Review of The Return of the Pink Panther (1975) by Paul Z — 02 Nov 2010

Where Blake Edwards was once a handler of comedies combining slapstick, sophisticated wit, melancholia and social criticism, which was nearly forgotten by the time he's sold out this far into the eponymous franchise, because this one is just slapstick. Nothing else. He's mostly celebrated as the creator of the Pink Panther series. But this one's problem is how it drags. There isn't any anticipation felt or even created, any comic anguish, that nearly Hitchcockian suspense where time suddenly dilates to allow a burst of laughter.

Other than the usual homage to the silent cinema of Laurel and Hardy, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd and Leo McCarey, the Clouseau films seem to reveal preoccupations that come up again and again in Edwards' work. Clouseau is very much a hysterical white male and much of the series' humor comes from the ludicrous gap between his presumptions of cultural superiority and his idiotic behavior. He feels free to treat his Asian manservant Cato brutally, and proclaims his mastery over women, yet he is spectacularly inept at everything he attempts and is constantly humiliated. Clouseau's humiliations are particularly evident in a subtext of the films involving his predominant sexual embarrassment and failure.

An elaborately original cartoon throughout the opening credits gets this amusingly distracting movie off to a lighthearted start before the bungling Inspector is asked by an Arab government to help them trace the Pink Panther diamond, which has been stolen from their theoretically impenetrable national museum. Clouseau deems the burglary to be the graft of Sir Charles Litton, a.k.a. The Phantom. To facilitate his own protection, the cunning Litton embarks on his own to recover the offender while his wife Claudine deflects Clouseau.

The action is not so much a slapstick aficionado's ice cream castle as a slapstick aficionado's house of Cheetos. Our inelegant star is disengaged by defective vehicles, a telephone, a doorbell, revolving doors, a vacuum cleaner, a lamp, a parrot, and the exceedingly fanatical Cado who is provided with secret hiding places and surprise Kung Fu assaults. The sight gags come on like lightning and frantically, but the story line flies in several directions at once, where the original Pink Panther and A Shot in the Dark were methodically clever caper plots constructed out of their slapstick scenarios. Return of the Pink Panther is constructed right in synch with the brain's most rudimentary wavelengths, which is perhaps why it's a good house of Cheetos, a vegging-out flick.