The Pink Panther Strikes Again
Peter Sellers stars in The Pink Panther Strikes Again, the fifth film in the Pink Panther series. Directed by Blake Edwards, this movie picks up where The Return of the Pink Panther left off and maintains the slapstick tradition of the series thanks to the relentless zaniness fans have come to expect. This film was rushed to production thanks to the success of its predecessor and is the only movie in the series that directly follows the events of its earlier film.
Edwards never got along with Sellers and this put a strain on the picture. Sellers wasn’t in very good shape at the time of the shoot, but it never really shows on-screen to the casual observer. He’s up to his usual tricks and handles most of the slapstick rather well, except in some relatively obvious sequences in which the stunt double handles the action.
Sellers is Inspector Jacques Clouseau. He’s just been named the Chief Inspector and the former Chief Inspector, Charles Dreyfus (Herbert Lom), couldn’t be angrier about the fact. Dreyfus blames Clouseau for everything that has happened to him and, once he escapes an insane asylum, he develops a plot to kill Clouseau at any cost and complication. This requires Dreyfus to assemble a crew of the world’s most dastardly villains and even includes a rather weird disappearing ray that he threatens to use on a city.
The disappearing ray gets the attention of the world after Dreyfus cuts a tape threatening to make the United Nations building vanish into thin air. This calls the world’s leaders into action, but not before Dreyfus can make good on his threat and make another larger one. This causes many countries to send assassins after Clouseau to please Dreyfus’ demands and forces the bumbling detective to run for his life.
Sellers will probably always be remembered as Clouseau. He embodies the role from top to bottom and, while he may have been better in other pictures, it’s hard to imagine Clouseau played by anybody else. The Pink Panther Strikes Again carries on this tradition and slides a bunch of other terrific bits and pieces into the mix. Lom is good as the villain, transforming his long-suffering Chief Inspector into his character’s unavoidable conclusion.
For Edwards, the Pink Panther films resembled a bit of a dead horse after the filming of The Pink Panther Strikes Again. This one is probably the last of the good movies in the series and the later pictures, all still handled by Edwards, were cobbled together cutting room floor shards and used the name of Clouseau to boost another plot. That really makes this one the one to see out of the latter Pink Panther films.
There are a lot of funny ideas here, as you might expect. The design of the team of super villains is good, although Edwards doesn’t explore it as much as he could have and this leads to the standard strain of cardboard bad guys. The use of Lom’s Dreyfus to arrange the mischief is a stroke of good fun, however, and keeps this movie floating above the others. Sellers works well with Lom, too, and the two achieve some really great comic stuff.
Overall, The Pink Panther Strikes Again is hardly earth-shattering entertainment. It’s good fun, but there’s nothing here that is overly memorable or overly extraordinary. It’s neat and somewhat tragic to see Sellers doing this shtick so close to his 1980 death, giving this movie more meaning than it perhaps deserves, and there are some big meaty laughs to be had. For this sort of entertainment, I suppose that’s more than enough.
Trailer:
