Cast overview, first billed only: | |||
Peter Sellers | ... | Chief Insp. Jacques Clouseau (archive footage) | |
David Niven | ... | Sir Charles Litton | |
Herbert Lom | ... | Chief Insp. Charles Dreyfus | |
Richard Mulligan | ... | Clouseau's Father | |
Joanna Lumley | ... | Marie Jouvet | |
Capucine | ... | Lady Simone Litton | |
Robert Loggia | ... | Bruno Langois | |
Harvey Korman | ... | Prof. Auguste Balls (archive footage) | |
Burt Kwouk | ... | Cato Fong | |
Graham Stark | ... | Hercule Lajoy | |
Peter Arne | ... | Col. Bufoni | |
André Maranne | ... | Sergeant Francois Duval | |
Ronald Fraser | ... | Dr. Longet | |
Leonard Rossiter | ... | Superintendant Quinlan (archive footage) | |
Marne Maitland | ... | Deputy Commissioner Lasorde |
The Pink Panther diamond is stolen once again from Lugash and the authorities call in Chief Inspector Jacques Clouseau (Peter Sellers) from France. His plane disappears en-route. This time, famous French television reporter Marie Jouvet (Joanna Lumley) sets out to solve the mystery and starts to interview everybody connected to Clouseau. Each interviewee: Charles Dreyfus (Herbert Lom), Sir Charles Litton (David Niven) and Lady Simone Litton (Capucine) (an ex-wife of Clouseau), George Lytton (Robert Wagner), Hercule Lajoy (Graham Stark), and Cato Fong (Burt Kwouk) tell of their run-ins with Clouseau. She is also kidnapped by mobster Bruno Langlois (Robert Loggia), who doesn't want Clouseau found, but she continues and finds Clouseau, Sr. (Richard Mulligan), Clouseau's father. Is Clouseau alive or is he dead? Each interview has not-yet-seen or famous clips from the previous movies (since Peter Sellers died) as Marie continues to get a honest view or impression of the great French ... Written by Lee Horton <Leeh@tcp.co.uk>
Cut 45 minutes of filler material and this would make a nice little hour-long network retrospective and a decent tribute to Peter Sellers. It mostly plays that way anyway, with a "plot" which is simply dropped halfway through, serving only as one of the framing devices to introduce the Sellers clips. The other framing device, a reporter's series of interviews with Clouseau's associates, is so inanely written and obviously "tribute-y" that it's shocking to remember that this was a theatrical feature film.
And that was Blake Edwards' major mistake. Some of the unused footage is amusing, but if it had been up to Sellers' usual hilarious standard, it wouldn't have gone unused. And the flashback sequences are made up of, well, flashbacks--scenes which we already saw in the previous movies. On a TV special, that would have been fine. Here, it just makes you wonder what Edwards could have been thinking.