There was an interesting review of the work of a deceased director, Blake Edwards, by The Star-Ledger movie critic Stephen Whitty recently (May 20, 2012, issue, Section Four, pg. 4). Many of today’s young viewers might not be able to fully relate to Edwards’ work, though they may know the name as associated with some famous films: the Pink Panther series; 10 (1980), with Dudley Moore and Bo Derek; Victor/Victoria (1982); and even something that might seem like from a million years ago (which it somewhat does to me, too), Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961). The Pink Panther films might be what are most responsible for his fame (either in a positive or less-than-fully-positive sense), but what is interesting to me is a title Whitty omits, perhaps inadvertently.
I realize that when I write my more amateurish movie reviews, I am missing things here or there, too (for instance, sometimes when I quote lines from films, I truncate a set of lines that might be better fleshed out—readers may ask, Why did he leave out the next lines? Usually I don’t second-guess myself along these lines; I have my reasons, if not always so strong, for writing these things as I do). Whitty omitted mention of A Shot in the Dark (1964), which I think Pink Panther fans consider the greatest film in the series.
Also, I believe it was at an Oscar ceremony several years ago that Jim Carrey enthused about A Shot in the Dark as if it had been a major influence on him.
And it is a great film despite, and probably because, it varies from the other Pink Panther flicks in a few ways.
A Shot was made first, but rejected by the studio
I thought that I’d heard that A Shot in the Dark was the first Pink Panther film made, and that the initial Pink Panther installment (~1963) was made after it. (As support for this theory, if A Shot was released only about three months after the first Panther, as is shown by comparing the two Wikipedia articles on the two films, then given A Shot’s richness of script and so on, it seems it would have to have been made before it; having been made concurrently is unlikely, given how different the films are, with obviously different marketing aims.)
A Shot in the Dark was based on a French play, adapted by another writer; it was further adapted when Edwards and a partner wrote the movie’s script, with one or more characters—especially Clouseau, it seems—added by Edwards (see this brief Wikipedia article). The screenplay was cowritten by Edwards and William Peter Blatty, the author of the novel The Exorcist. The film thus had a complex provenance, which could well explain its richness.
It also featured characters that would become staples to the series, but who are not in the first Pink Panther: Commissioner Dreyfus, played by Herbert Lom, and Clouseau’s valet and karate sparring-partner Kato, played by Bert Kwouk. Yet when this film was finished, apparently the studio didn’t like it. Thus the first Pink Panther was made, which the studio did like.
The first Pink Panther features David Niven as the jewel thief who steals what is the movie’s namesake, a diamond called the Pink Panther. The character of Inspector Jacques Clouseau occupies a more subordinate, occasional role. Apparently the studio felt the real star of this movie should be Niven (see this article on the film). There was even a European-flavored suspense/romance-film touch, with a couple of female stars who are not widely remembered today, including one whose voice had to be redubbed by someone else. To me, the whole Niven/romance/jewel heist components of this film—which aren’t meant to be comic—are a bit tedious; but the comedic temperature, and the fun, go right up when Clouseau enters scenes with his trademark bumbling and un-self-aware dignity.
Perhaps it was when audience reactions to the film showed a taste for Clouseau that A Shot in the Dark was released the same year as the first Pink Panther. Support for the theory that A Shot was made first is suggested in another thing, which may strike viewers as odd: the theme music is not the famous tune written by Henry Mancini and present in every other Pink Panther film; it is still a Mancini tune, but is a sort of intrigue-adapted theme, with chugging rockabilly-like rhythm guitar that reminds you of the theme from Edwards’ TV show Peter Gunn. Mancini also wrote a more romance-oriented theme song for the film, “[something] in Paris,” that occurs variously in instrumental form and in sung-lyrics form (seeming as if made to be a radio single). It has a charmingly European and melancholic flavor (though it may seem a little trite). But these two themes don’t detract from the film so much as give a different theme-related flavor than does the familiar Pink Panther theme.
Oddly, the series featuring Peter Sellers as Clouseau didn’t continue in the 1960s; there was a movie titled Inspector Clouseau (1968), starring Alan Arkin as Clouseau (!) (and not directed by Edwards), that as far as I know wasn’t successful. The series was resumed starting in 1975, and it was in that decade that the series, I would presume, provided steady enough returns for whatever studio made the films, which helped kept it going. Also, for the longer term, the 1970s films further stamped the brand of Clouseau’s comic brilliance and fun on the popular imagination. (The Mirisch Company [or Corporation] produced the 1960s Pink Panther films, while the later films were done by other companies.)
Interestingly, the 1970s movies alternated not-(quite-so-)comic plot elements with Clouseau’s smart-slapstick comic scenes. This seems in line with the strategy of the first Pink Panther.
A Shot displays the best of the series; complex plot sets up tapestry of laughs
But interestingly, A Shot in the Dark seems to distill the best elements of the series into a single film that is the funniest simply because Clouseau is in almost every scene. There is no serious diamond-heist plot interwoven. The criminal plot elements that set up a framework for Clouseau’s incompetence comprise a tangled plot that also embraces, to an extent, one of Edwards’ trademarks—sexual comedy coming at you at unexpected moments (amid comedy or some other-toned material), which is all the funnier for being mischievously popped in (though the jokes may seem corny to today’s audiences).
A wealthy man in Paris reports a death at his mansion; a chauffer has been killed, and when Clouseau comes to investigate, it seems as if the maid Maria Gambrelli, played by the attractive but somewhat blocky Elke Sommer (who was Sellers’ wife for a time), a rather dopey but seemingly well-meaning-sort, had killed the chauffeur. Various people, including a butler at the house and, later, Clouseau’s boss, think Gambrelli is the murderer, but Clouseau, smitten by her, indulges in the apparent wishful thinking that it is not she who killed the man but someone else whom she is protecting. He is determined to investigate the crime on the assumption the killer is someone else.
The plot becomes a comedy of not errors, but of intrigue alternating with bumbling Clouseau investigating, while protecting Gambrelli; and meanwhile further people at the mansion are getting killed, while Gambrelli seems again the culprit. Clouseau’s boss, Dreyfus, is getting increasingly furious (and, more vividly, psychologically broken down) at Clouseau’s apparent stupidity in the matter, while the mansion’s owner has requested to have Clouseau on the case, astonishing Dreyfus, but making sense in terms of how the mansion’s owner wants to cover up the criminal goings-on, and wants the self-deluding, bumbling Clouseau on the case to keep things obscured.
Sellers develops his character so well that he even displays not simple bumbling but what would be considered signs of neuroticism, if not worse: he thinks people have said something when they haven’t, and sometimes he suddenly spins around to catch someone else “in the act” when there is no one there. He paints a vastly incompetent detective every way he can. The crime is finally solved, seemingly on the instigation of Clouseau’s arranging to try to explain the crime in a meeting at the mansion, but the solution is not at all what Clouseau had thought; and more broadly, things connected with Dreyfus spiral even more out of control, to a rather chaotic set of deaths near the film’s end.
Clouseau as centerpiece grounds the film’s value
The film mixes a sort of cynicism tied to, perhaps, a mild social commentary and Clouseau-style slapstick in such a rich series of laughs-in-almost-every-scene that perhaps audiences were put off by the anarchic side of this film—or at least the studio heads were. Once the Pink Panther series resumed in the 1970s, one could go back to A Shot in the Dark, see all the funniest elements of the series there, and appreciate that the true genius of the series, Sellers as Clouseau, was the heart and raison d’etre of the series—and a film with him in almost every scene isn’t too much. Sellers was also such a good comic actor that his timing—and his making a self-deluding character work as a source of laughs without seeming too crazy—mean that Edwards’ craftsmanly style could deliver good scenes without a lot of separate shots sewn together, as is so commonly done today. An actor, or well-mixing pair of actors, could play out their roles for minutes at a time in a given take and deliver the humor.
Sure, Edwards has been noted not only to alternate styles within a film, but also quality: he can alternate sequences of rapid-fire humor with more serious scenes (which might not be so interesting) or with musical set pieces (which could sometimes try patience). This film has its share of musical or interlude sequences—which I think are not too bad, though.
But anyone who is a fan of Sellers, and especially of the character Jacques Clouseau, and who moreover wants to appreciate an example of the high points of movie humor over the years should see this film.
