Blake Edwards (1963)
Not exactly his origin story but this is the start of Inspector Jacques Clouseau’s life in cinema. That’s the main interest of Blake Edwards’ film now: as comedy entertainment, The Pink Panther is a strenuous mess and watching it quite hard work. Clouseau has his own Wikipedia page, according to which his ‘immense ego, eccentricity, exaggerated French accent, and prominent mustache are all a parody of Hercule Poirot’ (never mind that Poirot’s Belgian). Yet this isn’t how Peter Sellers’ Clouseau comes across in his screen debut. His torturous, mispronounced English is still a work in progress here – ditto his unfailing knack of getting hold of the wrong end of the stick. Clouseau says plenty of daft things in The Pink Panther and his delusions of suavity are preposterous, but the verbal side of his absurdity, which came to match his gift for wreaking havoc on high-end décor, plays second fiddle in the first film of the series. It’s nearly always a pratfall that punctures Clouseau’s inflated idea of himself.
He’s also, for the first and only time in the series, married – though purely for plot purposes. Unbeknown to adoring, amorous Clouseau, his lovely wife Simone (Capucine) is having an affair with middle-aged playboy Sir Charles Lytton (David Niven) – who’s also an internationally notorious jewel thief, aka the Phantom, with his sights now set on the priceless Pink Panther diamond. Simone has accrued a small fortune acting as a fence for Lytton; her sleuth husband hasn’t noticed that either. In the film’s climax, Lytton and his nephew George (Robert Wagner), after a car chase through the streets of Rome, are arrested and stand trial, only for Clouseau to be framed as the Phantom. He’s surprised to be called as sole defence witness and answers trick questions from the defence barrister (John Le Mesurier) ineptly. As Clouseau prepares to mop his brow at the end of his ordeal in the witness box, the precious jewel drops from his handkerchief. Ill fame does instant wonders for his manhood. In the car taking him to jail, the two carabinieri escorting Clouseau wonder enviously that he has so many female fans and ask how he managed to commit so many crimes. ‘Well, you know,’ replies the prisoner, ‘it wasn’t easy’. He would never be so popular with women again. In subsequent Pink Panther films, wifeless Clouseau’s romantic endeavours are reliably doomed to failure.
It’s surprising too, given that the later films are comedy vehicles for Peter Sellers, that Clouseau, in terms of screen time, isn’t even the main character here – he’s certainly out of the picture for some time midway through. This hints at a basic problem with The Pink Panther. There are times early on when it looks to be aiming to be a stylish crime romcom in the manner of Stanley Donen’s Charade (released just a few weeks ahead of The Pink Panther, in late 1963). There’s only one sequence where Blake Edwards comes anywhere near succeeding in this aim – when Lytton, trying to seduce the diamond’s owner, Princess Dala (Claudia Cardinale), gets her drunk on champagne: sprawling tipsily on a tiger-skin rug in her chalet in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Claudia Cardinale is one half of an amusing double act with the stuffed tiger’s head. After this, Edwards virtually abandons the supposedly sophisticated side of things. A few minutes after the champagne and tiger bit, there’s a feeble scene in which Simone gives beginner George a skiing lesson with chaotic results. It’s as if the director has set an alarm reminding him it’s time for another wodge of physical comedy, never mind how mechanically it’s delivered.
According to AV Club, the contrast between the stylish stuff and Clouseau ‘is precisely what makes the movie so funny. It acts as the straight man, while Sellers gets to play mischief-maker’. If only! Once A Shot in the Dark (1964) introduced Chief Inspector Dreyfus (Herbert Lom), Clouseau did have a straight man to play off. In The Return of the Pink Panther (1975) – the only other film in the series I know that I’ve seen – Herbert Lom’s apoplectic exasperation is a painfully funny complement to Peter Sellers’ inadvertent anarchy. Even in that film, though, Edwards takes the view that more is more, piling on gags until they get tiresome. It’s worse in The Pink Panther because he seems to think that, if he pushes hard enough, he’ll turn the whole cast into brilliant comedians. An extended farce episode in adjoining bedrooms – involving David Niven, Capucine and Robert Wagner, as well as Sellers – is well enough played by all concerned, but in three out of four cases you can see the effort. Even when Edwards has a decent joke, like the police sergeant disguised as a zebra at Princess Dala’s costume party, he flogs it to death.
Thanks to the strongarming direction, it’s Sellers’ grace notes that you appreciate rather than the spectacular collisions and trip-ups: his more intricate bits of clumsiness and throwaway line readings are especially enjoyable. Niven’s light touch and good humour can’t disguise his lack of comic flair, but he has more of it than Capucine or Wagner; after Sellers, though, Claudia Cardinale’s performance is the film’s best. This wasn’t her first appearance in an English-language film – that was in an obscure British comedy called Upstairs and Downstairs (1959) – but The Pink Panther was her Hollywood debut. Playing South Asian royalty (Princess Dala’s Maharajah father gives her the Pink Panther diamond when she’s a young girl), Cardinale is as likeable as she’s beautiful and, as far as the script by Edwards and Maurice Richlin allows, funny.
Cardinale and Niven’s verbal sparring is nice, though it’s a stretch to believe the Princess is so smitten with Sir Charles Lytton that she’s ready to help Simone frame Clouseau for the Phantom’s crimes. The most surprising piece of casting is Brenda de Banzie as a gushing socialite – de Banzie throws off her usual careworn and/or querulous screen persona (Hobson’s Choice (1954), The Entertainer (1960)) with OTT abandon. Over-familiar as it became, Henry Mancini’s theme music is elegantly witty. There’s plenty of high society on display in The Pink Panther but it’s only Mancini’s score that supplies the film with a real touch of class.
28 February 2026
