Der rosarote Panther wird gejagt

Cut 45 minutes of filler material and this would make a nice little hour-long network retrospective and a decent tribute to Peter Sellers. It mostly plays that way anyway, with a "plot" which is simply dropped halfway through, serving only as one of the framing devices to introduce the Sellers clips. The other framing device, a reporter's series of interviews with Clouseau's associates, is so inanely written and obviously "tribute-y" that it's shocking to remember that this was a theatrical feature film.

And that was Blake Edwards' major mistake. Some of the unused footage is amusing, but if it had been up to Sellers' usual hilarious standard, it wouldn't have gone unused. And the flashback sequences are made up of, well, flashbacks--scenes which we already saw in the previous movies. On a TV special, that would have been fine. Here, it just makes you wonder what Edwards could have been thinking.

If you watch this film, then watch the others, you could figure out what other Pink Panther movies the scenes come from:

The Harvey Korman/Peter Sellers' Exchange in the beginning of the film is from "The Pink Panther Strikes Again." That can be assumed, because Sellers is trying on the hunchback disguise.

But the film does manage to be a tribute to the late Sellers, who died much too early.

Trying to piece together a movie with a limited number of outtakes is asking for trouble. Actually, they (barely) manage to make a plot of some kind for about the first half of the movie. But when they run out of footage of the late star (even desperately at one point using a longer version of a scene that actually made the final cut in a previous Panther movie), the movie collapses with the ridiculous device of trying to finish the movie by having people relating their memories of the detective.

However, during this second half, there is one bright spot: Richard Mulligan, who plays the famous detective's father. He is *hilarious* in his scenes! And the scenes showing the past of the detective (played by different actors) were pretty amusing. You have to wonder why the movie didn't just focus on Mulligan or the idea of showing the detective in the past.

I've been watching Pink Panther films since I was very young. Peter Sellers is probably one of the early names I got to fix with a face on the screen, he and Roger Moore. I really like Sellers and this series is one of my favorites. However this isn't really a new film. It's Blake Edwards' tribute to Peter Sellers. It could have worked out great if it was a television program because it's a mere collection from old Panther films shown as the characters who knew Clouseau from the old films narrate about their relationships with him. It was fun to watch though. But makes you sad as it makes you nostalgic to Sellers and the old films and the "baameb".

Blake Edwards was not interested in doing a "tribute" to the late Peter Sellers with this movie. What he wanted to do was find a way to milk more money out of the property by first setting us up with a "Clouseau disappears" movie to squeeze the last nickel out of Sellers posthumously and then hope audiences would come back for the dreadful follow-up with Ted Wass and he could then get some more movies out of it. For the first half, we have half a plot by using old Sellers outtakes and then when he runs out it turns into a "tribute" by spotlighting old clips. What I remember so vividly when I saw this movie in the theaters was how after the outtakes ended, absolutely no one in the theater laughed for the last half of the movie.

If Edwards wanted to do a proper "tribute" he would have taken these Sellers outtakes (which are funny) and put them back into longer directors cut versions of the Panther films they were originally intended for (one outtake finally clears up why Clouseau keeps referring to Colin Blakely as "Sergeant Yard" in "Pink Panther Strikes Again"). The end result would have pleased everyone as a proper tribute to Sellers' genius and when Edwards used to know how to make a funny movie. Unfortunately Edwards wasn't bright enough to think of a sensible idea like that.