‘The Pink Panther Strikes Again‘ (1976) is the fifth film in the original series of films directed and written (most of them) by Blake Edwards and starring Peter Sellers as Inspector Jacques Clouseau. I can forgive the Edwards-Sellers couple anything, as they authored the brilliant movie ‘The Party’ (1968), one of the best comedies ever made. Among the series that belong to the cops comedy genre, this is one of the most successful, and this film is considered one of the best in the series. The ultimate criterion for judging a comedy is the quantity and quality of laughter it generates. From this point of view, ‘The Pink Panther Strikes Again‘ was and remains a successful film almost 50 years after its release.
Inspector Clouseau, a walking disaster whose combination of innocence and incompetence solves any case and defeats any enemy, investigates the escape of Dreyfus, his former boss, from the mental asylum where he had been imprisoned. He kidnaps a scientist competent enough to create a weapon that destroys the United Nations building in seconds, and with which he can threaten to further destroy entire nations. The goal? Blackmailing world governments to hand over or kill Clouseau. He is on his trail, but on his trail are the paid assassins of every secret service in the world, all ready to kill Clouseau to save the planet.
The pseudo-detective story intents to be (also) a parody of James Bond movies. The best comedy scenes in this series of Clouseau’s adventures might well belong to the period of silent film comedies. ‘The Pink Panther Strikes Again‘ contains several such scenes that would find a good place in the comedy anthologies of the 1920s. It’s what merely remains of this movie. Peter Sellers and Herbert Lom are excellent, and we also have the pleasure of seeing Omar Sharif in an uncredited role for a few minutes. Behind the mask of the character, Peter Sellers seems genuinely unhappy. But this is already the subject of another film.