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A mobile camera outside the chateau gives a Rear Window view of overlapping indiscretions, plus the ticklish sight of George Sanders tiptoeing through the garden. A sideline buffoon in The Pink Panther, Inspector Clouseau (Peter Sellers) is here given center stage to tumble out of windows and declare his Kestone-cum-Zen philosophy: "I believe everything... and I believe nothing." It is this openness which drives him on a quest against logic, discarding a blackboard full of facts and evidence in favor of faith on the innocence of the maid (Elke Sommer) found with smoking gun and bloody shears. Despite the lack of priceless gems and animated felines, Blake Edwards' sequel is where the series comes together—the hero's inner balance in a widescreen world of chaos, the sudden karate exercises with Cato (Burt Kwouk), the ocular twitch that overtakes Commissioner Dreyfus (Herbert Lom) when he ponders the questions that keeps him up at night. "What if Clouseau is right?" Balloon seller, Matisse and poacher are the disguises, then stripped "right down to your mustache" at the nudist colony, each lands him with a jump-cut in the back of a whizzing police van. (Henry Mancini's score is at its best when played by a naked band in the woods.) W.C. Fields' curved cue stick at the billiards table, just the instrument for the seeker who runs into a wall and recommends the architect to be investigated. "Ridiculous!" "I decide what's ridiculous." Another Hitchcock joke (The Man Who Knew Too Much) is thrice repeated to leave a pile of innocent corpses as the protagonist stumbles on, serenely. A most brutal work behind the continental surface, the old era's classic farce skewered by the new one's jaundiced absurdism. "Give me ten men like Clouseau and I could destroy the world." Cinematography by Christopher Challis. With Graham Stark, Tracy Reed, André Maranne, Maurice Kaufmann, Martin Benson, and Vanda Godsell.
--- Fernando F. Croce |