The famous Pink Panther diamond is again stolen, this time from a museum in Lugash, so the authorities demand the French Inspector Clouseau to investigate. The retired thief Charles is the main suspect, so he travels to Lugash to try to find the real perpetrator and clear his name. Charles’ wife Claudine is trailed by Clouseau in some Swiss town. When Charles returns, Claudine admits she stole the diamond. Clouseau then enters the room, and Chief Inspector Dreyfus starts shooting at him from the window because he hates him, but is arrested and sent to a mental asylum. The Pink Panther is returned to the museum.
11 years (!) after his last performance in “A Shot in the Dark”, comedian Peter Sellers returned in big style to play Inspector Clouseau again in this 4th “Pink Panther” film, after the ‘intruder’ instalment “Inspector Clouseau” from ‘68 proved that nobody could replace him in this role. Just like all the movies in the film series, this is also a hit-or-miss affair: some jokes work better, some worse. The director Blake Edwards again suffers from an overindulgence of relaying on Clouseau tripping, falling or getting stuck on some object, which gets tedious pretty fast and feels like forced humor, and thus the weakest points in the film are Inspector’s overlong shenanigans with a table and a vacuum cleaner. However, Edwards also has some better, occasionally even truly funny jokes. One of the craziest is when someone rings the doorbell and gives Clouseau a bomb, the Inspector takes it, but then realizes the danger and throws it away. Cut to the next scene of a grandma living next door, watching TV in her room, getting lifted up for a moment from the neighboring explosion, and hitting Clouseau who crashed through the wall in all the commotion. At one point, Dreyfus says: “Compared to Inspector Clouseau, Attila the Hun was a Red Cross volunteer”. The gags in the Swiss town are so ridiculous they are again comical: Clouseau enters a cab, says: “Follow that car!”, and the taxi driver starts chasing it on foot (!), leaving the cab behind. Clouseau enters a hotel, a random stranger asks him: “May I have your coat? And your gloves?” As Clouseau gives it to him, the stranger randomly walks out and escapes with said robe. Edwards relies on sight gags that pay homage to Tati’s Monsieur Hulot, not caring so much about the arbitrary storyline as much as just tickling the viewers until they at least chuckle, yet he and Sellers won’t reach the stride of the series until the next instalment, the funniest “Pink Panther” film, “The Pink Panther Strikes Again”.
Grade:++
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