Reviews & Ratings for
The Pink Panther More at IMDbPro »

off the center, 18 February 2011
Author: ruiresende84 (ruiresende84@gmail.com) from Porto, Portugal

There are so many film personalities involved in this film that today carry a great dose of nostalgia that this film is worth watching on that account alone. That is if you can fully take that scent of other day's class that exhales from these people. Capucine, Claudia Cardinale, even the now extinct breath to which Niven belonged. Blake Edwards, who recently passed away, and of course Peter Sellers, one of the most genuinely funny people on screen ever. Add that to the 60', itself a channel of western contemporary nostalgia, and the panther, when it was born. It's heavy, probably as much as watching Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant in this same year's Charade. If you inspire the scents of those days, and let yourself be taken away by how you imagine it might have been, this will shine.

The film is actually incredibly fresh as a comedy. Not because any of this is still remotely the standard for comic acting these days. It is not. The pace is slow, the thing drags compared to what makes general masses laugh these days; we know that comedy is, among all genres, the one that gets out dated quicker. This is outdated, but it works from where it stands.

But something awkward and quirky kills in great part this experience. The film is off centered today, and i suppose it became off centered as soon as it came out. That's because this was engineered to have Niven as the star, and Cardinale as the exotic sex symbol. She even plays a queen from an exotic far away country. Capucine and Sellers were to be equivalent asteroids surrounding the main stars. But Sellers shuffles the things here, and unbalances this apparently well built universe. That's because he is the most shiny star of this firmament. Apparently his role was to be acted by Ustinov, but Sellers ended up doing it and we all know the rest, and the much we gained with it. He is a great performer, because he somehow performs all his gimmicks without overtly appearing to be acting funny. And his timing is usually perfect.

So, the awkwardness here is that we have a brilliant performer stealing the film from the true robbers (he even goes to jail instead of them at the end). The great thing is that we had Sellers.

My opinion: 3/5

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