Following completion of A Shot in the Dark, sequel to The Pink Panther, Blake Edwards and Peter Sellers again went their separate ways, this time for good. Theirs had been a fruitful year’s worth of collaboration, but now they hated each other, two strong comedic temperaments which disagreed over professional product as often as they saw eye-to-eye.
This was it. Sellers went directly over to Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb – and we’re all the better for it. Edwards continued combining modern comic techniques with silent era styles in The Great Race, which boast cinema’s finest and most epic pie fight of all time, never to be bettered. And the Pink Panther series lay in hibernation, having been outgrown by both of its authors in its infancy.
But there was still demand for more Pink Panthers, and executives were anxious to feed that demand, even in the absence of all parties responsible for the series’ existence. United Artists acted on their own and commissioned a screenplay by Frank and Tom Waldman.
Then in 1968 it seemed Edwards and Sellers had settled their differences and were ready to work again, except…They rejected this script, and instead went to go do The Party, satisfying Edwards’ interests both good (silent comedy) and bad (ethnic stereotyping). But even this would not deter Panther-mad producers, who went ahead and hired a new director anyway: Bud Yorkin, best known for being a television producer; that is, he is no Edwards.
Sans Sellers, the series sought a semi-satisfying solution: Recasting! Even in 1968, the final year B.L. (Before Lazenby), replacing actors was not unheard of – hell, it dates back to the silent era – but doing so for such a public role, one inhabited by a specific actor, that is a risky move.
As if to cover for their betrayal, the resulting film was christened Inspector Clouseau, just to let you know that, yes, Inspector Clouseau is here, even if Sellers and Edwards (and even composer Henry Mancini!) are not. This title is unoriginal, over-obvious, and pretty damn desperate.
Also, Dreyfus and Cato are not in it.
As Sellers’ subber, Inspector Clouseaux, we have Alan Arkin, an actor who would eventually win an Oscar (for Little Miss Sunshine) when twas Sellers who so coveted one. Arkin is a good comic performer, but I wouldn’t wish upon anyone the task he is charged with: impersonating another actor’s impersonation. This leaves Arkin no place to define his own performance, so by definition his Inspector Clouseau must pale in comparison to Sellers’. There is no room for interpretation, and those changes Arkin does make instead read like mistakes. Hence his understated new accent (which sounds, like, Andorran or something), even his physicality and sense of timing betray our fond memory of Sellers – a memory which Inspector Clouseau hugs with glee.
The issue: Sellers’ Clouseau was a buffoon, but he didn’t act like a buffoon. Always, the Clouseau of A Shot in the Dark (a comic hero, let us not forget) struggled to appear sophisticated, creating a sense of contrast when slapstick thus ensued.
Arkin’s version, in contrast, FLAILS throughout every scenario, no matter the context. This is a man without a grown up sensibility, a man who’d rather challenge an opponent to a game of freaking jacks than try (and fail) to best him in billiards. A man who feels the need to don anachronistic WWI British garb when, somehow, he becomes convinced a fruitcake is a bomb (ah, fruitcake humor, does anyone actually understand it). This form of comedy presumes that an absence of shame, sense and muscle control is the height of hilarity, and the louder it is the funnier it is. This is a man who’d’ve been burned at the stake in any other century.
And so much comic flailing! Perhaps it’s Bud Yorkin’s horrible misunderstanding of Blake Edwards’ tone, but Inspector Clouseau is rife with overeager zaniness, loud and mostly incoherent antics in place of actual jokes. Consider how much trouble this Clouseau has in simply crossing a Parisian street, earning labels of “Idiot!” from his fellow frogs – this is far from the strange center of calmness Sellers projected even while catalyzing chaos. All in all, Arkin’s buffoonery is akin to Sancho Panza’s switch from gourmandism to gluttony in the ersatz “Don Quijote,” which Miguel de Cervantes ne- Too obscure?
Arkin’s Clouseau has very little stage presence. Consider the introduction for his version compared to Sellers’ in A Shot in the Dark. With Sellers, Edwards builds the audience’s expectations in advance by giving Dreyfus’ impressions of the man: “Oh dear God!” Then we cut to a single close-up of Clouseau, which Sellers somehow makes funny entirely through a single well-timed squint of the eyes. In the next shot, Clouseau instantly falls into a fountain, before we’ve even seen it.
Quick, efficient, funny in its unexpectedness.
As for Arkin’s intro…Over the course of 3 minutes, he exits an airplane in the rain, sees his shoes are not on, goes through a seemingly endless rigmarole reboarding the craft, spends an equally lengthy time retrieving those shoes, then spends even more time selecting which of the two exit stairs he shall use. I’d anticipated his inevitable fall minutes in advance…and when it does happen, Yorkin still cannot deliver it effectively. Look, do I really have to refer to Hot Shots! for an example of how to do this joke correctly?
That’s the issue with Inspector Clouseau in a nutshell: Way too much effort expended upon obvious punchlines, then not told well. That is, when a scene has an obvious point. All too often, Clouseau finds himself in a bizarre scenario for no reason, such as getting shaved by a barber in a prison (okay then…), and without an assured guide, all Arkin can do is resort to flailing to get a pity laff from a comedy virgin child in the audience. Flailing, flailing, flailing! It all amounts to the worst sort of drunken college sketch routines I’ve seen (and been embroiled in), with no hint of intelligence behind the tomfoolery.
Overall, Yorkin’s approach to filming Inspector Clouseau is hardly adequate – consider the preponderance of medium shots in the screen caps. Yorkin simply points his cameras at the action, with angles changing sans purpose – almost as though Yorkin had no idea how to stage an event so as to convey the simple joke action behind it. Compared to Edwards’ dabbling in high wire showmanship, his oners and immaculately-conceived sequences and echoes from one scene to another – it is so very evident Yorkin was best left to TV.
It’s a shame, really, for the germ of an idea for Inspector Clouseau is not awful – though an Edwards and Sellers-free attempt is surely doomed to failure. That plot at its heart: Scotland Yard faces a gang of crooks and possible corruption from the inside, and so requests the aid of the French Sûreté, of Clouseau.
Here’s one good notion: Send Clouseau to Britain. It’s the fish-out-of-water idea, though it’s hard to say just when Clouseau was a fish-in-of-water – even with Sellers’ abstraction of Clouseau as the Frenchest Frenchman in all of France, he was a fictional construct in a more realistic world. Nonetheless, something could be made of Clouseau in the land of limeys. Too bad this effort simply botches that notion on a cheap attack upon the Scottish, then sends Clouseau right back to France before the film’s even half over. Then later sends him to Zurich for no conceivable reason…At least Switzerland is itself beautiful to look at, the highest compliment I’ll pay Clouseau.
The villains’ scheme is equally promising, on paper. A gang of thieves, a crooked variation on Ocean’s 11, plans to make “Mission: Impossible”-style masks of Inspector Clouseau, then impersonate him in order to rob 13 banks at once. There are so many possibilities here; let’s try to account for some of ‘em:
You have multiple Clouseaus wandering around at once, which suggests a wonderfully farcical “Comedy of Errors” type of lunacy. This does not happen here, as the central premise only directly yields a single scene where one Alan Arkin combats another, with a disgusting split screen scar running down the image’s center.
Then there’s the chance for Arkin to do something with his performance, seeing as he’s suddenly given free rein to portray a dozen people other than Clouseau. Sellers would’ve relished such a chance! Too bad it’s all tossed away in montage. Hell, they don’t even make the obvious meta joke about a ton of false Clouseaus in a movie arguably headlined by a false Clouseau.
Even the specifics of the heist have potential. The cash is hidden in shipments of chocolate bars, suggesting a variation on the gold Eifel Tower paperweight fiasco from The Lavender Hill Mob. In fact, a WHOLE Pink Panther movie could be constructed from such a notion, so it’s a shame the chocolate idea is tossed away in another goddamn montage, one which does the movie proud in levels of comic desperation and inanity. Good thing Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory delivered where Inspector Clouseau failed.
The rest of the cast doesn’t fare very well – and considering the fundamental incorrectness underlying this film’s sense of humor, it doesn’t behoove us to dissect the rest of the poor beast and point out further deficiencies. While leaving the performers’ names unstated (though you can embarrass them after the fact and go on over to the IMDb!), let’s say Inspector Clouseau is not populated well. It suffers the standard problem so many murder mysteries inexplicably exhibit: Most of the actors are nigh indistinguishable from each other, for they look mostly the same in facial features or costume or something. (Even Clouseau somewhat suffers from this anonymity.) So once the Third Act “twist” has Shymalanned its way into our hearts, we’re not even engaged enough to care.
Then there’s the plot enabler – excuse me – love interest, Lisa Morrel (Delia Boccardo), an attractive enough wench, which is at least one thing the franchise has so far upheld rigorously. As an agent of Interpol, she exists mostly to point the plot in the right direction whenever Clouseau’s learning disabilities prevent it. It’s the same thing Natalie Imbruglia did in Johnny English, which is itself a sort of Pink Panther parrot. This is thankless.
So much of Inspector Clouseau plays like a watered down Blake Edwards pastiche, from a filmmaker without comprehension of how Edwards’ efforts work. Knocked down to a G-rating, this is the first one which feels aimed solely at children – for this style of, yes, flailing can only appeal to a mind that is only just starting to understand how humor works. For everyone else, the combination of predestined punchlines and general desperation suctions out most pleasure to be had – and that’s not even taking into consideration the behind-the-scenes kerfuffle!
Related posts:
• No. 1 The Pink Panther (1963)
• No. 2 A Shot in the Dark (1964)
• No. 4 The Return of the Pink Panther (1975)
• No. 5 The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976)
• No. 6 Revenge of the Pink Panther (1978)
• No. 7 Trail of the Pink Panther (1982)
• No. 8 Curse of the Pink Panther (1983)
• No. 9 Son of the Pink Panther (1993)
• No. 10 The Pink Panther (2006)
• No. 11 The Pink Panther (2009)
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