Curse of the Pink Panther (Blake Edwards, 1983)

 

I wrote in the past that Blake Edwards’ fascination with the Pink Panther universe carries the air of a stubborn, doomed quest toward revelation, and the late failure Curse of the Pink Panther fits right in with that assessment. Things kick off with yet another heisting of the titular diamond, but this time executed so cursorily that it seems like mere referential nodding; Clouseau apprehends the perpetrators and abruptly disappears, with a bereft France summoning the world’s best remaining detective to track him down, except that the computer making the selection is secretly reprogrammed by Inspector Dreyfus to instead identify the world’s worst, Chicago officer Clifton Sleigh. As played by Ted Wass, Sleigh is indeed sufficiently inept and bumbling that several characters wonder whether he and Clouseau are related, but he’s otherwise an affectless blank, sheer dead air, which however somewhat fits the obsession with absence; the ending has the world convinced that Clouseau is indeed dead, whereas he’s actually undergone plastic surgery and is now played by Roger Moore (apparently embodying a weird simulacrum of himself, given that Sleigh recognizes him as a famous star). Edwards churns out the set pieces (miraculously-avoided assassination attempts; the mandatory car chase; any amount of falling into swimming pools and the like) with barely a hint of his formal strengths, suggesting a broader displacement and dilution of spirit. And yet, the film’s selective navigation of the Panther universe is weirdly intriguing: it reaches back to the first film to resurrect David Niven’s Charles Litton (erasing the fact that Litton was subsequently played by Christopher Plummer in Return of) and related characters while relegating Graham Stark (who, among other things, was Clouseau’s assistant in A Shot in the Dark) to the role of a waiter, in a scene in which Sleigh’s extended ineptness has the people at one adjacent table hysterically laughing as if watching the movie Edwards wanted this to be, while those at the next table are utterly oblivious, presumably more securely lodged in the fictive universe. All very strange...