After
something of a wilderness period making box-office flops and worthy
experimental films that stretched his versatility if not his career, Peter
Sellers came back to the winning partnership he enjoyed with director Blake
Edwards with a long-overdue third PINK PANTHER film. Though they antagonised
each other off-screen, the two headstrong talents knew they wove movie gold
together on-screen in the previous Clouseau films as well as the brilliant
sight-gag classic THE PARTY. Their careers had mutually declined in the
intervening years and Sellers’ opting not to do the INSPECTOR CLOUSEAU sequel
for Edwards in 1968 meant they both needed a hit more than ever.
Edwards had
struggled to get the funding for a proposed sequel in the meantime and managed
to wangle the green light for this as the second of a two film deal with Lew
Grade.
Happily,
RETURN OF THE PINK PANTHER showed that neither Sellers nor Edwards had lost
their collaborative magic. Such is the director’s confidence that post-credits
(designed by Richard WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT, no less), he spends the first ten
minutes of what is a laugh-out-loud comedy presenting a daring and engrossing
theft of the infamous Pink Panther diamond as if it were a dramatic heist genre
movie. Edwards then can’t resist capping it with a more characteristic neat repeated
sight-gag where a guard is slammed into unconsciousness twice by the same
closing door.
Clouseau
himself belatedly appears, busted down to beat-cop status on the streets of
Paris, where he confronts one of Sellers’ real-life pals again (the familiar
John Bluthal) as a supposedly blind street entertainer, lacking “A ly-sonce” for his “mernkey”. Once again, Sellers shows off
the comic genius idea of a Frenchman whose accent is so impenetrable even other
French people can’t understand him. Clouseau’s superior stating of the rules
gets the better of his self-celebrated powers of observation, failing to notice
a bank robbery that the performer was serving as a look-out. This gets him carpeted by the welcome return
of Herbert Lom’s sublimely apoplectic Dreyfus for yet another incompetency on
the job.
As with THE
PARTY, Edwards shares the visual comedy stylings amongst his cast, giving
Dreyfus a recurring gag confusing a gun-shaped cigarette-lighter with the real
thing. There’s also some amusingly surreal touches like the gentleman in the
hotel foyer who offers to take Clouseau’s hat, coat and gloves and brazenly
drives away wearing them to our hero’s bemused resignation. We also get two
bursts of Kato (Burt Kwouk)’s amazing stunt set-piece sudden attacks to marvel
at. These are all immaculately timed and edited, combined with the sensibility
of a cartoon reality (the cannonball-shaped bomb, the frazzled smoky clothing
post-explosion etc)
The lion’s
share of the business of course goes to Sellers, who assumes a variety of
disguises in pursuit of the beautiful people who are his prey: Sir Charles “Phantom, the notorious Lytton” and Lady
Claudine, (the effortlessly elegant Christopher Plummer and Catherine Schell).
Never mind the plot concerning the criminally charming couple and their covert thieving
ways, when it comes to stealing the cat burglar Sellers takes everything that
isn’t nailed down. Schell in particular has difficulty stopping herself
‘corpsing’ at least twice as she’s hit by wave after wave of gloriously absurd
Clouseau creations washing over her. First, there is Emil Flornoy, his walking
disaster-area telephone engineer who succeeds in submerging his van in the swimming
pool just as his first vehicle is being fished out. He then becomes a
moustached housekeeping attendant who sneaks into her room and struggles
manfully with a popping light-bulb, a vacuum cleaner of frightening intensity
and an intransigent parrot. I’ve always had a soft spot for his latter guise of
Guy Gadbois, the preposterous lounge lizard sporting triangular sideburns,
calling Lady Claudine “a beautiful
chicken”, exuding a faux-casual swagger whilst causing mayhem with the soda
syphon and trolley.
The devious
manipulations of Lugash Secret Police agent Colonel Sharki (Peter Arne) are
conveniently nullified by a bungled assassination attempt on Clouseau by his
now homicidal boss, sending Dreyfus gibbering into the nut-hatch, acquitted “by reason of insanity” and Clouseau
into his job, setting the scene for the wonderfully over-the-top THE PINK
PANTHER STRIKES AGAIN, my favourite of all the sequels.
RETURN OF
THE PINK PANTHER is a fine way to close this 1967-75 retrospective on Peter
Sellers, restoring he and Blake Edwards to their deserved place at the top of
the screen comedy hierarchy…
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