The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976)

Waste of time

A Disappointing Continuation

It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

We thought this was hilarious when it was run endlessly on HBO in the early 1980's, and we quoted it all the time: "Does your deug baht?" "Do you have a reum?". I was looking forward to seeing it again recently, but thought it fell rather flat when I finally did. It has its moments, and Herbert Lom is entertaining as "the lunatic Dreyfus", but it's not the gem I remember. (How's this for a line I bet they wish they could take back in a screwball comedy: on the topic of the disintegration of the UN, Dreyfus screams, "I want a crater! Wreckage! Twisted metal! Something the world will never forget!" In another couple decades the Twin Towers would fill that request for real.) The end picks up a little bit after a sagging middle (I thought that bedroom ambush between Clouseau and Cato would never end), so it's worth hanging on to get to the finale which has some clever stuff in it. Not as good as I remember it, though.

For my money, The Pink Panther Strike Again is the funniest of all the Pink Panther movies.Peter Sellers is back as the clueless Inspector Clouseau. Herbert Lom is hysterical as Chief Inspector Dreyfus who has finally gone mad and kidnaps a scientist in order to construct a death ray.Clouseau's slow motion kung fu battle with Cato rates as one of the funniest slap stick bits of the 1970s. There are good comedy performances all around, and a cameo from Omar Sharif as the Egyptian assassin. The cross dressing butler, Jarvis, does a great job with "Until You Love Me," (voiced by Julie Andrews, who was married to Blake Edwards at the time).There hasn't been comedy like this in years. Peter Sellers makes the others look second rate by comparison.

"Sinister Forces are at work" - Yes, Blake Edwards, Henry Mancini, and Peter Sellers combine their incomparable talents once again in, what is for me, the most hilarious, farcial, and funniest Pink Panther movie. Don't get me wrong - A Shot in the Dark is the best of the films. No doubt here or argument either. But this one is my favorite(not a lot more but I grew up with this one...so nostalgia has a firm hold on my viewpoint). This time around Chief Inspector Drefuss(actually former Chief Inspector Drefuss) is languishing in a mental facility. He appears to be cured of his obsessive hatred for Clouseau(the current Chief Inspector). On the day he is to be released, Clouseau pays him one of the funniest visits ever. We get head hit with croquet ball, stepping on a rake, falling into the water - twice - a rubberized arrow in the forehead, a bench that falls on one side when one person gets up, and more. That is before we even get to the credits. By the end of this opening scene Herbert Lom as Drefuss is all ready gesticulating wildly, rolling his eyes and having the best screen nervous tick I have ever seen. Well the gorgeously animated and scored credits come on and then we get a hilarious view of Clouseau's home, the inevitable "meeting" between him and Cato - and then Clouseau dressed as the Hunchback of Notre dame whilst Drefuss tries to kill him from the floor underneath. Gold. The rest of the film goes on with similar scenes. The scene where Couseau addresses a group of servants at an English manor(yes, the parallel bars), the one where he is at the all-men's club, the Octoberfest(a killer montage), or while he is trying to scale a German castle and when he finally gets in dressed as an old dentist. Sellers, Edwards, and Mancini and a host of great comedic talents like Kwouk, Lom, Leonard Rossiter, Colin Blakely, Andre Maranne(as Francois), Grahm Stark(as the man who does not have a dog that bites), and Michael Robbins as "the incomparable Aimsley Jarvis(great character bit here - I always laugh when he "belts" out "Until you loved me") make this a welcoming, zany, laugh-riot. I loved this movie when it came out and I was not quite ten. I saw it again recently and loved it all the more. It is almost flawless with its non-stop barrage of intended laughs. The guys playing the President of the United States and Henry Kissinger even do a great job lampooning them! Let's not forget Lesley-Anne Down as Olga. Breath-taking even if it is a small role(that is Omar Shariff as her initial great lover). Edwards really uses lots of farcial techniques in this one like the scene with Olga in Clouseau's bed or the grappling of the castle scene around the moat. Add Henry Mancini's beautiful score(particularly in those two scenes) and it is comedic ballet. What can I say about Sellers? He is genius personified. Lom is great. In many ways this is his film. He looks so mad. He plays one of the best insane men in screen history for my money. How about the nitrous oxide scene..."It's Clouseau...Kill him!" Great stuff.

This was the fourth movie in the Pink Panther franchise and, despite the title, the titular diamond that was the namesake of the original and The Return of… has nothing to do with this entry. By now, Pink Panther had come to mean not gimmick for the sake of a comedy plot, but the world of the wonderfully inept Inspector Clouseau, and a vibrant brand of latter-day screen slapstick.One of the most consistently brilliant elements of the earlier pictures was Clouseau's relationship with the increasingly demented Dreyfuss. For The Pink Panther Strikes Again, this relationship becomes the central premise of the whole movie. As such the scope is there for more-or-less continuous comedy with very little else to complicate it. Apart from, that is, a James Bond spoof slant, with Dreyfuss taking on the role of the eccentric super villain. This in turn allows for some large-scale actiony gags, reminiscent of the wilder escapades of silent comics Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd. Peter Sellers's stunt double Joe Dunne received a lot of work here.This also allows for a greater part to be taken in comic staging by director Blake Edwards. A Shot in the Dark was nearly all Sellers, and that was very good in its way, but for Strikes Again we really get to see Edwards's outsize and somewhat surreal comic creations at their most unbridled, from the perfectly-timed three way fight between Clouseau, Cato and Dreyfuss to Clouseau's bungled attempts to get into Dreyfuss's castle. But Edwards still has a way with the smaller comedy confection, as usual his trademark tactic being to make almost everything invisible to the audience, showing just enough to make a gag work. For example, there is a very funny set-up in a public toilet where we only see the feet at the bottom of the cubicles.There's a lot of verbal comedy too in the Blake Edwards/Frank Waldman screenplay, which is of a middling quality and gets a little tiresome at times. But as we see for example in the scene where Sellers interrogates the professor's house staff, Sellers and Edwards have brilliant timing in punctuating a talky scene with physical gags. Occasionally the humour gets just a little too silly, and there are a lot of clichés – such as the "that is not my dog" line, which I'm sure predates this movie, and the stepping-on-a-rake gag, which predates cinema.But perhaps this latter is a deliberate tribute to the staples of slapstick. It becomes apparent, as Clouseau inadvertently survives numerous assassination attempts, that he succeeds purely by virtue of the fact that he is a slapstick hero and a wake of chaos must follow him wherever he goes. It is a kind of meta-comedy. And herein lies one of the slightly disappointing things about this movie. Often Clouseau is saved, not directly by his incompetence, but by sheer luck. When a giant pretzel stops him getting skewered by a killer disguised as a buxom wench, it is funny, but it is not really a Clouseau gag. It seems, with Sellers's lessening interest in the franchise (not to mention the heart condition which kept the aforementioned Mr Dunne employed), that perhaps the character around whom the whole thing revolved was beginning to be watered down.