Review of The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976) by Uditha D — 31 May 2012

Peter Sellers had reached his fifties by the time The Pink Panther Strikes Again had been released, and he was just four years before his untimely death in 1980, and one could see at times just how changed and frail he looked in this comedic classic.

Nonetheless, his charm had not failed him even in this, and this was all the more reason why I considered Strikes Again as the most ambitious (and daring) of all the Pink Panther films up to this point (not that the ones following it could even dream of equaling it).

I simply cannot imagine which was the funniest sequences in the film - the ones involving Clouseau, or the ones involving the insane and Blofeld-like megalomaniac Dreyfus, who kept me laughing with his refrain "After all, what is the life of one man.

.." over and over again. Clouseau yet again became the clumsy one-man-army he was in the preceding movies - with every single gunshot, arrow and knife aimed at him missed by inches! In the end, that was what really made Strikes Again, in my opinion, the best of them all - the incorporation of utter Absurdism (I mean, come on - the United Nations building being disintegrated? A doomsday machine at Dreyfus' hands as a mere decoy to just get the world to kill Clouseau? I was even surprised how the assemblers who gathered around the place to watch that didn't laugh EVEN in the film) along with plain old Clousea-ian fare.

Yes, I think Blake Edwards unwittingly saved the best among the last for us, with Sellers portraying his lovable Inspector the best way possible since 1964's A Shot in the Dark. Touchà (C) to that!