2023-12-09 13:20:00
The cult lieutenant, timeless defender of the weak against the powerful, can be found in a comforting, high-def complete.
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According to American and French press articles (quote New York Timesthe New Yorker, Telerama), Columbo was, at the height of his 50 years, a “hit” of the 2020 confinement. Were millions of boomers seized by a sudden and massive nostalgic impulse to satisfy? Not sure. Rather, they are thirty or forty-somethings experienced in other dramatic conventions who tell how they found comfort with the police lieutenant in the beige raincoat played from 1968 to 2003 by Peter Falk. What is this about? Obviously to the character himself, a modest and peaceful investigator, a sort of exception which confirms the ACAB rule, “All Cops Are Bastards”, which everything – up to his refusal to carry a weapon – opposes to technological frenzy and violence (including police officers) of our time. By confronting this proletarian inspector with bosses – sometimes his own – or wealthy stars who kill to preserve their financial, social or cultural capital, Columbo recycles in his own way a timeless political and sociological commentary on the baseness of the powerful and the greatness of the small. .
A poltergeist
Let’s add the repetition of a comfortable canvas. Act I: the murder, often cold and methodical, filmed in its entirety. Act II: the frumpy anti-hero arrives, who begins to harass the culprit, immediately identified as such, with surprise appearances in his garden, perverse interrogations (becoming ecstatic in front of a master’s painting before ‘address a “little detail that is confusing”) and, if necessary – Act III – fabrication of evidence (the criminal revealing himself by trying to make them disappear). At the end of the torture, confessions emerge, sometimes formulated with a simple look which means: take me away, prison will be sweeter to me than having you for one more second in my life. In his own way, Lieutenant Columbo is a poltergeist.
The creators of the series, Richard Levinson and William Link, said they drew their inspiration from the character of Porfiry Petrovich, the prosecutor in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Faced with the murderer, “it is always less a question of proving his guilt than of leading him to admit it himself”, summarizes the philosophy professor Gilles Vervisch in the booklet which accompanies this complete (69 episodes, the two “pilots » included) remastered on Blu-Ray, with revitalized colors. The careful production and the gifted directors who succeeded one another (Steven Spielberg, Ben Gazzara, Jonathan Demme, etc.) deserved this restoration.
Columbo, the complete in high definition, ed. the Image Workshop. 22 discs, approx. 90 hours, €135.
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