‘Obsolete’? Not at all. Necessary TV rarities, now on a great YouTube channel

The "Husbands" host a 
telethon: Gazzara and 
Cassavetes standing,
Falk in wheelchair (left).

At this point it is truly impossible to keep up with what is posted on the various streaming video sites. Fans, historians, obsessives, collectors, and tech-experts are flooding the Net with terrific posts of obscure movies and old TV series and specials, to the extent that one can’t possibly watch it all, nor would one want to. (’Cause most of it ain’t all that great… shhhh…)

In the case of YouTube, there are thousands and thousands of channels devoted to “TV nostalgia.” Some of them are very hard to sift through — in many cases, because the poster isn’t making use of the Playlist function on YT, in which you can separate your postings by title, theme, or topic.

One of the most intense collections of rare TV is the “Obsolete Video” channel on YT, which goes beyond the mere posting of vintage commercials – which I do like, but c’mon, how many hours of that can really be watched? – with a series of episodes and specials that haven’t been seen since they first aired. The Obsolete channel doesn’t have Playlists of its material, but it's definitely worth hitting the “Page Down” several dozen times to move through its offerings.

The gent who runs it, Rick Thomas, has an introductory video for the channel, in which he explains that his main business is the conversion (and digitization) of video footage from any format, past or present; he also repairs old video machines of any type and is looking for additional rare programming. He notes that the Obsolete channel has thus far been made up of tapes recorded for private use off TV in the Chicago and Los Angeles areas – Rick himself lives and works in Arizona.

Rick’s postings have been gobbling up my time in the last few weeks, and I wanted to present a “Ten Best” list for this post, but as I started putting the list together I realized I was going to go beyond 10 (but hopefully not to 20). Thus, let’s review some highlights of the Obsolete Video channel on YT.
*****

Since it’s nearly Labor Day, it’s fitting to start off with segments from the first and last hours of the 1974 MDA Telethon. A lot of the hour-long talk show and variety special vids that Rick has put up are actually two half-hour recordings, so around the :30 mark we often move from one episode of a given show to another. Here we move from beginning to end; click here to watch.

Since this clip can’t be embedded, it should be noted that it includes the “solo Jer” aspect of the Telethon — Jerry being sincere about the cause, introducing that year’s poster child, fawning over his guests, and accepting a big check by a corporate sponsor.

As for what can be embedded with Jerry at the helm, here is an off-kilter episode of The Tonight Show with him guest-hosting when Carson was on vacation. Many people guest-hosted Tonight, but the episodes that exist of Jerry hosting are unusual — he seemed calm in the early to mid-Sixties episodes, but was the living embodiment of flop sweat by the late Sixties.

Here is an example of that. And yes, the tape that is posted is “hot” and a mess to look at – but when this stuff initially aired, it was seen through the miasma of rabbit-eared antenna “ghosts” and other imperfections. In the part of Queens, N.Y., that I grew up in, cable TV didn’t exist until 1990, so I spent years of my life watching shows that looked like this (or worse!)

Jer’s opening song is a poor one — a standard that few folks revive — his opening joke falls flat, and the little we see of an interview with a psychiatrist-turned-politician is desperate. It is, therefore, absolutely fascinating to watch.

 

Another flop sweat host, but playing it that way for laughs, was Don Rickles. This video, which starts with Flip Wilson guest-hosting and Steve Allen and Jayne Meadows guesting, has segments from two Rickles-hosted shows. The first has Lee Marvin joining a panel of Don Adams and Muhammad Ali (!); Marvin did give good interviews, but here Rickles pounces on him, to the extent that you have Don doing humor about Lee not talking — until Lee finally talks and what he says is quite considered and intelligent.

The next Rickles-hosted segment comes as James Caan joins a panel with Bob Newhart and Karen Black (who is seen seducing Rickles on another Obsolete posting!). Black proceeds to kiss on the mouth both Caan and then Rickles, and Caan ends up telling Rickles “atrocity” stories, since he apparently used to regularly hang out with the two Dons (Adams and Rickles) before he was a star.

An even worse-looking but riveting-to-watch sample of a guest-hosted Tonight Show can be found in the middle of this video, which begins with segments from two other shows. The first has Carson hosting Tiny Tim (in his Vegas lounge-lizard phase) and Burt Reynolds hosting, with guests Kaye Ballard (who does her Vegas act) and redneck emeritus character actor Dub Taylor – who plays the xylophone!

At 20:15, a terrific example of a guest-hosted episode appears, this one a killer hosted by Sammy Davis Jr in August of 1974. Even though whoever recorded this left out Sammy’s two songs, we see: His opening banter with Ed; him interviewing the aforementioned Burt Reynolds (fresh from the set of At Long Last Love); him talking to Helen Reddy (whose first song is cut but her second song is included); him interviewing Richard Pryor at full steam (truly amazing); and then a final chat with Evel Knievel, who was at that time about to jump the Snake River Canyon.

Firstly of fascination, the network edits: While Reddy singing the word “screw” and Pryor saying the word “faggot” are both bleeped, Pryor’s album title That Nigger’s Crazy could indeed be said on the air on late-night NBC, circa ’74. Even in its edited-down version (with visuals so hazy they’re b&w), this is a great example of The Tonight Show at its best, but with a guest who was actually part of the superstar culture of the time. Johnny was the master of the laid-back chat with these people, but he was not a master performer in any format other than Tonight. (And the episodes with guest hosts have all been buried for the syndication package of the Carson Tonight — perhaps because one can see that other hosts were equally adept at running the show!) 

Yes indeed, Sammy does over-laugh at everything his guests say — but when Pryor is on fire, clearly trying to make Sammy laugh, it is sheer bliss. Richard is so busy ad-libbing he changes the end of his old routine about a preacher talking about eating a tuna-fish sandwich when God spoke to him, saying, “Hey... can I have a bite of that sandwich?” Changed here on what seems like a whim, since Richard is just gauging how much he can make Sammy lose it.

 

Still in a Tonight Show groove, here is the sketch comedy group The Ace Trucking Company doing a Halloween skit in costume. (Obsolete has a very good collection of horror-host material as well, by the way.) It’s not all that funny, but it’s a good set-piece that shows a younger group of comic actors taking over Tonight for a while. The ATC line-up included Fred Willard, George Memmoli, and Billy Saluga (of “Ooooh, you doesn’t has ta call me Johnson!” fame).

Like a bunch of posts on the Obsolete channel, this sketch has been posted more than once. Rick is so painstaking in his work that he has often posted “upgrades” of better transfers of the original tapes he’s restored. This is the best-looking version. (Still, for those of a certain age, remember what rabbit-ears TV used to look like!)

 

Before the Dean Martin Roasts took off (more on Dino below), there were several attempts to present roasts on network TV in the late ’60s and early ’70s. The Obsolete channel has two of these entries (which, of course, could pretend to be “racy” but were just super-clean in verbal content), which both seem to have aired on the ABC Wide World of Entertainment — the concept that ABC used to replace Dick Cavett. Cavett remained on board, but he switched off with Jack Paar (returning for his last shot at late night), various documentaries, comedy specials, and a concert slot for Friday nights (to compete with “The Midnight Special” on NBC).

The first roast of note here is “A Salute to Humble Howard” (1973) — Cosell, that is. The best presenters in this roast are Redd Foxx, Don Rickles (of course), and none other than Cosell’s “nemesis” Muhammad Ali. Slappy White comes off better than usual because he was put toward the end (after Rickles and Ali), so he gives up on the jokes written for him and starts throwing in ad-libs. Watch it here.

As a massive fan of Steve Allen, I was interested to see “A Comedy Salute to Steve Allen.” Here, all the jokes are indeed scripted, and it’s rather odd to see Steve on ABC (when all his successes were on NBC and CBS). Still, though, there are bits by Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme (singing Steve’s “theme song”) and the great Louis Nye (as Gordon Hathaway and himself). Steve himself has particularly brutal jokes at the end (a bit more brutal than he was in earlier eras and later on, when he became prudish). His mention of the stars of Fifties TVs having “survived” is fascinating.

 

Two of the rarest, most surprising videos on the Obsolete channel show are uncut tapings of The Dean Martin Show. Dean Martin fans, at least some of us, have a love-hate relationship with the show’s producer, Greg Garrison. On the one hand, Garrison made the show possible by striking a deal with Dean where he had to do as little preparation as possible and would only have to be in-studio one day a week.

On the other hand, Garrison was a notoriously schlocky producer who made extensive use of terrible laugh tracks and godawful editing, including many, many freeze frames. The Dean Martin Show had some of the slickness of other variety shows, but it also had a really tacky “packaging” that made its comedy sketches really sink (even as they began). The tacky editing was one of the central features of the later DM roasts, where guests who weren’t present were edited in, laughs were “sweetened” with exceptionally phony tracks, and reaction shots of celebs laughing were used repeatedly, even in the same segment.

Dino and Greg Garrison.

The two examples of the uncut record of the Dino show explains why this was — in essence, Garrison wanted to honor the commitment to Dean to get him quickly on and off the set on his one day in the studio, and thus was constantly directing sketches “in frame.” Meaning he would constantly be stepping into the frame to restart or clumsily finish off sketches by appearing in front of the performers right after the final line was spoken. (I mean, RIGHT after — Garrison nearly jumped into frame as the sketches ended.)

And while some of the show was done with a live studio audience, a good amount of it was done without, including standup monologues. In the first video below you’ll see Steve Landesberg doing his standup to an empty studio, where only the crew are laughing. (Thus, it’s even more remarkable that some of the standup worked on the show — the comics were so good they could deal with Garrison’s moronic cost-cutting measures.)

What comes through as one watches these weird little shards of entertainment into which Garrison bounds, looking like a stevedore rather than a producer, is that he did NOT intrude when Dean was singing solo. Those moments truly were the best moments in the show (and the reason Dino fans do have to be grateful to Garrison, for at least keeping the DM show on the air for so long), and were clearly the moments that Dean rehearsed — Garrison’s mythology was that Dean “listened to tapes in his car” of the material, but it’s been made clear (even from other interviews with Garrison himself) that Dean did rehearse and block the musical numbers. Thus, seeing Garrison keeping a respectful distance as the solo songs fade out is very welcome.

The best part about seeing Dean’s blasé response to the show being built around him is hearing him refer to himself in the third person as “the Italian.” As in, “Where does the Italian go now?”

 

A second “raw” tape of the Dino show being assembled. Notable here? Frank Sinatra Jr. doing a cover of America’s “Horse with No Name” and one of those full-ensemble musical medleys of songs from old musicals, this time based around Pal Joey with Sinatra.

 

Another wild artifact of the Sixties-into-Seventies: the pilot for The Kopykats, a variety show featuring a group of impressionists, on The Kraft Music Hall in Nov. 1970. This show varies from the later Kopykats series, in that it features Edie Adams as the one female impressionist (Marilyn Michaels played that role in the later series) and one of the first standup impressionists (Will Jordan) and a then-very successful nightclub act (David Frye) are in the ensemble. (They were replaced in the series by Joe Baker and Fred Travalena; Frank Gorshin, Rich Little, and George Kirby were in both pilot and series.) 

The comedy (supervised by Danny Simon) is quite lame, but the fascination here are the impressions themselves, ranging from the perfected ones done by their innovators to ones that seem quite labored. The wonderful Edie gets her own solo spot, and Frye seems to get the most to do in the special — most likely because he was doing very topical political comedy at the time the special aired.

 

The joy of watching old talk show segments on YouTube comes mostly from realizing that, while late-night talk shows are absolute garbage these days, there were indeed some genuinely smart, fascinating, adult talk programs on the air besides the obvious ones (Cavett, Allen and Paar on Tonight, David Susskind). Tom Snyder may have often seemed like a rambling, discursive interviewer (best parodied by Dan Aykroyd on SNL), but when he was in peak form (as with Sterling Hayden), the Tomorrow show hosted some terrific talk.

The Obsolete channel has a number of Tomorrow segments, but the hour that immediately grabs attention is a two-parter (not sure if it’s even the same program): one half with Marlon Brando and Russell Means of the American Indian Movement; one half with Arthur Marx to discuss his dual biography of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime (Especially Himself). 

The Brando/Means segment is a very serious discussion of Native American rights, with Snyder asking a great question of Marlon – if the Indian movement asked him to “go away” since they didn’t want him distracting from their cause anymore, would he do it? (Snyder also gets to hear what Brando has actually donated to the Indians in the way of land – 40 acres in Azusa, Calif., and an apartment building in another California town he can’t remember!)

The Marx segment is fascinating because it takes place at the time that Jerry Lewis was thought to be entirely washed up, purely a presence on the show biz scene because of the Muscular Dystrophy Telethon. Marx was a truly unreliable narrator (he doesn’t get key dates right — like when the duo broke up!), but his book does have some wonderfully gossipy stories in it, and it is amazing to hear he and Snyder discussing “what happened” to Jerry. (Without mentioning the personality issues that killed off his career in the late Sixties.)

 

Obsolete has put up segments from a certain New Year's show that Snyder did (on Jan. 1, 1974), but one segment (from a 1973 show) is best seen on its own. A Louisville, Kentucky Satanist conducts a “hexing” ritual with a silent lady lying on an altar (her presence is mentioned but never explained). Might’ve been the only time “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law!” was uttered on late-night TV in, well… at least that part of the Seventies.

 

For comedy LP fans, one of the great treats unearthed by Obsolete is Murray Roman’s TV Show, a pilot hosted by Murray Roman, a comedian who is best known for having written for, and been an ensemble cast member on, The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. Roman was actually a very special figure in comedy history – clearly “converted” by Lenny Bruce, he spoke like Lenny when doing standup but also pioneered on his albums the kind of headphone comedy that was done to a fine turn by the Firesign Theater.

Roman let his eclectic and turned-on taste rule his TV pilot. The comedy is oddball and more off-kilter than Laugh-In or the Smothers show (it has the off-beat tone of Kovacs, but without his visual innovation); the music is supplied by Donovan, folkie/actor Hamilton Camp, and Linda Ronstadt. Nancy Sinatra does a poetry reading of the lyrics to the Beatles' "Revolution" (!), Frank Zappa sits for an interview by Murray, and the show closes out with Donovan’s recording of “Atlantis” being played, with Donovan, Roman, and a group of hippie-ish young people singing along (although you can only really hear the recording). Tommy Smothers also makes a brief appearance.

This program has no IMDB listing, but according to Obsolete’s notes, it was broadcast on KTTV in Feb. 1970. An educational documentary appears after the Roman show on the tape that Rick and his crew transferred. 

 

Still in the realm of comedy, and another jam-packed show with great names from that Sixties/Seventies era, is “Comedy News,” another pilot that aired during the ABC Wide World of Entertainment late-night slot in Sept. 1973.

The cast is pretty damned impressive: as fake “anchors,” Kenny Mars, Andrew Duncan, Fannie Flagg, Anthony Holland, and Marian Mercer; as “correspondents” doing their own material, there are Bob and Ray, Mort Sahl, Dick Gregory, and Peter Schickele. Appearing in a final “women’s panel show” sketch (which would seem to have begun as a bit done at an improv club) are comedy writer emeritus Gail Parent and Joan Rivers.

Some of the material is dated; some is timeless. The best stuff comes from the correspondents and on the women’s panel, but Kenny Mars deserves special mention for incarnating a pompous, self-satisfied and conservative anchorman, decades before Will Ferrell.

 

There are many mind-blowers in the coffers of Obsolete. Two major ones come from a non-Jerry Lewis program, the Easter Seals Telethon. The first one is from 1975, cohosted in early scenes by Peter Falk, Wayne Rogers, Billy Davis (of Marilyn McCoo and…), and actor James Cromwell. Tony Bennett (in excellent voice, with one of his wackier wigs on) performs several numbers in-studio as the clip begins.

Diana Trask does a song and then the show kicks into higher gear for cinephiles: John Cassavetes and Ben Gazzara, Falk’s Husbands pals, appear as cohosts. Falk then participates as the referee of a rather bizarre wheelchair basketball game (!). It’s a mind-boggler to hear Cassavetes’ cigarette-smokey laugh and Gazzara’s DEEP tones while they serve as spontaneous sportscasters. (With Micky Dolenz and Donny Most on the phone bank.)

The oldies group the Penguins then perform “Saturday Night at the Movies” (after an intro by new hosts Lucie Arnaz and Desi Jr; Lucie does a slow dance to the song with Henry Winkler). A call-in of $20.00 from Garry Marshall — wow, Garry, couldja spare it? — closes out the segment, which then goes to many ads.

 

Perhaps the most mind-roasting segment yet unleashed by Obsolete (and this is a hard call) is another one from the same ’75 Easter Seals Telethon. It begins in media res, with Adrianne Barbeau dancing wildly (yes, the teen boys who loved her at the time were no doubt thrilled) with Marty Allen, who was quite the crazy dancer himself. Ben Gazzara’s dance partner at this point? Well, Charo, of course.

Falk is still the serious host, doing a pitch to call in with a pledge as the music plays. Adrianne continues to feverishly dance, as Marty Allen breaks off and cuts a rug with a person in a giant Easter Bunny suit. The bunny person grabs Barbeau and cops a feel, but she is nonplussed, as she goes from dancing into a pitch for Easter Seals. Cassavetes gives the pledge-tally for the hour.

 

***** 

As I wrote this piece, there was a basic problem: Rick kept uploading things to the Obsolete channel that I really had to include. The first of these was a full special by Bobbie Gentry, shot in Canada and recorded off an L.A. airing.

The show is terrific, as Bobbie (like Johnny Cash) wisely avoids the standard terrible variety-show sketches that blighted shows hosted by singers. Her guests are all musicians, and so we get songs from them alone and with Bobbie.

They are: John Hartford, Richie Havens, Ian and Sylvia, Biff Rose, and the Staples Singers. Hard to pick a favorite performance but Bobbie, Hartford, and Richie, singing Bobbie’s own “Morning Glory” has to qualify. She also does a spirited and well-acted version of her latest story-song, the iconic “a girl has to do what she has to do” song, “Fancy.” The end, what we have of it, is amazing – Bobbie leads a little dance party onstage while singing “The Rainmaker” as all her guests dance around as well, as they are “rained on.”

 

And you’d think that an important TV special like Free to Be… You and Me from March 1974 would’ve made it to YouTube intact, but Obsolete has posted a nearly full broadcast of it with commercials intact. Marlo Thomas and her producers assembled a great collection of talent for the 1972 LP and the ‘74 TV special, which focused on letting children know that gender differences (and those of race) don’t matter — yes, it’s corny as hell at points but charming throughout and quite important in its time.

The most enjoyable scenes include: Marlo and Mel Brooks providing the voices of boy and girl babies in a hospital discovering their genders (sketches cowritten by Carl Reiner; the puppets of the babies were made and operated by Wayland Flowers, of “Madame” fame!); a cartoon about a girl who uses her being a “lady” to get everything she wants, until she receives her comeuppance (written by the great Shel Silverstein); and a number of very touching songs, most prominently “When We Grow Up” sung by Roberta Flack and teenage Michael Jackson — the last line, convincing children that you “don’t have to change at all” is indeed quite poignant given that it is sung by MJ (who changed everything about his physical appearance systematically through the last decades of his life).

I note at least one thing missing: Rosey Grier singing “It’s All Right to Cry” (and the beginning of the “William’s Doll” song sung by Alan Alda). However, this initially aired version of the show includes a segment with Dustin Hoffman that was cut from the special when it was first released on home-entertainment formats. (It has since reappeared as a DVD supplement.) Hoffman, at the height of his powers (in the year of Lenny), reads a Brooklyn Jewish boy’s story about wanting to stop crying so much. It would seem that this is the great Herb Gardner’s contribution to the program, as Gardner’s name appears among the writers — he and Marlo were a couple at the time — and this piece has the “sound” of Gardner’s NYC realist-poetry dialogue.

 

Note: Rick has posted info on how to reach him on the videos he hosts on the Obsolete Video channel. He is looking for donations and sponsoring orgs to help him acquire more collections and restore those videos. He's doing invaluable work and we are very lucky that he's making this stuff available for free on YT.

Thanks to Jon Whitehead and Rich Brown for referring me to Rick’s YT channel.

"This Old Man": Deceased Artiste Peter Falk

It is an extremely trite cliché that a TV star can “feel like one of the family” to members of the viewing public. If the expression has to be used at all, it might as well be used for Peter Falk, the inimitable Lieutenant Columbo, who died a few weeks back at 83. Falk was both a larger-than-life TV personality and an extremely talented movie and theater actor who did indeed occupy a sort of imaginary space in my growing up, as both my mother and father really loved his work (like Nicholson, Falk was the kind of a performer who was enjoyed equally by both men and women). As I became a diehard movie buff I discovered the depth of his work, and his ability to both “play large” and give the most nuanced and moving performances.

Columbo is, of course, the linchpin of devotion to Falk. The incredibly touching outpouring of affection for the gent across the Internet is pretty daunting: not only is he considered a kind of “member of the family” by most Americans over a certain age, he was genuinely loved the world over, as the Columbo TV movies were dubbed and shown throughout Europe and Asia (Falk also maintained that he was recognized on the streets of an African town when he went there to shoot a film).

The Columbo concept was indeed “something new under the sun” in the mystery world (the formula had no doubt been used before, but never so deftly and so often): a thriller wherein we the audience know from the very beginning who the murderer is, and the only true mystery is how will the police entrap him/her.

In the meantime nearly every one of the telefilms (minus a few of the final ones and two directed in the Seventies by Patrick McGoohan, who crafted a grimmer view of the character) offered a beautifully nuanced comic portrayal by Falk as Columbo: the shambling walk, the rumpled raincoat, the cigar, the dilapidated car, the dog named “Dog,” and of course that brilliant way of luring in the overstuffed pompous murder suspects and then lowering the boom with a simple, “…just one more thing…” The Columbo movies were TV at it best, with a comfortable, familiar lead character, exemplary writing, excellent (and, yes, often hammy) acting, and a plotline that could indeed be tied up in 90 minutes of TV time (minus commercials).

My mother adored the show from its first appearance in ’71 as part of the NBC Mystery Movie and became a diehard fan over the years, watching and rewatching the episodes, and contributing to a fan newsletter that covered everything related to both the series and Falk’s career.

The movies were indeed ideal family TV viewing: not as sickly sweet as a children’s movie (there was a cold-blooded murder taking place — right at the beginning!), not as simple-minded as a sitcom, not as tied up in scientific and legal procedure as today’s TV cop dramas. The running joke in places like Mad was that no court could convict one of Columbo’s murderers, because he built his cases against them on flimsy, circumstantial evidence — thus, the Thin Man-style outbursts or open admissions from the killers that they were indeed the culprit.

Watching the show as a kid was as invigorating as one’s first exposure to Conan Doyle: a steady accumulation of detail and character quirks, and a detective who was putting the pieces together quite handily as the program moved on. The Columbo movies have their wonderfully dated Seventies and Nineties hallmarks (hairstyles, wardrobe, plot twists involving “new” technologies like cellphones), but the storylines and, most importantly, the character of Columbo make for timeless TV. I’m happy to have experienced watching and discussing so many of the shows with my mother, and will keep those memories close to me as time goes on.

My dad enjoyed the Columbo series, but he opened me up to the “other side” of Falk’s work at an early age, when he praised John Cassavetes' incredible (and also, incredibly timeless) Husbands to me as a kid. There was no way I was going to “get” Cassavetes’ work at a young age (in fact, his work, like all perfect art, grows with you as you get older), but the bits of the film I saw on local Channel 11 were fun to me as a kid because the movie seemed to be about grown men acting in a silly, childike manner (but indulging in adult things, like drinking, smoking, and flying to London).

Years later I saw the sublime and as-near-to-perfect-as-cinema-gets A Woman Under the Influence, and realized that not only was Falk a terrific television personality, he was an incredibly nuanced actor who could play a part that at first glimpse seemed like the “villain” of the piece (a husband who can’t understand his wife’s breakdown at all) but was in fact an incredibly difficult part to play — the two things that always hit the hardest about that film are Rowlands’ delirious devotion to her kids, and Falk’s beautiful desire to help his wife and his common-Joe inclination to just ask her to please snap out of it.

The film is a difficult one, that remains as difficult and rewardingly beautiful to watch as the years go by. I think it was the critic Raymond Durgnat who said that, no matter how many times you watch the beginning of Un Chien Andalou, that razor cutting the eye never gets any duller. Similarly the almost endless scene where Rowlands tries to hurt herself in the family home and Falk tries to “wake” her up and keep his kids from witnessing what’s going on never becomes any easier to watch.

It is the trauma of both the person breaking down mentally and emotionally (Rowlands) and the person who cannot accept what is happening and wants it to stop immediately (Falk) that makes the scene so extremely powerful. The scene is a testament both to Cassavetes’ willingness to subject his audience to emotional discomfort and to the unbelievable talent of both Rowlands and Falk (the other actors in the scene respond thoroughly authentically because they are Cassavetes’ mother playing Falk’s mother and a trio of child actors who honestly don’t seem to understand what the adults are doing).

So Falk’s work has a resonance on several levels, both with the most comfortable material imaginable and the most blissfully uncomfortable. And staying in the realm of the uncomfortable (and integrally connected to Falk's final years), let me just put in a word here about how utterly disgusting the self-congratulatory crew over at the TMZ website are (while the website is bilge in cyber form, that godawful TV show is beyond noxious).

I’m a self-admitted fan of trash TV and will read gossip items by the yard, but there’s something REALLY ugly about the TMZ “ambushes” on celebrities, which have in some cases made me feel sorry for celebs I have absolutely no pity for (the only time I can feel bad for the Paris Hiltons of the world is when I fall across a TMZ link or the heinous TV show — the constant screaming of the name; the handheld camera racing to keep up with the person; the annoying, stupid questioning).

Falk was the victim of this kind of really ugly tabloid shittiness around the time that it was coming to light that he was suffering from dementia. It was reported that he was found “wandering in Beverly Hills” one afternoon in a sweater looking out of it. The photos reproduced on the Web seemed to show him talking to himself and screaming (the one to the right is not from that "news" story; I'm not going to reprint their pics). Then I actually saw the clip — yes, I succumb every so often, and as happens when you watch the infamous Bud Dwyer suicide video, I do feel really dirty afterwards. Porn makes you feel a lot (and I do mean a lot) cleaner.

What was clearly going on was that, yes, Peter was addled and was walking down the street and might indeed have been talking to himself (now how many of us have ever done the same thing?). The screaming he did and the “wild” look in his eyes and his tousled hair were due to the appearance of a camera; he begins to tell the cameraman “turn that off” and appears angry that they’re shooting video of him at that moment. Falk might’ve been having problems in the later part of his life, but I have no doubt whatsoever that the consummate pro in him immediately knew that the camera should not be there, he was not “on,” he was not in character. This was, need I add, a private moment for the guy.

The only victory I saw in this horrible moment (which was echoed, again, in the beautiful verbal tributes when he died the other week) was that commenters on the Net were as one saying “leave the old guy alone!” There is no way any of us couldn’t sympathize with this situation, either as a person whose mind wanders, or as the child of a senior who might someday have a problem similar to Falk’s.

All I can remind you of, happily, was the fact that when sleazy guys with eyes for a buck broke into Marlene Dietrich’s apartment when she was ailing and housebound, the European press did not purchase the photos they took of her looking terrible (yes, they have shown up in later biographies and on the Net). Marlene wanted her audience to remember her as she was (as did Stan Laurel, who declined to be seen in public after he had a debilitating stroke), and somehow the usually incredibly sleazy major tabloids in Europe took a stand and did not purchase the pictures. All TMZ is made of are such pictures.

But enough with the final years of Falk’s life (and yes, there are several less-than-compelling movies at the end of his filmography, including one in which he played second fiddle to SNL drone Chris Kattan), and let me celebrate the guy as he was and will ALWAYS be remembered. He spoke in interviews as if he came very late in life to acting, but in fact he began doing it in his late 20s in an amateur theater group. To that point he had been a cook in the Merchant Marine, had gotten a political science degree in college, and had worked as an efficiency expert in an office (the fact that Columbo once had that job title was one of the many wonders in Falk’s life).

When he finally devoted his life to acting in the late Fifties, he broke through in mainstream theater with a small but steady part as the bartender in the Circle in the Square production of The Iceman Cometh (this was the mind-blowing Jason Robards production preserved thankfully for TV by Sidney Lumet, without Falk). He played roles at the tail end of the “Golden Age of Television” on shows like Studio One and Kraft Television Theater, and distinguished himself in starring roles in episodes of sublime anthology series like The Twilight Zone and Naked City.

Around this same time (1960), The Chevy Mystery Show presented a teleplay by Richard Levinson and William Link called “Enough Rope,” with a shrewd detective who was smarter than he looked, based on the character of Porfiry in Crime and Punishment. The character had been played by Thomas Mitchell in the theatrical version of the show, while Bert Freed played him on the TV anthology series. His name was “Lieutenant Columbo.”

In the meantime, Falk established himself in the movies playing gangsters in Murder, Inc. (1960) and Capra’s last movie, A Pocketful of Miracles (1961). He tried to shake his “mob boss” image by playing a broad variety of roles on TV and in the movies in the decade that followed (although he met Cassavetes for the first time working on Machine Gun McCain in 1969). He shook that image forever in 1968 when he played Columbo for the first time in the somewhat dour Prescription: Murder, and then when the show began in earnest with the 1971 pilot film Ransom for a Dead Man.

As the years went by, he did vary between earnestly brilliant dramas, like the two Cassavetes milestones already mentioned (he also has a worldless cameo at the end of Opening Night), and broad farces, the best being those written by talented scripters like Neil Simon (Murder by Death) and Andrew Bergman (The In-Laws). He kept working until his final health troubles emerged, and although he never did do that long-promised “final Columbo movie,” he appeared as the character in 67 telefilms from 1971-2003 (with ten years off, from ’78-’88) and left us many happy memories.

*****
His first movie role was a small part in Nicholas Ray’s Wind Across the Everglades as one of Burl Ives’ band of mangy-lookin' rogues. He appeared in countless TV dramas, including this 1959 Omnibus episode. His first starring role was in this low-budget Beatnik potboiler, The Bloody Brood (1959).



The first role that got him major attention was his picture-stealing turn as Abe “Kid Twist” Reles in Murder, Inc. (1960). This segment from the film contains my favorite scene, him urging Stuart Whitman and May Britt to “TAKE!”:



This is the special reason that YouTube exists: upon Falk’s death, a collector uploaded an episode of the obscure 1960 TV series The Witness in which Falk reprised the role of “Kid Twist.” This is extremely rare stuff:



Falk’s theatrical roots are in evidence in this film adaptation of Jean Genet’s The Balcony (1963). A bit overdone, but still very strong:



And, showing that the guy loved to broaden his range early on, here he is singing in the Rat Pack musical Robin and the Seven Hoods (1964):



Another role in a musical, this time a 1966 TV adaptation of Brigadoon, starring Robert Goulet:



Falk’s first starring role in a TV series came with this one-season 1965 NYC lawyer show, The Trials of O’Brien. This episode begins with a great go-go club scene featuring Vincent Gardenia (!):



The sublime Murray Schisgal play Luv was adapted into an uneven but still very funny movie in 1967. In the parts played by Alan Arkin, Eli Wallach, and Anne Jackson on stage, there was Jack Lemmon, Peter Falk, and Elaine May (whatta cast!):



Falk also appeared regularly on variety shows. Here he is on The Dean Martin Show playing (what else) a gangster:



We arrive at Columbo with the advent of the 1970s. There are literally a few hundred Columbo clips on YT, but I’ll have to let the next few suffice. First, the Lieutenant annoying the hell out of a stuffy old lady. Then Columbo getting sidetracked by a book on erotic art:



A fan-created vid done in the style of Jack Haley, Jr’s “here’s the same phrase as it appeared in several different movies” montages:



The Columbo TV movies had a spectacular range of guest-star murderers. Of course Falk had to have on his friend Johnny C. (as an orchestra conductor):



The guest star who Falk seemed to enjoy having on the most was Patrick (“I am not a number — I am a free man!!!”) McGoohan, who wound up directing episodes of the series (as noted above, they are not exactly fan favorites, due to presenting a far grimmer Columbo). Here is a fan-created tribute video to the two actors. And here is a marvelous duo on one episode (who never met): William Shatner and the always overwhelming Timothy Carey:



A perfect example of the wonderfully scripted Columbo conclusions. This time the Lieutenant accuses the always-awesome Rip Torn of the crime:



If I haven’t already stressed the fact that viewers LOVED Columbo, here’s a fan-created vid illustrating Harry Nilsson’s strange but fun song “Kojak Columbo” with images from… well, take a guess…:



Falk was fine with reprising the role of Columbo in other venues if the offer was entertaining, or lucrative, enough. Here’s the entertainment — the Lieutenant shows up at a Dean Martin roast for Sinatra (and does a full ten-minute bit, a very long segment for a Dino roast):



And, yes, the filthy lucre. Falk did a series of ads for Japanese TV in the early Nineties. He promoted the Toyota Corolla dressed as Columbo. He also did ads for Suntory whisky relaxing at “home” and in pajamas and a halo with a chick in a bonnet (I have no idea). Here is a Suntory ad shot in English where Falk plays a bartender:



The trailer for Cassavetes’ Husbands (1970), narrated by NYC radio personality William B. Williams. This contains my favorite Falk scene in the picture, his singing “Good Morning, Mr. Zip-zip-zip,” a WWI-era tune out of a clear blue sky to seduce a young Chinese woman:



The opening scene from A Woman Under the Influence (1974):



The trailer for the film:



The most Cassavetes-like film that Falk was in that wasn’t directed by John himself was Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky (1976), which costarred Falk and Cassavetes. This sequence is a gorgeous riff on death set in a graveyard that is, by turns, funny, touching, annoying, ridiculous, and profound. May encouraged the actors to improv on camera, which is what made her approach completely different from Cassavetes, whom was she presumably mimicking (John tried to limit all improvs to the rehearsal period):



A Falk interview segment from the French documentary Trois Camarades, about the friendship of Cassavetes, Falk, and Gazzarra:



Falk and Jill Clayburgh in a meet-cute scene from the TV-movie Griffin and Phoenix: A Love Story (1976):



In certain roles, Falk sounded like Humphrey Bogart. Here he is doing a delightful sendup of Bogey in Neil Simon’s Murder by Death (1976):



Falk formed a sublime comedy team with Alan Arkin in The In-Laws (1979). Here is the “serpentine!” scene:



While The In-Laws is well-remembered by fan of Seventies comedy, the other film that Falk and Arkin made in tandem, Big Trouble (1986), is completely forgotten. It is uneven but features a very good spoof of Double Indemnity, offers more of the two acting as a good comedy team, and was in fact the last film directed by John Cassavetes, who took over when scripter Andrew Bergman left the project. Here is a plum bit of business:



A film with Falk that is well-remembered by gentlemen “of a certain age” is the women’s wrestling picture …All the Marbles (1981). The last film made by director Robert Aldrich, Marbles finds Falk managing a sexy female tag team as they move up the circuit to the big time. The film is one of those cult items that actually satisfies its “mandate” — namely, devoting a large amount of the running time to the matches. Falk is the colorful, devoted manager and, yes, this is one of the many pro-wrestling films that posits that the sport is entirely real. My favorite line in the picture (Burt Young’s crack about the Brontes) is in this trailer:



From a sexy sports pic to one of Falk’s best-loved supporting roles: as himself, the former angel, in Wim Wenders’ beautiful Wings of Desire (1987). One of the many fans who loved the guy wrote in the comments field for this clip, “I can’t see you, Peter… but I know that you’re there…”:



And, similar to Big Trouble, there was a sequel to Wings of Desire that was wholly unnecessary but was nonetheless pleasant. Here’s an outtake from the film, called Faraway, So Close! (1993), featuring Falk:



Falk did indeed work steadily in the last years of his life before the health troubles emerged. Here is the trailer for one of those films (usually comedies and family fare) that went straight to DVD, an “old guy” farce featuring Peter, George Segal, Rip Torn, and Bill Cobbs called Three Days to Vegas (2007):



In closing I offer my personal fave online offerings. First the absolutely wonderful appearance made by the stars of Husbands on The Dick Cavett Show. The episode was taped on 9/18/70, and the boys put on Cavett, refusing to submit to a conventional interview (one easily assumes they visited a local “establishment” before the taping began — their playfulness seems fueled by something…). An online commenter noted that “These guys were the Rat Pack of independent film!” And this interview pretty much proves that they were:



And finally two clips that play on the same theme, in fact the same song: when Columbo had to wait for something in the series, he began to whistle or hum “This Old Man.” The song thus became a sort of in-joke for diehard fans of the show, and inspired one devoted fan to create this very touching tribute to Falk as the Lieutenant:



There is no better way to close out than with the finish of the last show in the 1976 season. The producers of the Columbo movies were not getting along with NBC, and it was assumed that the series might’ve reached its end (they were only 27 years off!). As a result they closed out the season with this nice bit of business where Columbo leaves in a rowboat, going to meet the all-important but never-seen Mrs. Columbo, as his favorite tune plays on the soundtrack:

Turning Japanese (for a paycheck): Celebs in '80s TV commercials

For almost four decades now, the Japanese have been luring American and European celebrities to do their ads with big paychecks and the promise that the commercial will only be aired in Japan. Of course now with YouTube, nothing is country-specific, and so posters like this one provide with endless amusement.

This gent seems to have specialized in collecting Japanese ads from the Eighties, so forthwith I present these kitschy little items:

Jane Bikin


Jodie Foster (to the tune of “She Drives Me Crazy”):



A very shabbily dressed Peter Falk (and would we have him any other way?):



The personification of class, Marcello Mastroianni:



Mickey Rourke, with his original face:



An odd choice for studliness, Anthony Perkins:



Even more gawky studliness from Tony:



And since we’re in the Eighties, we need some of the stunning ladies of that time. First, Nastassja Kinski:



The gorgeous Diane Lane:



The fantasy of every teen boy at that time, Phoebe Cates:



And the absolutely perfect Mademoiselle Sophie Marceau:



Sean Connery, who turned 80 years old this week!



And a little more Sir Sean:



To close out, I return to the kinetic and busy-as-fuck Mr. Sammy Davis Jr. If you thought he was ubiquitous on U.S. TV when we were young, he also blitzed the airwaves in other countries. Here he’s older and pitching coffee and something called “the stick”:



There are two versions of this one, a longer one that loses sound midway through and this twangy sucker:



From a 1974 campaign, where he pitched whiskey and did impressions. Here it’s Bogart:



Here it’s Brando as Don Vito:



A dance video, with the trademark “con-chicki-con-con”:



And lastly, a frenzied Jerry Lewis impression:

YouTube find of the month: Cassavetes, Falk, and Gazzara guest on "The Dick Cavett Show"

If there is any further proof needed that network TV was a lot more engaging and intelligent way back when, I don't know what it is. This is the 9/21/70 edition of Cavett on which JC and friends discuss Husbands (or better yet, don't really discuss the film). It's amazing to see the three of them hanging out (the only footage that makes the rounds is from documentaries on the making of the film). Also being oddly, charmingly uncooperative with a talk show host (who happened to be one of the smarter, more simpatico talk show hosts of the time). He jokes in this segment that he thinks they're "smashed," and they firmly deny it, but it does seem like they've some fun *somewhere* before the show started rolling. I've linked to the third part of four, but this is well (!!!) worth your time. It's a 40 minute Cavett episode, as he had to do half-strength shows when "Monday Night Football" ran over.

This is like spun gold for fans of Cassavetes' movie work.

Click here if the above doesn't work.