No matter how generously inclined you are towards
the Pink Panther series (a lot, in my case), it’s hard to find much to
praise in the fourth installment (not counting Bud Yorkin’s Inspector
Clouseau), The Pink Panther Strikes Again: complacency and slackness
intrude at virtually every point, and whereas Christopher
Plummer and Catherine Schell at least seemed to be enjoying themselves in the previous film,
everyone here seems either tetchy or listless. Inspector Dreyfus, this time round a Bond-level madman who gets hold of a death ray machine that can
erase entire buildings and cities from thousands of miles away, spells things
out all too explicitly by calling Clouseau more powerful than his deadly
machine, but it speaks to the series’ most intriguing element, the consistent sense
of a universe bending its laws around its protagonist. Clouseau misses the most
obvious clues and indicators, yet is inexorably drawn to the heart of things;
he survives serial assassination attempts without even realizing they existed;
he embodies the self-involved ineptitude that’s poisoning our world (it’s not
too much of a stretch to find some contemporary political resonance) and yet
thrives (despite apparently rendering walls and floors strangely fragile): seen
as such, Dreyfus is fundamentally a righteously poignant character, a quality
undermined here by the absurd and shoddy plotting. But in contrast to the
average comic child-man, Clouseau is specific in his physicality, often seen
stripped down to his hairy torso, driven by primal urges which he presumably
knows how to satisfy (despite being unable to execute the most basic aspect of
the surrounding rigmarole), the effect drawing on Peter Sellers’ well-known
personal turbulence, feeding into making Clouseau a more immediate and vaguely
threatening presence than he might otherwise be (especially when supplemented with
the sadistic undertones of the random attacks by his manservant Kato, which make
no allowances for bedroom guests).
