In the yo-yoing, mutually antagonistic professional friendship between Blake Edwards and Peter Sellers, disagreements over the Pink Panther series rose and fell. They had good years and bad, and it seems Sellers’ increasing mental instability following Revenge of the Pink Panther saw them nearing the end of a fruitful mid-‘70s period.
The fallout of this falling out was Sellers’ desire to continue The Pink Panther on his own, sans Edwards, this comic star having finally warmed to the role which put bread on his table and stagnation on his creativity. It helps that Sellers had just defined his personality-deprived career with Being There, playing the personality-deprived Chance. As a playful lark in the wake of that heavy, dry satire, Sellers proceeded penning a potential Panther perceived as Romance of the Pink Panther. In it, Sellers’ Inspector Clouseau would have fallen in love with a cat burglar known as the Frog.
Preproduction on this effort was a challenge, as Sellers wished to direct it himself, while the studio (unimpressed with his drafts) considered freaking Sidney Poitier instead. But whatever life support they’d planned for The Pink Panther, there’s always one surefire way to end a franchise.
Have the star die.
Following Sellers’ fatal heart attack and touching Time retrospective, Edwards reentered negotiations to determine a means of inexplicably continuing The Pink Panther sans Sellers – or at least bringing closure to the franchise.
For whatever damned reason owing to old age, complacency, lack of artistic ambition, whatever, Edwards insisted that the series march on indefinitely, with a new actor taking over as Clouseau and entering audience’s hearts for years to come. And we’ve seen how poorly new leads fare in this franchise…
As part of an eventual compromise, Edwards negotiated the creation of two Panthers at once, tomorrow’s Curse of the Pink Panther, and the transitional Trail of the Pink Panther, a film starring Peter Sellers despite the fact his cadaver had been cold and buried for quite some time. Edwards was dead-set to use a dead Sellers.
It isn’t most celebrities who “enjoy” prolific post-death careers, at least ignoring the shameless output of the television commercial industry, those swine. Only the most iconic are so blessed, among them Bruce Lee and Heath Ledger. Trail of the Pink Panther is in many ways like Lee’s posthumous Game of Death, except more so. It is Clousploitation to rival any Bruceploitation the ‘70s could front. At least no Peter Cellars emerged in the manner of Bruce Li.
How does a movie feature a dead man without its creators violating the laws of God and man?
Archive footage!
… Well…at first…
In those benighted pre-DVD dark ages, outtakes and deleted scenes languished in cutting room obscurity (as opposed to digital obscurity). So it became possible, albeit also unethical, for Edwards to repurpose certain dropped scenes he’d previously made, specifically from The Pink Panther Strikes Again (as the best recent addition, not a horrible thing). This would, theoretically, give the public some “lost” Peter Sellers antics, meant ostensibly in Sellers’ loving memory. This ignores the fact that these scenes were initially deleted for a reason.
Edwards’ challenge, one he was doomed to lose, was to fashion a narrative around disparate, random scenes of Inspector Clouseau hijinks. It helps that the Pink Panther series has largely been constructed out of scenes of random slapstick chaos, with little direct connection to the plot…so the seams shouldn’t show too much. Or will they?
They show. Blake “Entertainment” Edwards, as an opening title seems to call the man, had long ago lost serious passion, now just going through the motions of his former love – like my grandparents in bed. With a lack of actual stories to tell, Trail merely posits that the damned, stupid fucking Pink Panther diamond has been burgled a third time. Ho hum! To show how joyless Edwards is in this approach, its robbery occurs in less than a minute, as opposed to the nearly 20 lavished upon the act in Return of the Pink Panther.
That’s as good a reason as any to present a scant amount of Clouseau footage. Because we can only see Sellers doing plot inspecific things from former entries, the entire story is handed over to his associates at the French Sûreté – that means assorted bland men in suits, uncelebrated series regular Francois (André Maranne), and Chief Inspector Charles Dreyfus…Ah, Dreyfus! Herbert Lom again lends his talents, running through a creatively emaciated series of jokes between him and his psychiatrist. If you weren’t sick of these sanity gags due to series longevity, Trail will alone tire you out.
Every new attempted plot development must pass through this crew. Rather than us see Clouseau decide to go to London (because Strikes Again’s footage includes Union Jacks in the background), we have Francois telling Dreyfus about all this, though Dreyfus could care less. It’s painfully obvious thus where the new footage begins and ends, but such is a necessary evil once you’ve made the scandalous decision to stitch together a movie like a Mexican automobile.
But there’s a problem with fashioning a film out of discarded old footage – I mean, beyond the mere idea of it being awful. Simply put, there was only about 20 minutes worth of unused stuff to cull from, and it takes under a third of Trail for that stuff to run out. How’s Edwards gonna deal with this?
Why, by taking a page straight out of Ed Wood’s fantastic playbook! It’s Panther 9 From Outer Space, as an actor I know the identity of but shall not further embarrass has the ignobility to play chiropractor to Sellers’ Bela Lugosi. That is, lotsa long shots of a clearly not Peter Sellers fellow wandering along, and totally mis-delivering pratfalls. Add to that the terrible voice over, entirely too nasal for Clouseau, delivered only when we can’t see the extra’s mouth, we’re lucky they didn’t just superimpose a cutout of Sellers over new scenes.
Trail of the Pink Panther is already a fascinating and unwatchable abortion of a sequel, but it’s just gettin’ started! Edwards cannot even stretch his latest cover-up. So as a rashly scripted reworking, Francois up and announces that Clouseau has just disappeared on a plane flight, or some such nonsense. Which is a complete non sequitur, considering what we’ve seen. It’s truly a full and complete disappearance, in fact, with zero fanfare, as even that damned Pink Panther “plot” never gets mentioned again.
We’re halfway through.
Instead, for the third time in as many pictures it’s “Clouseau is dead, long live Clouseau!” Twice the franchise has cried wolf, and now that their star is well and truly decaying underground, they’ve no more material to milk out of this particular conceit (but what else is new?).
Suddenly the main character, without even a proper introduction to help the audience, is news reporter Marie Jouvet (Joanna Lumley). She is intent upon chronicling Clouseau’s blessed life. On the air, Marie delivers a Clouseau retrospective, which may as well just be a Sellers retrospective with the facts switched up. Trail is now simply a memorial service, an unauthorized eulogy, which Blake Edwards expected audiences to pay to see.
It all plays like something that’d’ve worked out far better on television – and never mind the fact Marie’s TV scenes are simply scenes of her ON a TV, watched by others. NOT her in the studio! This is disengaging filmmaking right here!...Anyway, Trail really ought to have been a television special. That would’ve justified the clip show it becomes.
Oh yeah, a clip show, that is how far we’ve fallen from even Trail’s initial premise! Marie interviews Cato (Burt Kwouk, withered with age). Cue every major battle Clouseau had with Clouseau over their four films together, edited with as little excitement as anything else.
This is the highpoint of the clips, as it at least necessitates editing. During Marie’s interview with former assistant Hercule (Graham Stark), Edwards simply plops in a solid 4 minute clip from 1964’s A Shot in the Dark, sans context or explanation or anything. Ignore the merely technical issue of marrying something shot in ’82 with something nearly 20 years older, which is not accomplished well. Rather, this plot-heavy old scene of Clouseau working on the Gambrelli case (see here for an explanation) stands best as an example of how far the Pink Panther standard of quality has fallen. Innumerable subtle little jokes pass by, alongside outsized pratfalls. There was energy to this old stuff.
Then it’s further back, to 1963, to the original Pink Panther. Master thief Sir Charles Lytton again gets dusted off, satisfying a request no one ever made. David Niven resumes his archaic role, despite not having returned for Return. And for his few minutes of sitting motionlessly on a chair in the sun, while another actor does his voice-over (what is this, an Italian movie?!), Niven gets second billing – behind only the dead man. As part of this underperforming reunion, Capucine is there as Lytton’s wife (and Clouseau’s ex) Simone. Which I now realize was the name of an unrelated female lead in Revenge. And Lytton’s wife in Return was not Simone, but the totally forgotten Claudine. The Pink Panther series has never been much (like, at all) for continuity, but each new entry picks and chooses so randomly that it feels insulting.
Anyway, Lytton is an excuse for Pink Panther footage. Trail is an amazing artifact, as it continues to find new ways to get worse, even in the clips. For now Lytton feels the need to occasionally voice over the original film’s climax, explaining perfectly clear jokes. “I’ll never forget the old man trying to cross the street.” Really, Charles? Really? I doubt you even noticed that old guy during your zany car chase.
Well…we’ve even run out of old movie clips to refer to here, with an entire Third Act (such as it is) still to go. It’s time for Trail to screechingly change gears yet again, and become nothing more than a thinly-veiled advertisement for the upcoming Curse (without possessing a single frame of footage from that yet-unmade non-masterpiece).
Marie is of the opinion that Clouseau has survived his death by exposition. The film’s final shot (and I’m jumping ahead here) seems to suggest the follow-up shall give us a new actor in Sellers’ old role, as this entry’s stand-in gets shat upon by a bird (5th time the series has crowed that joke). Marie is opposed in her quest by a generic criminal villain, who won’t really have anything to do until next time. That is Bruno Langois (Robert Loggia), who is in the Mafia, but in all other respects is basically Douvier from Revenge with a new accent. Hell, even his uninteresting business meetings use the same camera angles and dialogue, for as little difference as it makes. And nothing even comes of him here, despite an extended scene with Marie.
Not to mention Edwards doesn’t even try to toss any jokes into these extended Marie scenes, forgetting that a Pink Panther movie is supposed to be a comedy. There are attempts to correct that oversight, which make one wish Edwards hadn’t bothered. With Langois’ scenes now over, Marie has another 10 or 20 minutes of movie to fill out, and so she goes to meet with Clouseau’s father (Richard Mulligan). His bumbling grotesque is as good an example as any why non-Sellers actors should not adopt his Clouseauesque mannerisms. The way Gene Siskel put it is actually funnier than this entire movie (except that all of the old Sellers stuff is still funny). He calls this bit a “boring scene.” It’s all in the delivery.
There’s a final flashback with no purpose or context, showing another non-Sellers as Clouseau in his youth during the WWII French Resistance. At least it’s new content; it is still unfunny. Now add “childhood flashback” to the motley life support devices Edwards employs.
Then the best part of Trail comes up: the end credits. I don’t simply mean in the cynical sense that the movie is over, but because this is where all the good clips got shuffled, all of Clouseau’s greatest comic bumblings collected together in one spot.
But that’s the kind of thing you could find today on YouTube with no difficulty. Of the footage I hadn’t seen before (meaning the bits cut from Strikes Again), why, hell, some enterprising rapscallion has condensed it 10 simple minutes of YouTubular goodness. There, now you never have any reason to watch the stillbirthed Trail.
If this was what Edwards needed to do in order to make more personal projects such as 10 and S.O.B., then so be i- No! I still won’t stand for such shenanigans! Besides, Trail failed to bail a stale, ailing tale.
Sellers’ wife (Lynne Frederick, that is, not Anne Hayes nor Britt Ekland nor Miranda Quarry) was herself as offended by the project as, well, as the entire movie-going public. Edwards professed the best of intentions, but nonetheless Frederick sued him for tarnishing her late husband’s reputation as a merry japester. She won $1 million. At least someone made money off of this movie.
But no danged lawsuit could stop the inexplicable continuation of the Pink Panther franchise, not when Hollywood studio contracts were already in place for a follow-up. Like Back to the Future II and III, concurrent production meant Curse was a go, pointlessness or no.
Related posts:
• No. 1 The Pink Panther (1963)
• No. 2 A Shot in the Dark (1964)
• No. 3 Inspector Clouseau (1968)
• 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. 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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