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A priceless gem, presented to a sultan's daughter, provides the film's title along with its animated feline mascot. A flurry of sketches lays the foundation: A gloved hand removes an engraving of the Lupa Capitolina to reveal a safe, the Phantom (David Niven) at work in Rome; a trenchcoated agent flees the Parisian police by dashing into a hotel and emerging as Capucine, not just a larcenous swan but the wife of Inspector Clouseau (Peter Sellers). (The connection between the escape down a rope and the quick change up an elevator is part of the dapper design, in between there's Robert Wagner as the British burglar's nephew running across Hollywood Boulevard.) The action settles in Cortina d'Ampezzo, Stroheim country (Blind Husbands) for the visiting princess (Claudia Cardinale) and the revolving boudoir. "Something about extremes," elegance and slapstick combined by Blake Edwards for a jet-setting Arsène Lupin and the pure pleasure of seeing a clotheshorse doing spit-takes and face-planting in the snow. Clouseau is less the Zen-fool of the sequels than one of the figurines in the bravura farcical clockwork, the double-cuckold oblivious to the thieves hiding under his bed. (The extended adulterous quadrille is played like a violin and capped under the covers with a champagne ejaculation: "When you've seen one Stradivarius, you've seen them all.") Lubitsch for the tipsy seduction on the tiger-hide rug, Tati fireworks at the masked ball where Duck Soup's mirror scene is updated with widescreen and gorilla suits. Crime and marriage, "we must have no secrets from each other," the Hitchcockian terror of the ending's switcheroo. By dint of inspired denseness, Sellers makes Clouseau the axis of Edwards' world—the ass in knight's armor, prone to slipping off the globe yet turning a pratfall into a thing of grace. With Brenda de Banzie, Colin Gordon, John Le Mesurier, James Lanphier, and Fran Jeffries.
--- Fernando F. Croce |