LinkBack URL
About LinkBacks
Donator
The Pink Panther Strikes Again
The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976)
At a psychiatric hospital, former Chief Inspector Charles Dreyfus (Herbert Lom) is largely recovered from the murderous insanity that saw him repeatedly attempt to kill the thorn in his side, Inspector Jacques Clouseau. He is about to be released but Clouseau (Peter Sellers), who is now Chief Inspector and has arrived to speak on Dreyfus's behalf, comes to visit and his clumsiness and proneness to accidents drive Dreyfus insane again.
A Shot in the Dark is a better movie but The Pink Panther Strikes Again is the high water mark of the Pink Panther series. Most movie series' throw all inhibition out the window at one point or another and that is the case here. The movie is unrestrained folly with as much style as a hammer over the head. But it's so well done that the movie keeps it's pace of intense idiocy throughout with a slow storm of truly funny bits.
The Pink Panther Strikes Again was rushed into production owing to the success of The Return of the Pink Panther. Blake Edwards had used one of two scripts that he and Frank Waldman had written for a proposed "Pink Panther" TV series as the basis for that film, and he used the other as the starting point for Strikes Again. As a result, it is the only Pink Panther movie which has a storyline that explicitly follows on from the previous film.
The film was in production from December 1975 to September 1976, with filming taking place from February to June 1976. The relationship between Sellers and Blake Edwards, never very good, had seriously deteriorated by the time Strikes Again was filmed. Sellers was physically in bad shape, and Edwards says of the actor's mental state: "If you went to an asylum and you described the first inmate you saw, that's what Peter had become. He was certifiable." The original cut of the film ran for 124 minutes, but it was trimmed down to 103 minutes for theatrical release. Some of the footage was later used in Trail of the Pink Panther. Strikes Again was marketed with the tagline Why are the world's chief assassins after Inspector Clouseau? Why not? Everybody else is. Like its predecessor and subsequent sequel, the film was considered a box office success.
The video is not my encode, but I've added the 5.1 audio from an original DVD. The source is HDNET with the logo only visable every now again.
Reply With Quote
Bookmarks