No way Steve Martin's Inspector Clouseau survives against your memories of Peter Sellers'. But that's because you're remembering Sellars in the original Pink Panther and A Shot in the Dark and The Return of the Pink Panther. Watch The Pink Panther Strikes Again and Revenge of the Pink Panther and you'll be shocked and dismayed. Noisy, grotesque, and deliberately obnoxious, as if both Sellers and Clouseau's creator, writer and director Blake Edwards, were in a conspiracy to make the audience hate Clouseau, these are terrible movies built around Sellers half-hearted efforts at parodying himself.
In his first three outings, we couldn't wait for Clouseau to walk into something, trip, fall down stairs, break something, or blow himself up because it was funny and because it was the inevitable result of Clouseau's vanity and over-confidence. The slapstick was character-driven and the joke didn't end with the prat-fall. Clouseau's pain and humiliation continued the joke and set up the punchline, which was that he ignores them. His pride trumped everything, including third-degree burns. Clouseau's wounded but triumphant vanity is the necessary point of every joke at his expense. It reminds us that he is a human being with feelings we're meant to sympathize with. We are meant to like Clouseau.
Sellers described Clouseau as a "sad and serious man."
In The Pink Panther Strikes Again and Revenge of The Pink Panther bad things happen to Clouseau because the bad things themselves are the joke. Clouseau is just a target. There is no pain, no humiliation, because dart boards can't feel. Instead of being a character in a farce, Clouseau is merely a clown in a dunk tank, and Sellers puts about that much effort into playing him. Edwards' writing and direction are even less inspired. I don't know if they were sick of the character---although Sellers was working on the script for another Pink Panther movie when he died in 1980---sick of working together---they weren't speaking during the filming of The Pink Panther Strikes Again---or, in Sellers' case, just sick---his health was failing by the late 1970s when the movies were made---but, like I said, both director and star seemed determined to murder our affection for Clouseau as a substitute for murdering Clouseau himself. If they could have thrown him off Reichenbach Falls they would have. They settled for turning him into an object of contempt.
Up until The Revenge of the Pink Panther, I'd have said that Sellers owned Clouseau the way Chaplin owned the Little Tramp and Buster Keaton and W.C. Fields owned their comic personas. But when I saw Sellers play Clouseau badly, in fact, hardly play him at all, it dawned on me that there was a character there who existed apart from what Peter Sellers did with him. Looking at it that way, what Steve Martin's up to in his two Pink Panther movies is something of a rescue attempt. He's taking Clouseau away from Sellers, and Edwards, and giving him to the public by giving him to other actors, writers, and directors as a character to be reinvented with each new incarnation, like Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan, and James Bond.
Martin's Clouseau is also a "sad and serious" man. But he's kinder than Sellers' Clouseau (From here on all comparisons are to Sellers at his best), softer-hearted, and, while often just as self-absorbed, more easily reminded that other people have feelings and wishes that don't conform to his own. He's every bit as vain, and as with Sellers' Clouseau, the vanity is defensive. But with Sellers it's the case that at a level not very far down from the surface Clouseau knows he's an idiot and a fraud. He boasts and swaggers in the hope of keeping other people from finding out what he suspects and in the process manages to fool himself much better than he fools anyone else. Martin's Clouseau knows that he really is a great detective but he also knows he can be a klutz and a dope and get in his own way on his road to fame and honor. He has to boast and swagger to keep up his own confidence as well as to try to distract his colleagues from his frequent mistakes and keep them focused on what he's doing right. When Sellers' Clouseau is on the case, the joke is that Clouseau is often missing the obvious. When Martin's Clouseau is on the case, the joke is that the supposedly smarter people in the room are missing the clues Clouseau finds because they are too focused on his stumbles and bumbles. In a way, Martin's Clouseau is like an over-eager little kid who can't get the grown-ups to take him seriously, and the harder he tries to make them treat him as a grown-up like them the more child-like he appears in their eyes. Which makes Martin's Clouseau a more kid-friendly character, so it's not surprising that his movies are more kid-friendly movies.
The Pink Panther 2 is not a particularly good movie, even for a kid-friendly movie. It's not even as well done as the first Martin revival. But the problem is not that Martin is no substitute for Sellers. The problem is simply that the script is weak.
The crime---a set of crimes, actually. The quadruple thefts of national treasures from museums in Japan, Italy, England, and France.---just isn't worthy of the great Clouseu's talents. It's a simple smash and grab operation with a suspect who gives the game away right at the beginning. So there's no whodunit, no howdunit, and no compelling why-he-dunnit, and no need for a detective as brilliant as Clouseau to be assigned to the case, let alone for a "Dream Team" of brilliant detectives.
Without a formidable crime to solve, the other three supposedly formidable detectives have nothing to do but stand there and gape in amazement and horror at Clouseau's bumbling. Very quickly they fade into the woodwork. This might have been what would have happened if the great detectives had been played by A-List movie stars, as I suspect was the plan when the story was concocted. I can't think of any other reason for giving Clouseau three rivals when one would have been enough except to give Steve Martin three co-stars of equal box office mojo to boost the film's international appeal. I can imagine the producers getting excited over the prospect of hiring, say, Colin Firth, Jackie Chan, and Antonio Banderas. Alfred Molina, Yuki Matsuaki, and Andy Garcia aren't Fox sitcom rejects, but after the producers realized they were settling for character actors instead of leading men as their stars it should have occurred to them to make the parts characters.
Actually, one character, since all three have essentially the same role, the anti-Clouseau. My choice would have been to let Alfred Molina go it alone. He could have easily handled both the Sherlock Holmesian brilliance and the smooth David Niven-esque charm necessary to stealing Emily Mortimer's affections away from Clouseau. As Clouseau's suave, hot-blooded Italian romantic rival, Andy Garcia looks shockingly seedy and past it.
An aside: It's easy to imagine this conceit played out in Sellers' day, with his Clouseau going up against Roger Moore or Marcello Mastroianni. It's easier and more fun to imagine Sellers playing all four members of the Dream Team.
With no real mystery or suspense to drive it, the plot of the movie is pretty much a string of excuses for a series of stupid Inspector Clouseau tricks. Some of these are funny, some of them are...not.
John Cleese is wasted as Inspector Dreyfus, which is probably for the best. Cleese is too old and frail-looking to play the punching bag that Kevin Kline and Herbert Lom were in the role. Lily Tomlin's scenes seem hammered into the movie, as though she happened to drop by the set during shooting one day and she and Martin hurriedly came up with some bits for her to do for the fun of it. Weirdly, the joke behind their scenes together depends on our remembering what a sexist and racist jerk Sellers' Clouseau could be. But Martin's success at portraying Clouseau depends on keeping the references to Sellers hazy and distant. There's a reason Burt Kwouk's Cato has been replaced by Jean Reno's Ponton and also a reason Clouseau has been given the very nerdy and unglamorous Nicole as a love interest, and it's strange to have Tomlin and Martin going on as if on his way home Clouseau's going to be stopping off at the nudist colony to ogle Elke Sommer and then have to fight off Cato jumping out at him from the refrigerator in his apartment.
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"The Pink Panther 2" directed by Harld Zwart. Starring Steve Martin, Emily Mortimer, John Cleese, Jean Reno, Lily Tomlin, Andy Garcia, Albert Molina, Yuki Matsuzaki, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, and Jeremy Irons. Rated PG.
Lance,
First of all, I'm the cliche "first-time caller, long-time listener" so let me first say that I enjoy your blog greatly. Thanks for the interesting writing you do daily. Now that that's out of the way ...
Interesting piece. Enjoyed it. I have not seen either of the Martin "Pink Panther" films, so please forgive what may be a stupid question/observation.
You write:
"When Sellers' Clouseau is on the case, the joke is that Clouseau is often missing the obvious. When Martin's Clouseau is on the case, the joke is that the supposedly smarter people in the room are missing the clues Clouseau finds because they are too focused on his stumbles and bumbles."
Does that mean that Martin's Clouseau is in the same vein as Peter Falk's "Columbo"? Columbo always was bumbling his way around the over-confident crook and was able to solve the case via his a) being smarter than everyone (police and criminal) and, b) appearing so bumbling as to be not a threat, which usually resulting in the crook giving the game away without meaning to and/or realizing he/she were being played.
Again, I haven't seen the latest "Pink Panther" movies, so this may not be the case. But your quote reminded me somewhat of the old "Columbo" shows, so I thought I'd add my two cents worth.
Posted by: JFT | Tuesday, February 24, 2009 at 08:34 PM
JFT, We love the first time callers here, and thanks for all the kind words.
I hadn't thought about a Clouseau-Columbo connection. I wonder if Peter Falk did. He might have. He might have said, I want the bad guys to think they're dealing with an American Clouseau. Of course, Columbo never fell off the Pope's balcony while he was investigating a case, so there's that. With Columbo, we the audience were in on the joke with Columbo. With Martin's Clouseau we're often put in the position of the other grown-ups gaping in amazement and horror. In both of his Pink Panthers, Martin has Clouseau actually solves the crime or at least makes a major stride in a scene in which he appears to be at his most lunatic and inept, so the joke is on us. I don't think Sellers' Clouseau actually solved any of the crimes in his movies.
Posted by: Lance Mannion | Wednesday, February 25, 2009 at 03:40 PM
Lance,
Sellers admits that he plays Clouseau as a buffoon who has the knack for surviving.
The real-life parallel of Clouseau is George W Bush, someone who stumbles his way up the ladder. Clouseau does "solve" cases, if you consider that he gets credit for the solution that someone else (or even happenstance) provides.
He has to, else why would Dreyfus be so tempted to kill him for hogging all the glory?
Posted by: actor212 | Wednesday, February 25, 2009 at 05:19 PM
Lance,
Well, I wasn't so much talking about Sellers version of Clouseau, who is a total buffoon who stumbles onto the solution through no credit of his own -- although in a sweet an innocent way that made him likeable. I don't see Sellers version as similar to Clouseau at all.
But from what you said, it sounds like Martin's version of Clouseau has a bit of the Columbo persona. The seemingly dim bulb who winds up being smarter than everyone and solving the case in the end.
Now I have to go see one of the new Pink Panther movies, I guess! Ha!
Posted by: JFT | Thursday, February 26, 2009 at 06:17 PM