Pale Pussycat

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

THE PINK PANTHER STRIKES AGAIN

Directed by BLAKE EDWARDS

Screenplay by FRANK WALDMAN and BLAKE EDWARDS

You will recall that the last we saw of Inspector Clouseau he had succeeded in 1) solving the jewel theft that was the central issue in The Return of the Pink Panther and 2) driving his immediate superior, Chief Inspector Dreyfus, completely, totally, padded-cell mad.

As The Pink Panther Strikes Again opens we find poor Dreyfus (Herbert Lom) recovering very nicely. Indeed, on this very day he is about to be released from the sanitarium. Alas for his hopes, but good for the movie, Clouseau has picked this moment to make a courtesy call on his old colleague. This results in repeated dunkings in a lake for poor Lom, a suspicion on the part of passers-by that he may be a homosexual--and, finally, total relapse.

How does a certified loony find gainful occupation? The answer is as obvious as the plot of an antique B movie: he rents a remote and gloomy castle and sets up shop as a master criminal, abducting the professor-proprietor of a doomsday machine and forcing him--he has this beautiful daughter, you see--to employ the weapon as an instrument with which to blackmail the world. It is a measure of his madness that all he wants in return for not using the machine is Clouseau's life.

For some reason quite a bit of this basic action is rather lamely executed. One suspects that the film makers were so busy devising good stuff for Peter Sellers to do in his fourth impersonation of the serenely incompetent Clouseau that they neglected the long periods when he is not onscreen. One feels for Lom and the rest of the cast, working sweatily to be funny with not much help from the creative talents. On the other hand, Sellers is amply provided for. Once again, he is well served by his houseboy, Cato, hiding in his apartment and leaping out at him for ferociously funny karate encounters. Sellers also has a couple of fine set pieces--interrogating all the witnesses to the crime, wrestling with a Russian superspy (Lesley-Anne Down) and a ludicrously athletic attempt to penetrate Lom's castle. And the Richard Williams studio has outdone itself in the title animation sequence. It is perhaps ungrateful to wish that the linking parts of the film were more artfully tooled. Better an indifferent Panther than none at all.

Richard Schickel

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