Tuning In to Today’s Peter Falk : Film: The man behind ‘Columbo’ has a list of movie credits that show his ambivalence about commercial success. The latest example: He stars in the quirky new ‘Tune in Tomorrow.’

“Mainstream world-famous TV Middle America,” Peter Falk says slowly, arranging the words as if on a banner in his mind that might describe an actor identified with one of the most popular characters ever seen on television. “But he’s an actor who has this kind of schizophrenic existence. A little bit like Charlie Chaplin. He’s a millionaire by day and a drunk by night. He gets involved with things that. . . .”

The head shakes slightly, the sentence breaks off, and a brief silence fills the converted Beverly Hills garage. Falk drops a smoldering cigarette butt to the floor and steps on it while his visitor is left to fill in the blank--most likely with memories of some of Falk’s many feature films or at least with some of their titles. For, in fact, Peter Falk is talking about himself.

“This disease of mine, it goes way back, back to when I first came to Hollywood,” he says, referring to one of his early movies, 1963’s “The Balcony,” based on the absurdist play by Jean Genet. Around Falk are tables and easels bearing the charcoal figure drawings he does when he is not in front of a camera. “I did that with Shelley Winters and Lee Grant and the fellow from the spaceship (Leonard Nimoy). It was directed by Joe Strick. We all worked for nothin’.”

And where audiences were concerned, it came to nothin’, which bode a pattern for his film career. Never mind the Oscar nominations Falk had received for his first two film roles--in “Murder, Inc.” (1960) and “Pocketful of Miracles” (1961)--what followed were such offbeat, commercially lackluster films as “Robin and the Seven Hoods” (1964), “Penelope” (1966), “Luv” (1967), “Machine Gun McCain” (1970), “Husbands” (1970), “Mikey and Nicky” (1976) and, more recently, “Big Trouble,” “Wings of Desire,” “Happy New Year,” “Vibes,” “Cookie” and “In the Spirit.”

Falk runs a title check through his mind and observes, “These are not traditional, mainstream, big-budget action pictures. I don’t know how you would characterize them. I guess you would say they’re unusual.”

The newest addition to Falk’s “unusual” filmography is “Tune in Tomorrow . . . “ (which opens Friday), a radically altered adaptation of Mario Vargas Llosa’s modern Peruvian novel “Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter,” which has been reset in 1950 New Orleans and directed by the Englishman Jon Amiel from a script by the Scot William Boyd.

In this transcultural comedy, Falk plays an eccentric Irish-Mexican writer of radio dramas, Pedro Carmichael, who is newly relocated to the Deep South, where he is packing his newest plot with details of a May-December romance between a 20-year-old protege (Keanu Reeves) and the young writer’s 35ish aunt (Barbara Hershey).

“Tune in Tomorrow . . . “ is a seriously odd movie that merges the real events going on in Pedro’s New Orleans with lifelike dramatizations of Pedro’s soap operas. It does offer Falk a chance to dress up like a rabbi, a surgeon and a French maid (“a very specific French maid”), since Pedro is a writer who needs to put on costumes to fully understand his characters. But is it going to change his luck on the big screen?

“This guy was like the spiritual godfather of ‘Dallas’ and ‘Dynasty,’ ” Falk says, explaining why he said yes to the role after once rejecting it. “David Lynch, ‘Twin Peaks,’ they owe a debt to Pedro Carmichael, who as early as 1950, before television, knew that people had a desire to know about other people’s hidden sexual preferences.”

In Llosa’s 1982 book, however, Pedro was less of a con man than he has become in the screen version, which has Falk playing him as a wacky sage who deliberately fuels the fire between Aunt Julia and the young scriptwriter for his own purposes.

“It was the Irish, the Blarney, the manipulator, that mischievous sense of humor, that flamboyant artistic thing,” Falk says, citing the things he liked about Pedro Carmichael. When producer John Fiedler first sent him the script, he turned it down because “I knew that part was a terrific part, but I had a problem: I didn’t know how to play it.”

When Fiedler, who had been working at Columbia, re-submitted the script to Falk a year later, Amiel was attached as the director and the project was looking for a studio (eventually landing at Cinecom). Amiel asked Falk to think about the character’s name.

“He said he’s half Mexican and half Irish. When I heard he was Irish, that rang a bell. There were certain lines that I didn’t know how to say, that if you said them with a trace of Irish or an Irish feeling, they worked. Then I said yes.”

Falk, born in New York in 1927, began acting off-Broadway in the 1950s. It was after the Oscar nominations and “The Balcony” and assorted other Hollywood ventures that he first put on the moldy raincoat and quizzical smiles of Lt. Columbo in a 1967 made-for-TV movie. In 1971, “Columbo” became a series, and in the years since--including a 10-year layoff between 1978 and 1988--the show has brought him four Emmies and defined him to the world. He insists that he still enjoys it--”In terms of playing the character, I still get a kick out of it. I love it when it works”--but it has not contained his ambition.

“Even the first year of ‘Columbo,’ ‘Columbo’ was Jesus Christ, No. 1, you know,” he says in his raspy Long Island syntax, thrusting his arms skyward as if signaling a touchdown. “So during the day it was Charlie Chaplin, and at night I was with (John) Cassavetes and (Ben) Gazzara trying to get the money to make this picture ‘Husbands.’ And the second year of ‘Columbo,’ soon as I get a hiatus, I went and made ‘Woman Under the Influence,’ with Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands. The third year of ‘Columbo,’ the drunk came out and we made ‘Mikey and Nicky’ with Elaine May.”

Falk’s kinship with Cassavetes, the late maverick director who relied heavily on improvisation and defied Hollywood conventions, is a clue that his instincts have never led him to play it safe. In 1963, he became the first American movie actor to work in the Soviet Union, traveling there against the advice of friends in Hollywood to make “Italiano Bravo Gente” because, he says, “I wanted to see Russia!”

Falk acknowledges a debt to Cassavetes, whom he believes set “standards of immediacy” for acting and actors in his films. “He was concerned with emotional complexities and ambiguities that you don’t find in movies.”

It was from seeing him in Cassavetes’ pictures, as much as ‘Columbo,’ that German director Wim Wenders decided to cast Falk as an ex-angel in “Wings of Desire,” his mostly black-and-white symphony on the unexamined joys of mortality.

Falk never expected “Wings” to even reach the United States. “I was amazed it ever showed up here.” It did not scratch the surface of Columbo’s audience, but it was an art-house hit and easily the most critically respected movie Falk has had a sizable role in since 1974’s “Woman Under the Influence.”

As for his other recent films, Falk has been, well, unlucky. They seem to be pictures that get held up in release, suffer from lack of promotion, are not widely seen or not very good. Among them, Elaine May’s “In the Spirit,” Susan Seidelman’s “Cookie,” John Avildsen’s “Happy New Year.”

Have such misadventures been the result of deliberately sticking to “unusual” films, or are these the only movie offers that Falk gets?

“I’ve said no,” Falk says, lighting another in a long chain of smokes. “I also would have said yes if they had asked me for certain things. So we’re talking about both. There are certain very popular pictures that I would die to be in, yet there were other very popular pictures that I didn’t want to be in. And I don’t want to get specific about naming them. But both things apply.”

Falk is looking ahead to another unusual project, “My Dog Stupid,” based on the John Fante book and to be directed by France’s Claude Berri. He will play the part of Fante, a late, neglected Hollywood novelist now being rediscovered. “It’s about the relationship between John Fante and his kids during the ‘60s,” Falk says, adding, somewhat superfluously, “It’s not the same thing as ‘Columbo.’ ”

On a table across the room, mostly covered with stacks of books on Degas, Matisse and other artists, two of Falk’s Emmies can be seen. But only the lower halves of their golden torsos are visible, because they are currently serving as hat racks.

“My wife found a use for them,” Falk says.