The picture was made during the professional nadir of both Edwards, still smarting after the expensive flop Darling Lili (1970), and star Peter Sellers, who for several years appeared in a string of virtually unreleaseable comedies such as the alarmingly bad Soft Beds, Hard Battles (1974). Things were so bad that the project was apparently conceived as a limited-run British television series, which Edwards was to produce. When Sellers was brought on board ITC opted to finance it as a full-blown theatrical feature, and the retooling of the script to feature film format might explain its awkwardness.

The film literally marks the return of the Pink Panther, the "largest and most famous diamond in the world," which is stolen from a museum in the vaguely Pakistani / Arabian (and fictitious) country of Lugash in an extravagantly-staged heist. Everyone assumes the thief is Sir Charles Litton (Christopher Plummer), alias "The Phantom," who had stolen the jewel before (in The Pink Panther, 1963), though he was played in that film by David Niven. Lugashian authorities request the services of French Insp. Jacques Clouseau (Sellers) owing to his experience with the earlier case, this despite the misgivings of his superior, Chief Inspector Dreyfuss (Herbert Lom), by now driven to a state of near-madness by Clouseau's constant bumbling.

Litton, for his part, claims he had nothing whatsoever to do with the robbery, and travels to Lugash to find the real thief. Meanwhile, Clouseau spends most of his time in Gstaad, Switzerland, where Lady Litton (Catherine Schell) amuses herself watching Clouseau work "undercover" in a parade of elaborate but unconvincing disguises.

One of the oddities about The Return of the Pink Panther is how its two main characters, Clouseau and Sir Charles, aren't even in the same country for most of the film, then meet up only fleetingly at the end. Additionally, there is an equal emphasis on Sir Charles' adventures in Lugash, filmed with the featherweight suspense and light humor of To Catch a Thief (1955), as there is on the more overt slapstick of Clouseau. This suggests that perhaps as originally conceived, the proposed television series would have been something more along the lines of other Brit TV shows of the period like The Persuaders!, and that the Clouseau character was really secondary, much as he had been in the first Pink Panther movie.

In any case, replacing Niven (by 1975 too old for the character's physical requirements) with charisma-free Christopher Plummer doesn't help. Plummer has long been a great actor on the stage (particularly in Shakespearean roles at Ontario's Stratford Theatre), and later an especially good character actor in films like Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country and The Insider, but as a dashing, sophisticated jewel thief Plummer compares most unfavorably with Niven or Cary Grant.

All the business with Sir Charles also stretches the film to an overlong 113 minutes, a good half-hour longer than necessary. (Edwards' comedies almost always run too long, even though he tends to cut whole scenes shot for his films to tighten their pacing.)

Nonetheless, audiences responded favorably to Sellers' reinterpretation of the character, which is much more cartoonish and exaggerated than it had been in either The Pink Panther or its immediate follow-up, A Shot in the Dark (1964). Here, as in a number of Edwards' films, including The Great Race (1965) and The Party (1968), the director adapts a comic sensibility from comedies of the 1920s and '30s, particularly the style of Laurel & Hardy (e.g., the scene with the ringing doorbell) to a sexier, glamorous European setting with Clouseau at sea in a world of wealthy jet-setters.

Sellers is really in his element here, and adds to it the funny voices and characters that first brought him fame on The Goon Show. His timing is very good, and for the first time in the series creates a genuinely endearing character, though none of the Pink Panthers excepting possibly this film's sequel, The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976) engenders the kind of affection enjoyed by Laurel & Hardy, even now.

There's something remote about Edwards' style that keeps audiences at an arm's length; unlike the best film comedies, you have to be exactly in the right frame of mind to enjoy the Edwards-Sellers films or you won't like them at all. This reviewer remembers seeing theater audiences roaring with laughter watching the best Pink Panther movies, while others'll watch the same picture in stony silence.

Still, the sight gags here are sometimes so good that Edwards' directly reworked and elaborated on them for The Pink Panther Strikes Again. In that film he also expanded Herbert Lom's role, which in some ways was even funnier than Sellers. Lom was Edwards' secret weapon, and virtually the lone bright spot in several particularly bad post-Sellers Panther films.

Video & Audio

The Return of the Pink Panther is presented in a solid 16:9 enhanced transfer that retains the original Panavision aspect ratio. The image is a bit on the grainy side (original printing by DeLuxe), but very sharp and free of damage and age-related wear, and certainly a vast improvement on Artisan's 4:3 letterboxed DVD from 1999. A Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo soundtrack is listed, but it sure sounded like standard mono to this reviewer. Optional subtitles in (HOH) English, French, and Spanish are included. There are no Extra Features.

Parting Thoughts

The Return of the Pink Panther isn't bad, just overlong and a little bit blah, though Sellers' antics and some great support from the always reliable Herbert Lom make this worth a look.

Stuart Galbraith IV is a Kyoto-based film historian whose work includes The Emperor and the Wolf - The Lives and Films of Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune and Taschen's forthcoming Cinema Nippon. Visit Stuart's Cine Blogarama here.