Show Notes
Not every Peter Falk performance comes with a rumpled coat and a homicide to solve. In this episode, we take a look at Griffin & Phoenix, a 1976 made-for-TV gem that finds Falk in rare romantic form. As Geoffrey Griffin, a terminally ill professor, Falk trades sharp wit for quiet heartbreak opposite Jill Clayburgh’s Phoenix, a fellow traveler on a limited timeline. What might sound like a recipe for melodrama turns into something far more poignant and disarming, with Falk giving one of his most restrained and vulnerable performances.
We dig into the film’s TV-movie roots, its place in the 1970s “disease-of-the-week” wave, and how its frank, unvarnished take on death—and love—holds up nearly fifty years later. It’s Peter Falk without the trench coat, but not without charm, soul, and a monologue or two.
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More from The Shabby Detective: Yet Another Columbo Podcast
Peter Falk strolls through gunfire like it’s light rain while Alan Arkin screams for both of them, and there isn’t a trace of Columbo in sight. The In-Laws (1979), directed by Arthur Hiller and written by Andrew Bergman, lands on The Shabby Detective during the long haul between Columbo Season 7 and Season 8. Mike and Chris sort out whether this mark-and-stooge romp earns its reputation. They weigh Falk playing against type, a first hour that stalls before the madcap begins, Richard Libertini’s black-velvet art gallery, screenwriter Walon Green’s tales of William Friedkin wrangling Falk on The Brink’s Job (1978), the troubled Big Trouble (1986) reunion, and the The In-Laws (2003) remake with Albert Brooks and Michael Douglas. Serpentine!
Mike spends the cold open dodging one simple question: why, exactly, are he and Chris watching a 1979 Romanian comedy called Nea Mărin miliardar? He won't say. The answer arrives thirty minutes and seventeen seconds in, when a stranger billed as Detective Columbo shuffles into frame and asks for one more thing.
Peter Falk said no. Richard Levinson and William Link said no. Fred Silverman did it anyway. Mike and Chris take a detour into the Columbo universe's most dubious corner: Mrs. Columbo, Season 2, Episode 5, "A Chilling Surprise" (aired November 22, 1979). Kate Callahan — no longer even Mrs. Columbo in any meaningful sense — investigates a body that won't stay put in a restaurant freezer.
Mike and Chris close the book on Season Seven with "The Conspirators," a 1978 episode that takes Columbo somewhere the series rarely ventured: the murky, morally weighted world of real geopolitical conflict. Clive Revill — Tony-nominated stage actor, Matilda's trainer in the boxing kangaroo film of the same name, and the original voice of Emperor Palpatine in The Empire Strikes Back — plays Joe Devlin, an Irish poet and public charmer who moonlights as a gun-runner for the IRA.