Pink Panther 50th Anniversary

The Return of the Pink Panther
Blake Edwards, UK, 1975, 35mm, 113m
A decade after the first two installments of the Pink Panther series, Peter Sellers and Blake Edwards team up again, scaling new heights of comic mayhem and mangled English dialogue at the hands of the incompetent Inspector Clouseau. When the Pink Panther diamond is stolen once again, Clouseau is dispatched by his long-suffering boss Dreyfus (Herbert Lom) to Nice and then Switzerland to investigate the prime suspect, suave super thief Sir Charles Litton (Christopher Plummer)—who, now happily married and retired from his life of crime, sets out to clear his name by tracking down the real thief. Classic slapstick setpieces abound as Sellers pulls out all the stops in this lavish jet-setting comedy knockout.

Followed by:

The Pink Panther Strikes Again
Blake Edwards, UK, 1976, 35mm, 103m
Peter Sellers’s comic genius is on full display yet again in the fifth installment of the Pink Panther series, but the great Herbert Lom is not far behind, with his twitching, psychotic Dreyfus, now transformed into a James Bond–style supervillain, taking a central role. Driven insane by the bungling detective and confined to a padded cell at the end of The Return of the Pink Panther, Dreyfus escapes, recruits an army of crooks, and creates an international criminal network dedicated to the extermination of his nemesis. Meanwhile, Clouseau assists Scotland Yard on the case of a kidnapped scientist, who has fallen into the clutches of Dreyfus, for whom he is forced to build a Doomsday Machine to threaten the world unless Clouseau is eliminated. The supporting cast includes the great British comic actors Colin Blakely and Leonard Rossiter, Burt Kwouk as Clouseau’s manservant Kato—plus an uncredited Omar Sharif as an Egyptian assassin!