately leading to the North Sea via the Moray Firth. It is one of a series of interconnected, murky bodies of water in Scotland; its water visibility is exceptionally low due to a high peat content in the surrounding soil. Loch Ness is the second largest Scottish loch by surface area at 56 km2 (22 sq mi) after Loch Lomond, but due to its great depth, it is the largest by volume in the British Isles. Its deepest point is 230 m (126 fathoms; 755 ft), making it the second deepest loch in Scotland after Loch Morar. It contains more fresh water than all the lakes in England and Wales combined, and is the largest body of water in the Great Glen, which runs from Inverness in the north to Fort William in the south. Loch Ness has one island, Cherry Island, at the southwestern end of the loch, near Fort Augustus. It is an artificial island, known as a crannog, and was probably constructed during the Iron Age. There was formerly a second island (Dog Island) which was submerged when the water level was raised during the construction of the Caledonian Canal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loch_Ness
Ben Lomond/ Beinn Laomainn, 974 metres (3,196 ft), is a mountain in the Scottish Highlands. Situated on the eastern shore of Loch Lomond, it is the most southerly of the Munros. Ben Lomond lies within the Ben Lomond National Memorial Park and the Loch Lomond and The Trossachs National Park, property of the National Trust for Scotland. Ben Lomond's popularity in Scotland has resulted in several namesakes in the former British colonies of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, and the United States--see this list. The mountain is mentioned directly in the popular folk song The Bonnie Banks o' Loch Lomond. The name Ben Lomond is generally agreed to mean "beacon mountain" or "beacon hill". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Lomond
A 17th century gold ring, discovered near Loch Lomond by a metal detectorist, has fetched £14,000 at auction. Michelle Vall from Blackpool literally struck gold when she searched the shore at Duck Bay, near Balloch, in January 2019. It is thought the ring once belonged to a courtier of the future James II of England (James VII of Scotland). It went under the hammer in London on September 10, 2019 after the National Museum of Scotland declined the chance to buy it. The ring was expected to raise about £10,000, but the winning bid was £14,000. The new owner, a private collector from the US, will pay a total of £17,360, which includes the buyer's premium. Read more and see pictures at
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-49653771
http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com Issue 2152 September 12, 2019
No comments:
Post a Comment