THE CURSE OF THE PINK PANTHER

US, 1983, 105 minutes, Colour.
David Niven, Ted Wass, Rich Little, Robert Wagner, Herbert Lom, Joanna Lumley, Capucine, Robert Loggia, Roger Moore, Burt Kwouk, Harvey Korman.
Directed by Blake Edwards.

The Curse of the Pink Panther was made by Blake Edwards back-to-back with The Trail of the Pink Panther in 1982. The latter capitalised on the memory of Peter Sellers and used outcuts not used in previous films. The film also highlighted his disappearance and the search for Inspector Clouseau. Critics were not particularly favourable to this posthumous tribute to Peter Sellers.

The Curse of the Pink Panther has a stand-in in the shadows for Peter Sellers in the prologue. He is present in memory by the Inspector Clouseau Museum (looked after by an ever-aggressive Cato, who is also trying to evade Professor Balls (Harvey Korman), trying to get paid for the disguises supplied for the Inspector). Bert Kwouk and Harvey Korman do their typical guest roles.

Inspector Dreyfus is to the fore in this comedy - again Herbert Lom with long-suffering accidents and a desire to finally see his psychiatrist. He bugs a computer which is to find the greatest detective who can find Inspector Clouseau. It comes up with Ted Wass - a lanky American comedian, who looks like a mixture of Harold Lloyd and Christopher Reeve as Clark Kent. He is an American version of Inspector Clouseau's disaster slapstick accidents. There are plenty of these, some of them laboured, some of them very funny - an umbrella at the airport, many attempts on his life by Robert Lodge's Mafia men. Wass is incompetent but somehow or other moves through the proceedings and succeeds, to all intents and purposes, in indicating that Clouseau is dead.

In the meantime we see Sir Charles Lytton (David Niven in his last film - his voice dubbed by Rich Little) with his wife Capucine and Robert Wagner reappearing as George. By an irony they finish up with the Pink Panther. Joanna Lumley plays a Countess who has abducted Clouseau - and changed his appearance by plastic surgery. In a surprise joke at the end of the film, Clouseau has been remodelled as Roger Moore. Moore good-naturedly imitates Clouseau's voice and all his accident-prone mannerisms.

The film is typical of Blake Edwards' enjoyment of slapstick comedy - but by this stage in the proceedings it seems a bit worn. However, there are quite a number of good laughs and guest roles - e.g. Graham Stark as a waiter. As with the original (for which some moralising critics condemned it) there are some obvious and broad, if very funny, sex jokes. At the time, it remained to be seen whether Ted Wass would emerge as Peter Sellers' successor in Blake Edwards' comedies.

(The Pink Panther himself appears, as always, to good effect in an animated credits sequence.)