Last week, I watched 11 movies—the entire run of The Pink Panther, sequels and reboots included.
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It all started innocently enough, when I thought I’d maybe rewatch The Pink Panther, only to discover that I wasn’t at all sure that I’d ever actually seen the movie before. But I enjoyed it well enough, even if it was a little dated and Clouseau-light, so I decided to carry on with the sequel, A Shot in the Dark.
That’s maybe where I should have ended things, because the next film in the series, Inspector Clouseau, is not good at all. Alan Arkin is clearly trying. What he’s trying isn’t always clear, but he definitely is. It’s just that there isn’t a funny moment to be hand in the movie.
For some reason, though, I pressed on. The next three movies—The Return of the Pink Panther, The Pink Panther Strikes Again, and Revenge of the Pink Panther—are each okay enough. They’re also quite dated, to the point of some very unfortunate yellowface, but they’re often also silly and amusing. I think my favorite was probably Strikes Again just for how silly it gets, with Herbert Lom’s Chief Inspector Dreyfus becoming a full-out Bond villain, but they all have their moments.
I wish I could say the same for the next two films that followed. Trail of the Pink Panther is little better than a clip show, stitched together from deleted scenes and out-takes after Peter Sellers unexpectedly died early in the movie’s production. Some of those deleted scenes are kind of amusing, but most of them look like they were deleted for a reason, and the whole thing just falls apart as a narrative. Sellers’ estate reportedly successfully sued the filmmakers, and the whole thing just feels patched-together and sad. Even sadder is the very real possibility that this is the only one of these movies I had actually seen before. (I can’t say for certain, and it’s a Frankenstein of the whole rest of the series, but released in 1983, it is the first one I could have conceivably been taken to in theaters.)
Still, as bad Trail is, it can’t hold a candle to the absolutely dire Curse of the Pink Panther. If Trail was a misguided attempt to honor Sellers and the franchise, then Curse is a lamentable attempt to extend it with a spin-off nobody wanted, a complete miscalculation of a movie, just fundamentally flawed in its concept and desperately unfunny in execution. I don’t blame Ted Wass for being very confused about how to play this character, but his attempts do reveal the heart of the problem: Inspector Clouseau isn’t a funny character, Peter Sellers made him funny. Every attempt to play this material with someone else, first with Arkin and then with Wass, simply was never going to work.
Peter Ustinov was reportedly cast in the first film, before it eventually went to Sellers, and that I can see. I think Ustinov could have very successfully played the character as written in the first Pink Panther, where Clouseau is just one element of many. I don’t think the series would have carried on with that character, however. The series’ longevity owes everything to Sellers, and it was a fool’s errand asking anyone else to play the role.
So of course, that’s what they did for three more movies. Son of the Pink Panther is not as bad as Curse—and, in all fairness, I think Roberto Benigni is more under-used than miscast—but it’s also never very funny. It doesn’t even particularly feel like a Pink Panther movie, more like warmed-over James Bond. It’s a sad place to end the series, on its thirty-year anniversary no less, but it’s stumble of a step up from the movie before it.
The two Steve Martin remakes are a little better, but that’s not saying a whole lot. I did like the second one more, so it was nice to end this mad exercise on a high(er) note, but neither film was especially funny. We’ve now gone sixteen years without another attempt at the series, so hopefully that’s where things remain.
Honestly, the whole Pink Panther series is pretty checkered, with some fine but not necessarily remarkable entries, and with some utter garbage. I can’t necessarily recommend any of them, and certainly can’t in good conscience recommend running the entire series like I did.
Oh, but I did also re-watch 1972’s Asylum. I don’t think it’s the best of Amicus horror anthology movies, but it has a lot of fun moments.