Spoiler warning: These reviews reveal plot details
A TV reporter attempts to track down the missing Inspector Jacques Clouseau…
Trail of the Pink Panther is not unique in being a film that stars someone who’d passed away before its release. There are instances of actors dying soon after filming has concluded – Heath Ledger, for example, who won a posthumous Oscar for his role in 2008’s The Dark Knight. Sometimes an actor has died during production, such as Oliver Reed who was making Gladiator (2000) when he succumbed to a heart attack. In that instance, a body double and CGI face replacement was used to finish off his character’s contribution. In a more extreme example, the 2019 Star Wars film The Rise of Skywalker includes a performance from an actor who’d left us months before filming even began: unused footage of Carrie Fisher from a previous movie was repurposed to give Princess Leia one last hurrah.
The Fisher example is the closest to what happened in the early 1980s when the Pink Panther series was resurrected despite its biggest star, Peter Sellers, having died in July 1980. Producer/director Blake Edwards was keen to carry on, and he had a plan in mind. When editing The Pink Panther Strikes Again back in 1976, Edwards had wanted to release a three-hour cut but was ordered by the studio to reduce the film to around 100 minutes. So, after Sellers’s death, he knew that there were swathes of unused material in the archives. Edwards devised a format where new scenes could be shot to wraparound the old footage – allowing one more Inspector Clouseau film starring Peter Sellers.
It was a bold idea. But it doesn’t work.
The end product is disjointed from the start, with Clouseau only featuring in self-contained sketches and all the storytelling coming in the newly shot material. It mostly falls to series regulars Herbert Lom (Dreyfus) and André Maranne (François) to explain what’s going on, but the ‘story’ is a vague collection of lame justifications to set up the Sellers material. Also, some of the Clouseau scenes are eerily familiar because a few gags had been used in the interim, in 1978’s Revenge of the Pink Panther.
The Pink Panther diamond has been stolen (again) and Inspector Clouseau suspects that his old adversary Sir Charles Litton – the dapper thief from the original 1963 movie – is responsible. After a diversion to London, solely so the film can use some UK-set scenes from the Strikes Again shoot, Clouseau’s plane goes missing and everyone assumes he’s been lost at sea. French journalist Marie Jouveat (Joanna Lumley, using an accent that takes a grand tour around several European countries) then starts to research a piece on the famous inspector. Riffing on the reporter character in Citizen Kane, this involves questioning people who knew Clouseau. These interviews are then used as an excuse for the movie to become a ‘clips show’ as classic scenes from previous Panther films are repeated at length.
Marie speaks to Sir Charles, meaning David Niven appears in the series for the first time in 19 years. (His dialogue has been dubbed by a soundalike because Niven was then in the early stages of motor-neuron disease.) Also returning from the original film is Clouseau’s ex-wife, Simone (Capucine), who is now Lady Litton. Later, Marie talks to Clouseau’s doddering and spectacularly tedious father (Richard Mulligan from TV sitcom Soap), who tells her about Jacques’s past as a French Resistance agent (in these scenes, the young Clouseau is played by Daniel Peacock).
Early on, the film at least has some pace to it and it’s fun seeing how old footage of Sellers is being stitched into the new material. But once Clouseau drops out of the story, and the focus switches to journalist Marie, it’s an absolute mess: illogical, arbitrary, perfunctory, sloppy, and – worst of all – laugh-free. We then end with a cliffhanger that confirms Clouseau is alive. It’s a tease for the next film in the series, which had been made concurrently with this garbage.
Two massages this morning from Inspector Quinlan of the Yard of Scotland out of 10
Next time: Curse of the Pink Panther
Ian Farrington 