Review: Columbo - The Complete Third Season DVD

There is something that makes Columbo just so loveable.

It’s Peter Falk, no question, who, as a child, I remember thinking was this older man because he wore that great big overcoat and appeared always stooped over and that made me think he was older than he really is. Now, as I watch the episodes again, I see that he can be hardly more than his early forties (if that) and that really, he’s quite a handsome guy. Not the old geezer I had imagined, but someone I could easily see myself talking to in a crowded party. He looks interesting and smart, and in the show Columbo is smart. He has a certain manner about him that while not like Vincent Donofrio (Law and Order: CI), reminds me of Donofrio’s technique - which is impeccably good, I might add - because it is all his own style. It is his own unique approach unlike any other and it is highly effective. Make fun all you want, but he’ll catch the guy in the end.

Columbo is a thematic program that works nonetheless in the same way that Murder She Wrote worked so very well (or I thought so anyway). The difference with Columbo versus all of the other detective shows we see on television is that you know from the beginning who did it. It works backwards in a way, so that the viewer knows and maybe even our Columbo has an inkling - for surely the sparkle and the way he goes about harassing people would indicate that he does know something of this - but he spends the entire hour hounding an tracking like a dog tracking a scent and playing cat and mouse with his murderer.

Plotlines are simple but pleasing with titles like “Lovely But Lethal” and the like. Columbo is the guy who irritates the murder suspect to death with his “I’m about to leave but ‘one more thing’ routine that would drive and does drive anyone batty. He seems to pull in and out like the sea constantly retreating before moving forward again to his victim –the murderer – in this way reversing who the real victim or showing that there can be two victims.

Yes, the victim is the dead person but in Columbo they hardly seem to count. They generally die or kick it within the first five minutes of the film, formalities are dispensed of quickly, and then Columbo sets about his “I’ll irritate them to death” routine that he does so well and you cannot help but love the way he does this, not only for the way he teases and irritates the mind of the murderer, because it is just so damn effective and the kind of thing that in real life would drive anyone crazy, like a telephone that keeps ringing, an incessant caller who just won’t go away and with whom will have to deal with at some point.

Article Author: Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti

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