The Pink Panther (1963)

A Bank Holiday movie <comedy French accent> par excellence </accent>

Every generation recasts the cultural canon, but the Boomers, with their socio-political firepower, blew it all up. From Monty Python to Spike Lee, from Prince to Wolf Hall, they scorned the old orthodoxies, rediscovered forgotten gems and created a whole canon. And then never stopped going on about it. But were their choices… ok?

Sir Charles Lytton (David Niven), an international jewel thief known to the world as ‘The Phantom’, has his sights set on a fabulous diamond called ‘The Pink Panther’, so named because of a flaw shaped like a cat. The diamond is in the possession of Princess Dala (Claudia Cardinale), who is in exile in an Italian ski resort. Only one man can stop Lytton: the famed inspector of the Sûreté, Jacques Clouseau (Peter Sellers).

The Legend

This is the story of an audacious robbery, in which a master of disguise steals ‘The Pink Panther’ out from under the nose of its rightful, aristocratic owner.

I am, of course, indulging in a little chicanery of my own here. I’m not talking about the plot of the film; I’m talking about the film itself. (If you’ve seen the film, you’ll know that [spoiler] the diamond known as The Pink Panther is never actually stolen.)

The Pink Panther was conceived as a vehicle for Stowe old boy and Second World War commando David Niven, a man whose picture you can easily find by looking up ‘debonair’ in the dictionary. This tale of an internationally notorious jewel thief who flits from Alpine ski resort to European capital in a haze of champagne, lounge jazz and nippy sports cars was intended as a comedy-thriller-pan-European romp, much like Stanley Donen’s Charade, which was released in the same year.

Charade similarly dashes headlong from an Alpine ski resort to a European capital, starring Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant, another man to be filed (neatly) under ‘debonair’. Like The Pink Panther, it has a funky jazz score by Henry Mancini and inventively animated titles.¹ Charade even features a police inspector with a moustache, a mac and a thick French accent, this time played by an actual Frenchman, Jacques Marin.

It is, in other words, the mirror image of The Pink Panther, which almost starred Audrey Hepburn in the role of the Princess and Peter Ustinov as the police inspector having rings run around him.

And then, at the very last minute, just as filming was about to start, Ustinov backed out and a replacement had to be found in a hurry. Director Blake Edwards was talked into hiring British comedian Peter Sellers. He had only seen Sellers in I’m Alright Jack (1959), in which Sellers plays the dumpy, middle-aged Union foreman Fred Kite, and was not convinced he was right for the part. However, in the car ride from the airport to the set, the pair bonded over their love of Stan Laurel. Once on set, Edwards discovered that he had stumbled upon a precious gem with a remarkable flaw.

Sellers was already famous in Britain, after starring in the radio comedy The Goon Show and many Ealing and Ealing-ish comedies of the ’50s. The Pink Panther, however, was a crucial part of his becoming an international star. His perfect timing and sense of comic character allowed him to stumble onto the set of The Pink Panther and steal the movie right out from beneath David Niven’s dapper, moustachioed nose. As soon as Sellers appears, the film stops being a Niven vehicle and becomes the first in a whole series of films dedicated to a legend of comedy: the inept, deluded, ill-fated Inspector Clouseau.

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The Reality

Sellers’ fame in Britain had arisen from his character work, particularly his voice. In the Goon Show he played at least 16 regular characters, all with different voices. In The Ladykillers, he was a young Cockney spiv; in The Smallest Show on Earth he was a doddery old projectionist; and in I’m Alright Jack he was a middle-aged union agitator with pretensions (‘Ahhh, Russia. All them cornfields and ballet in the evening.’)

What he was not especially known for was his physical comedy. Even at his advanced age, you can see Cary Grant’s vaudeville background in his elegant horsing about in Charade, but that was not Sellers’ skill. Yet it was what Clouseau became best remembered for after his on-set collaboration with Blake Edwards. Edwards was, by his own admission, a very clumsy man. He found that his retelling of his various mishaps always got a laugh, so he figured they ought to work the same way in a film.

In some ways The Pink Panther owes a big debt to American comedy director Leo McCarey, of whom Edwards was a huge fan. McCarey had a knack for patience, letting the comedians do their business in front of the camera with little editing but often with masterful blocking. In the Marx Brothers movie Duck Soup (1933), which McCarey directed, there’s a famous mirror scene in which both Harpo and Chico pretend to be Groucho’s reflection. The Pink Panther features a homage in which the camera stays stock still as two thieves dressed as gorillas try to break into a safe from opposite ends, aping each other’s mounting confusion.

Edwards was particularly influenced by McCarey’s theory of the ‘pain barrier’, in which disaster upon disaster is piled upon the protagonist until the audience stops feeling sorry for them and starts laughing. Thus indignity is heaped upon indignity for Clouseau, both within scenes and across the plot of the entire film, which starts with his wife cuckolding him with the villain he is trying to catch, and ends with him being convicted of the crime he is trying to solve.

But Clouseau bears all of these indignities with dignity. McCarey is thought to have been the man who paired Oliver Hardy with Stan Laurel, and — as we know — both Edwards and Sellers idolised Laurel. The onscreen Laurel is a holy fool, a creature of naive optimism and a bewildered poise. The Clouseau of The Pink Panther is his screen descendent.

Clouseau is not yet the agent of chaos of the ‘70s sequels. He is even a competent detective: he discerns the Phantom’s M.O., figures out where he will strike next and, eventually, correctly identifies him. He’s just an extremely accident-prone competent detective. He, not unjustifiably, continues to take himself seriously, even as the universe doesn’t.

What Clouseau is, in The Pink Panther, is that classic comic figure, the man out of place. He is an ordinary if somewhat clumsy man who has wandered into the world of a sophisticated and sparkling caper, full of extraordinary and elegant figures like Capucine (who plays his wife), Claudia Cardinale, Robert Wagner and David Niven. Out of his depth, Clouseau is nonetheless determined to get by, his striving becoming the source of a lot of the comedy but also earning a lot of the audience’s sympathy, which is why he became the star of the movie instead of Niven.

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Is it still ok?

It's still funny, if that’s what you mean. But then, so is Charade. Hepburn isn’t that great at comedy, but Grant is good enough for both of them, and the script is terrific. Charade is precisely what The Pink Panther would be today without Sellers: a period romp of interest only to completists and obsessives (present!).

Blake Edwards said he initially thought The Pink Panther would be only worth doing if he could film somewhere exotic with nice restaurants and good hotels, hence the flitting between Rome and Cortina d'Ampezzo in the Italian Alps (precisely why a French detective is investigating an Italian case is, quite rightly, never explained). This is the world in which Clouseau is an interloper: the world of the jet-set, of royalty and the wealthy, of fashion and skis. Ski resorts feature in both Charade and, more centrally, The Pink Panther. They were a marker of the exotic and luxurious in 1963.

(Indeed, most of my image of skiing comes from The Pink Panther. I am not a particularly well coordinated or physically competent man. I have never been skiing nor am I, for the safety of both myself and bystanders, ever likely to start. So all I have is the image of the hotels and chalets of The Pink Panther, of blazing open fires, gorgeous knit-wear, antique painted woodwork and tiger skin rugs.)

Sellers apart, one of the chief joys of The Pink Panther today is its early ‘60s setting, that exclusionary, rarefied, luxurious European world in which hotels in the Italian Alps look like hotels in the Italian Alps, rather than being entirely indistinguishable from hotels in Nicosia or Edinburgh or Berlin. A world the charm of which relies entirely on its being unattainable, unaffordable and lost in time.

Not that it seems that exotic any more. All these things – nice jumpers, international travel, ‘vintage’ furnishings – are widely and easily attainable in the twenty-first century. After all, 1963, the year The Pink Panther was released, was the year sexual intercourse began for Philip Larkin. The year of the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP, the beginnings of a cultural, class and commercial avalanche that would sweep this rareified world away.

The Pink Panther is set in a vanishing milieu, more of the ‘50s than the ‘60s. But its a charming one to visit, even just for an hour and a half, especially if you can see it while drinking beer from steins next to a roaring fire, watching Fran Jeffries sing a sublime bit of Mancini-written Italian language pop.

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Speaking of The Fab Four, you can catch up with what they did next in our piece on 1964, A Hard Day’s Night and Doctor Who:

1. Mind you, although they are graphically thrilling, Charade’s animations — by Maurice Binder (the man responsible for the gun barrel Bond opening) — are not in the same league as the DePatie-Freleng animations for The Pink Panther, which were a selling point for the film and eventually spun off into a TV series of their own.