CURSE OF THE PINK PANTHER. Directed by Blake Edwards; written by Blake Edwards and Geoffrey Edwards; produced by Blake Edwards and Tony Adams for MGM/UA. Starring Ted Wass, Herbert Lom and Joanna Lumley. Rated PG.
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It's hard to believe that it has been almost 20 years since the first Pink Panther movie appeared. There were only a few remarkable things in that 1964 release. The music was catchy. The animated Pink Panther was witty and different. And the character Peter Sellers created—Inspector Clousseau—was an immediate hit.
The music and the cartoon are still with us in Curse. But the most important element—Sellers/Clousseau—is not. The result is an occasionally amusing, but mostly slow-moving farce which only creates nostalgia for the earlier films.
Curse's plot is as silly and illogical as that of its predecessors. Clousseau's nemesis Chief Inspector Dreyfuss (Lom) is pleased with the selection of Clifton Sleigh (Wass) to find the missing Clousseau. Since Sleigh is as clumsy and naively stupid as Clousseau, he should have no hope of succeeding. But he also has some of Clousseau's extremely good luck.
Wass is obviously expected to fill the gap left by Sellers' death. But his forte is as an ensemble player, and the script and supporting cast here aren't up to the standards of TV's Soap, where he was outstanding. His best scenes in Curse are played with inflatables—a rubber duck and an "instant companion"—not people.
A good deal of the humor of Clousseau stemmed from his improper grasp of English—his outrageous, unintentional puns and his increasingly hilarious mispronunciations. There is little of this type of humor in Curse, however, since Sleigh is an American and thus supposedly can pronounce English. But he could have been given some puns or malapropisms to go with the physical comedy called for in the script.
Some of the slapstick bits and double entendres are really quite funny, but unfortunately that still leaves a lot of time to be filled with jokes that just aren't worth it.
One interesting ploy in Curse is the appearance of David Niven, Robert Wagner and Capucine, in their original roles from The Pink Panther. They haven't appeared before in the sequels (although different actors played their roles in Return of the Pink Panther in 1975).
The reason for this casting is unclear, but one can only hope that director Edwards wanted to bring the series full circle. That might mean there will be no more new Pink Panther movies, hopefully. The ridiculous plots, caricature people and repetitious situations just aren't worth sitting through without Peter Sellers.
August 24, 1983