FANTASIA OBSCURA: Clouseau’s Comical but Clumsy Comeback
There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.
Sometimes, you have to keep your eye on those maniacal world-conquerors…
The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976)
Distributed by: United Artists
Directed by: Blake Edwards
You know the old line, about how dying is easy, but comedy’s hard?
Case in point:
Please note that there are unavoidable spoilers herein.
We open cold in this entry of the Pink Panther franchise, the third (Fourth? Fifth? Depends on how you want to count these), outside a French mental hospital for the criminally insane. We find former Parisian Chief Inspector Charles Dreyfus (Herbert Lom) showing up for an appointment with the doctor treating him (Geoffrey Bayldon). The doctor has some great news for his patient: There’s going to be a hearing that afternoon with the board, and the doctor is so confident that Dreyfus is cured of his desire to kill his former employee, the thoughts of whom sent Dreyfus into harsh rages, he lets Charles know that he should expect to walk out that afternoon.
There’s some good natured banter between them, about how Dreyfus may just be such a good liar that he can fool everyone into letting him out. Which is worth noting, especially as we watch what happens soon after he leaves the consultation and tries to relax on the grounds.
Showing up unexpectedly is Jacques Clouseau (Peter Sellers), the employee Dreyfus wanted dead, who is the current Chief Inspector of Paris. Clouseau is there to offer his support, which in his patented manner will lead to disaster upon prat-fall-laden-and-language-mangled disaster. In as much time as it takes for Dreyfus to get pushed in the lake and hit on the head numerous times, he relapses badly, right before we get the animated credit sequence created by Richard Williams.
We then watch one of Clouseau’s “training exercises” with his houseboy Cato (Burt Kwouk), who is instructed to try and injure his boss every night when he comes home so that Clouseau can stay sharp. The exercise gets interrupted when word gets out that Dreyfus has escaped and may be on the way to kill the Chief Inspector; no one is aware, however, that Dreyfus is under Clouseau’s apartment, ready to use some plastic explosives to do him in with:
With the direct approach not likely to work, Dreyfus decides to go much bigger: Using his contacts from his police days, he assembles a squad of some of Europe’s most desperate criminals. He then leads them as their mastermind to rob banks for funds, and then to kidnap from England Dr. Hugo Fassbinder (Richard Vernon) and his daughter Margo (Briony McRoberts in her first feature role), in order to get access to the doctor’s work on devices that can weaken bonds between matter on the atomic level.
Dreyfus’ efforts do not stay entirely under the radar, however, and soon Clouseau is on the trail. His main lead is Dr. Fassbinder’s butler Ainsley Jarvis (Michael Robbins), whom the detective discovers as he follows him has a side job as a female impersonator with a lounge act (his singing voice dubbed in by an uncredited Julie Andrews, Edwards’ wife), with jokes about the lifestyle that did not age well at all.
(To his credit, when Edwards comes back to this milieu for Victor/Victoria, he shows that he had a lot of growth during those six years…)
Clouseau’s bumbling both moves him forward and stymies him long enough for Dreyfus to put the next stroke of his plan into effect. He hijacks all the world’s television signals to announce his presence, then demonstrates the power he possesses by obliterating the United Nations building, putting panic in the hearts of world leaders such as the American President (Dick Crockett in his last role) and his Secretary of State (Byron Kane), who bear more than a passing similarity to their actual counterparts.
Once finished, Dreyfus comes back on the air to say that he will not destroy any more landmarks if someone kills Clouseau. To that end, at least 22 government trained assassins are sent after him, including the ones from China (Anthony Chinn), Italy (Deep Roy in his first feature), Egypt (an uncredited Omar Sharif), and Russia (Leslie-Anne Down), and as Clouseau does he blithely blunders his way past them:
There’s a lot of mileage that Clouseau, and by extension Sellers and Edwards, get out of being clueless. Sellers was very comfortable in the role by this outing, so for him there’s very little he needed to bring to the table. (Considering how Sellers’ own manias and excesses manifested during the production into an open feud with Edwards, some of it should probably have been brought to the other trouble spots in his life.) Edwards, despite his ups and downs during his career, had no problem getting the most out of cast and crew; the fact that despite Sellers’ instability he got a decent performance out of him is certainly worth noting.
What pulls out attention, however, is what happens as we follow Lom’s Dreyfus in this film. We watch him go from the patient foil he was for two films into a menacing mastermind, able to oppose just about any hero that didn’t need to have their powers depicted by a VFX house in Quebec. Were this made in our modern time, this would have been the perfect ‘origin of the villain’ film, as this matches so well with what’s usually found in an antihero origin outing, such as the tenor of the tone and feel, and the beats for the story. He could well have become the overall focus going forward had this script from Edwards and Frank Waldman made the rounds today.
Which feels like such a wasted opportunity, especially as it looks like we’re never going to get that ‘Doctor Doom’ movie, are we…?
However, it was not to be. One of the effects of Clouseau’s heroic bumbling as the film winds down finds Dreyfus and his castle in Bavaria winking out of existence, killing the villain in the last reel. Worse, when Revenge of the Pink Panther opens, Dreyfus is back in the hospital, his criminal acts seeming to have never occurred.
Sure, we can blame it on Sellers and Edwards just wanting to get the next film over and done with as they snarled at each other and not caring about continuity… Or we can surmise that Dreyfus ended up getting phased into another dimension when his doomsday weapon took him out, and he’s just biding his time, waiting for a chance to try and take over the (hopefully soon Clouseau-less) world.
After all, he may just be such a good liar that he can fool everyone into letting him out; if so, he can sit back and wait until the right bumbling moment comes along…
NEXT TIME: As we approach the 80th anniversary of the start of World War II, we get a chance to see someone who badly wanted a different outcome for that conflict…
…emphasis on “badly” here…
