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In the 1969 Vegas crime film Machine Gun McCain, he played the mob boss as harried CEO. ("What's the matter, I can't make an investment? I'm not allowed to make a dollar? I ain't got that right?") The movie wasn't a keeper, but it cemented Falk's friendship with John Cassavetes, its star. Soon these two and some other adventurous spirits — Ben Gazzara, Seymour Cassell, and Cassavetes' wife Gena Rowlands — formed a kind of Rat Pack of indie film to make, under Cassavetes' direction, a series of anguished, sprawling, semi-improv psychodramas. Falk was one of the wandering spouses in the 1970 Husbands, and the decent guy watching his wife (Rowlands) spiral into madness in the 1974 A Woman Under the Influence. He also teamed with Cassavetes when they played two pals in Elaine May's nighttime odyssey of anxiety, Mikey and Nicky.
While other members of the troupe might flex their Actors Studio chops to chew the material to gristle, Falk usually kept his tone nuanced and conversational; he was one of the few Method-era actors who didn't demand a big screaming scene as a statement of his power and purity. Somehow he knew that he had already commanded the viewer's attention, and that a whisper — or, in Columbo's case, the trademark pause at the suspect's door and a querulous pitch to the phrase, "Just one more thing..." — was as good as a wail.
Neil Simon, who had given Falk a Broadway lead as the unemployed businessman contemplating suicide in the 1971 The Prisoner of Second Avenue (Jack Lemmon got to play that role in the movie version), finally handed the actor two starring film roles in the classic-mystery parodies Murder by Death and The Cheap Detective. In the first, Falk was "Sam Diamond" (think the hard-boiled shamuses Sam Spade and Richard Diamond), one of five detectives summoned to solve a crime. In the second film, as "Lou Peckinpaugh," Falk anchored Simon's comic hommage (commage?) to The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca and the prime films of Humphrey Bogart — a movie icon, who like Falk, spent a decade playing supporting roles as gangsters before he found his star voice as a grizzled guy on the right side of the law. (In 1996, Falk and Woody Allen played the pugnacious old vaudeville stars in a TV remake of Simon's The Sunshine Boys.)
He had first played Columbo in the 1968 TV movie Prescription: Murder, which became a series in 1971 and continued off and on until 2003, for a remarkable 35-year fusion of performer and character. But because each season contained no more than eight, and usually three to six, feature-length episodes — and because the movie audience loved Falk as much as TV spectators did — the actor was one of the few living-room stars able to duplicate his clout simultaneously on the big screen. He became a reliable conduit for crime capers with a comic tinge: a light retelling of The Brink's Job and Andrew Bergman's The In-Laws, with Alan Arkin as a nebbishy dentist drawn into a possible murder scheme by Falk, the father of the groom. The two actors later paired for the ill-fated Big Trouble, which Bergman walked away from as director, to be replaced by Cassavetes — his last, most frustrating gig behind the camera.
As Cassavetes had subsidized his indie films with roles in so-so movies and TV shows, so did Falk use Columbo as his day job, allowing him to go trekking into illuminating back alleys. In Wim Wenders' angel tale Wings of Desire, he plays a visiting Hollywood actor (and ex-angel) who teaches a new friend some primal joys, simple things: "To smoke, have coffee. And if you do it together, it's fantastic!" (Falk also appeared in Wenders' Wings of Desire sequel, Faraway, So Close.)
That craggy, warm voice of authority was perfect for one of Falk's late signature roles: the old man reading his grandson the story that is the movie The Princess Bride. Who better than Falk could sell a kid the idea of the greatest kiss the world has ever seen? Who wouldn't want a grandpa, a friend, even an enemy like the ones Falk played? Even now, at his death, we wish, like the boy in The Princess Bride, that Peter Falk could come over and read to us again tomorrow.