The Pink Panther (1963) - film review

For the past 15 years, Inspector Jacques Clouseau of the Sûreté has been on the trail of a notorious jewel thief, The Phantom, and is blissfully unaware that the man he is after is the elegant British playboy Sir Charles Lytton.  The latter is planning the coup of his career, the theft of a priceless diamond known as the Pink Panther, which is currently in the possession of Indian princess Dala.   Whilst holidaying at a skiing resort, Lytton makes the princess’s acquaintance, but also encounters Clouseau, whose wife he has been secretly having an affair with.  The arrival of Lytton’s wayward nephew George complicates matters further, but Lytton is still determined to go-ahead with his robbery.  Little does he know that the Princess Dala is one step ahead of him and intends to use Lytton’s robbery as a cover for her own nefarious scheme.  Fortunately for Lytton, Clouseau is there to save the day...

The first film in The Pink Panther series is one of the best, mainly because it avoids the cheap comedic excesses of subsequent entries in the series and has a fairly well structured plot.  Director Blake Edwards originally intended that this would be a straightforward comedy caper movie, an opportunity for David Niven to reprise the gentleman burglar role that he had previously played in Sam Wood’s Raffles (1939).  Things turned out somewhat differently when it became glaringly obvious that Peter Sellers was the film’s comedy focus and stole the show with graceless ease from its principal star.  Although Sellars plays a secondary part in the plot, he dominates the film from start to finish and is tirelessly funny as the accident prone Inspector Closseau, his best-known comedy creation.

The film’s success was squarely attributed to Peter Sellers, so it was not long before he returned as the bungling Inspector Clouseau in the first (and best) of the sequels, A Shot in the Dark (1964).  The Pink Panther character which features in the opening titles would himself become the star of his own series, The Pink Panther Show, a series of animated shorts which ran throughout the 1970s, using the familiar Pink Panther theme which Henry Mancini composed for the original film and which picked up the film’s only Oscar nomination.

At times, The Pink Panther does feel like an uncomfortable amalgam of two very different kinds of film, a restrained drawing room comedy and an unbridled Marx Brothers-style farce, but this perhaps adds to its charm and makes it fresher, less formulaic than the subsequent films in the series.  After a series of protracted comedy situations of the French bedroom farce variety, the pace soon picks up and the film builds to a highly amusing crescendo as Clouseau goes in pursuit of Niven and Robert Wagner (dressed in gorilla costumes) at a fancy dress ball.  The latter ends with a crazy chase that might have been choreographed by Mack Sennett himself and which can hardly fail to reduce all but the most phlegmatic of spectators to hysterics.  Not the most sophisticated thing that Blake Edwards directed, but it is a lot of fun.

© Derek Adamson 2011

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