The Pink Panther Saga: 1963 - 2009

© 2011 by John Varley; all rights reserved

The Pink Panther (1963) Imagine you made a Marx Brothers film, and spent two-thirds of your screen time following Gummo and Zeppo. Looking at this film—which I really liked when it was new—after many years have passed, I realize that no one involved had the slightest idea what they had here. Top billing went to … Robert Wagner? I had entirely forgotten he was even in the film. Second billing, David Niven. When you think of the Pink Panther films you think of one thing only: Peter Sellers as Inspector Jacques Clouseau. Actually, about halfway through the shooting, Blake Edwards did realize that Sellers was stealing the show, which is why the movie was a big success and spawned sequels that are much better than the original. The problem is that no one in the audience gave a rap about the jewel of the title, they just wanted to see more Clouseau. Instead, we get a painfully awful five-minute seduction scene (that seems even longer) between Niven and Claudia Cardinale on a tiger-skin rug that climaxes with her passing out after half a glass of champagne. This is a very lame film, part smirking bedroom farce of the Doris Day school, part caper movie much inferior to just about any caper movie I can think of. Don’t waste your time. IMDb.com

A Shot in the Dark (1964) Here’s where the real Inspector Clouseau was born. The man who has never in his life hung a coat on a peg without seeing it immediately fall off, never walked past a small table without spilling its contents, never opened a door without the handle coming off in his hand, and infinite variations on these gags and others … and yet clings to his tattered dignity though it all. He’s not smart, but he is dedicated and sincere, and that’s why we love him as he blunders through life. Blake Edwards and William Peter Blatty (no kidding!) took a French comic play about a bumbling detective, L’Idiote, and rewrote it for Clouseau and it all worked for me. This one co-stars Elke Sommer, who I had a severe crush on in 1964. This Teutonic goddess and former au pair looks like a dumb blonde, and she’s not much of an actress, and most of her films ranged from pretty bad to very bad, but I was astonished to learn she speaks seven languages, which means she could make films in just about any country she chose to. For years I’d been wanting to see The Prize again, a film she made with Paul Newman that I really liked at the time, and that Newman was probably happy to forget. It isn't available on DVD, but then it showed up on TCM. IMDb.com

The Return of the Pink Panther (1975) Starts off well with a clever and sometimes dazzling animated opening. Moves nicely into a heist reminiscent of Topkapi. Then gets down to real business with the arrival of Inspector (now demoted to foot patrolman) Clouseau, who manages to completely miss a bank robbery going on behind him as he debates with a blind man playing the accordion as to whether he needs a permit for street performances with his minkey. “With my what?” “Your minkey.” “Oh, my monkey.” Clouseau’s French accent has grown so awful that throughout the movie even the French speakers can’t understand him. So basically we have two threads going on here: The supposed jewel thief (Christopher Plummer replacing David Niven) and his efforts to find the real thief of the Pink Panther diamond, and Clouseau’s inept efforts to find the thief. Naturally you want the scenes with the thief to just move along so we can get to the stuff we really came to see, Peter Seller’s physical and verbal comic genius, but you do need some sort of plot to hang these antics on. It’s basically a series of set pieces where Sellers wrings every possible laugh from a situation, such as his battles with a big vacuum cleaner. Much of this had to be improvised, as you couldn’t really predict how some of it would go. There are several scenes where he is talking to Catherine Schell where she cracks up, and I thought it was real, that she really couldn’t stop laughing. Most people agree that it was. And I just learned that in the theater this is called “corpsing.” It means deliberately trying to make some other cast member break character, as Tim Conway used to do so regularly with Harvey Korman on “The Carol Burnett Show.” Apparently the term came from trying to get the worst possible cast member to react, that being somebody on stage playing a dead body. Learn something new every day. IMDb.com

The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976) This one has a few good sight gags, but mostly it just goes over much of the same old ground. IMDb.com

Revenge of the Pink Panther (1978) With this one the steam has really gone out of the series. Sadly, there were still five more to go. IMDb.com

Trail of the Pink Panther (1982) Sorry, there’s just no way I will look at this one, which was cobbled together from deleted scenes from the previous movies, Peter Sellers having had the bad grace to die during the writing of The Romance of the Pink Panther. Blake Edwards called it a tribute to Sellers, but his wife didn’t think so, and sued because it diminished her husband’s reputation. She won a million dollars. I also don’t care to see [IMDb.com]

Curse of the Pink Panther (1983) This one features Ted Wass (who?) as an American detective assigned to find the missing inspector Clouseau. Let’s also skip [IMDb.com]

Son of the Pink Panther (1993) Where Roberto Benigni starred as Clouseau’s illegitimate son. It got terrible reviews. After that there was a merciful gap in the really ugly exploitation of this series until Steve Martin took a shit in the franchise with a new one called simply [IMDb.com]

The Pink Panther (2006), which I saw, to my sorrow. It was so dreadful he followed it up with [IMDb.com]

The Pink Panther 2 (2009) Why? Because the first piece of shit made money, that’s why. In the whole history of sequels these five stand out as possibly the worst, except maybe for the endless roman numerals behind Saw. IMDb.com