The Return of the Pink Panther
Blake Edwards (1975)
The Return of the Pink Panther is the return of the comedy ‘vehicle’ film too. Peter Sellers as the French detective Clouseau is ridiculously funny. Clouseau takes himself seriously. His determinedly imperturbable expression hardly changes, however often he falls over, whatever or whomever he knocks over. The film gets off to a great start. There’s a clever title sequence, with animations by Richard Williams. The theft of the Pink Panther diamond that follows is amusingly suspenseful, even though the repeated slamming of a door on one of the security guards, by his panicking, frenetic colleagues, gives an unpleasant early indication of what Blake Edwards think is funny (and, it transpires, inexhaustibly funny). Then comes Sellers’s marvellous first appearance.
Strolling with excessive nonchalance down a Paris street, Clouseau raises his baton to greet a pretty girl and hits himself in the eye. Outside a bank, he comes upon a blind beggar, complete with accordion and monkey. While he’s delivering a spiel about the requirement for a ‘commercial enterprise’ licence and his opening pidgin English special (‘minkey – a chimpanzee minkey!’), a bank robbery is going on. Clouseau, oblivious, sticks to the matter in hand. ‘Who are you to know all these rules?’ asks the beggar. ‘What sort of a stupid question is that?’ is the haughty reply, ‘Are you blind?’ The robbers emerge from the bank, dropping some of their loot. Clouseau helpfully hands it back to them and, as the bank manager storms out of the building, waves the escaping robbers on and slugs the manager. As a result, Clouseau is suspended by his boss, Chief Inspector Dreyfus (Herbert Lom). No sooner is the suspension imposed than Dreyfus receives an order to put Clouseau on the Pink Panther case because he solved the theft of the jewel the last time it was stolen. Informed that the accordion-player was the bank gang’s look-out man, Clouseau is scornful: ‘How can a blind man be a look-out man?!’ That too gives an idea of Blake Edwards’s modus operandi. He and Frank Waldman, with whom he wrote the screenplay, are never afraid of using the same gag twice (or more).
Sellers conveys Clouseau’s ludicrous hauteur without any recourse to crude mannerisms or grimaces. He’s looking to develop a full-scale characterisation from caricature material but he gets all the minor, immediate laughs of a funny caricature too. Back at his flat, the dispirited Clouseau is attacked by a strangely violent fellow-tenant, his weapon of choice a loaf of (Clouseau’s) French bread. Clouseau then goes into a martial arts routine with his servant-cum-bodyguard Cato Fong (Burt Kwouk) – the most inventive physical comedy routine in the film. Edwards has been criticised for playing his trump card too early but he manages Sellers cleverly. It’s essential for The Return of the Pink Panther to start well, grab the viewer’s attention and provoke a regular supply of laughs. When Dreyfus phones to tell him of his recall to investigative action, Clouseau launches into self-important musing on the thing all great detectives have in common: instinct. During this speech, a man arrives at the door to deliver a hand grenade that Clouseau instinctively accepts.
Edwards can’t, however, provide Sellers with sufficient material to keep him going through the film’s nearly two hours and the padding is feeble, whether played straight or for low, brutal comedy. The aristocratic crooks Lord and Lady Lytton (Christopher Plummer and Catherine Schell) are half-heartedly romanticised – with, for example, lamely admiring overhead shots of one of the couple’s many cars cruising homewards, accompanied by mellifluous incidental music. While Clouseau is abortively trailing Lady Lytton, her jewel thief husband sets out to find the culprit in the Pink Panther theft, for which Lytton realises he’s being framed. (A glove was left at the scene of the robbery: Lytton’s criminal signature.) His action-packed tour of the (fictional) North African country of Lugash contrasts comically with Clouseau’s energetic stagnation in Europe and Christopher Plummer is appropriately smooth and elegant as Lytton. After shinning up and down ropes, fighting off numerous enemies and crashing through windows, Lytton is quite unruffled: there’s hardly a crease in his white suit or a hair out of place on his handsome head. In contrast, Clouseau, whose hair sometimes stands bolt upright and is sometimes slicked down doggedly, keeps losing his trousers and getting his jackets blown off. But Edwards’s separation of the lightweight thriller and the comedy elements has the effect of exposing the film’s mechanics.
Edwards’s idea of suspense in the action scenes is to pour Henry Mancini’s thrills-and-mystery music onto the soundtrack. He and Frank Waldman work on a hit and miss, hey-that-sounds-like-a-great-idea level. One of Sellers’ funniest moments is his would-be ladykilling, mangled version of the Bogart line, ‘Here’s looking at you, kid’. Edwards and Waldman then push the Casablanca idea by having ‘As Time Goes By’ playing in a bar, introducing a big-wheel Fat Man (Eric Pohlmann) who’s a bit like Sydney Greenstreet, and so on. The jokes are piled on haphazardly – there’s a glut of corny gags when Sellers arrives in Switzerland pursuing Lady Lytton. ‘Follow that cab!’ he orders a taxi driver, who jumps out of his vehicle and runs after the car. Clouseau asks a passer-by if he knows where the hotel is. ‘Yes’, replies the man, and walks on. (This is even less funny if you work where I do and really do get this kind of answer if you ask someone if they know the time.) It’s only when Sellers is delivering hackneyed lines that they’re not hopeless.
The plot seems to have been devised by the desultory, vacuously beautiful Lady Lytton; since it transpires she’s been leading all the other characters a dance, I suppose it has been. But there’s no fun in it, partly because Catherine Schell reads her lines woodenly. The subplot depends for its comic success entirely on whether you’re repeatedly amused by over-the-top Graham Stark (as Fat Man’s underling) getting his fingers broken one by one and, finally, all crushed together – a more offensive version of the endless kicks-in-the-balls in the Musketeer films. Edwards’s penchant for shallow black comedy – or bad taste – goes too far in the last shots of Dreyfus: he’s in a padded cell, straitjacketed, writing ‘Kill Clouseau’ with a pen gripped between his toes. (The image probably seems especially tasteless just a couple of days after watching One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.) Although the homicidal maniac that Dreyfus turns into, thanks to Clouseau, is excessively grotesque, Herbert Lom’s performance is painfully good. Even at the start of the film, Lom is so hot and red that he oozes irritation. His deep-breathing, gulping attempts to contain his fury always fail – thanks to a tormented, half-weeping madman’s giggle. He’s done a service by constructing a comic showcase for Peter Sellers but Blake Edwards is such a shoddy workman that he destroys much of the goodwill he creates early on. You have to be as thick-skinned as Inspector Clouseau to ignore the ineptitude of much of The Return of the Pink Panther.
[1976]