• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Panther lore abounds. Jacques Clouseau’s name is said to have been inspired by the director Henri Georges Clouzot, his demeanor by the maladroit M. Hulot in Jacques Tati’s comedies. But there’s also the story of Peter, on the airplane to Rome, fishing a book of matches out of his pocket and instantly basing the comportment of his new character on the hero depicted thereon—the mustachioed Capt. Matthew Webb, who, in 1875, had become the first man to swim the English Channel. It makes a good anecdote, but it’s not especially convincing, since Peter had been a sucker for a fake mustache since he was a teenager in Ilfracombe.

As for the accent, despite Peter’s having done Frenchmen at least since 1945, Blake Edwards declares that it was really his invention: “I ran into a French concierge who talked liked this. And he did it for me. And I said, ‘We’ve gotta do it.’ ”

A better genesis story comes from Max Geldray, who remains convinced that Peter, on the suggestion of Michael Bentine, based Inspector Jacques Clouseau on one of Princess Margaret’s hairdressers.

Shooting on The Pink Panther commenced on Monday, November 12, 1962, and in a certain sense it continued sporadically for the next sixteen years. And of course it was Sellers rather than Niven who emerged upon the film’s release as the key to its charm and popularity. Peter used to claim, not without a certain accuracy, that Clouseau became such a hero because of the character’s bedrock dignity in the face of his own buffoonishness. He was specifically reminded of his own teenage years and the loss of his virginity:

“When I was making The Pink Panther and playing the accident-prone Inspector Clouseau for the first time, I remembered the embarrassment I’d suffered struggling out of my nightwear so that I could get on with satisfying my barely containable passion. It made a good gag and consolidated the conviction I had about Clouseau that, in all circumstances, whatever boob he’d made, the man must keep his dignity—which gave him a certain pathetic charm that the girls found seductive. It all went back to the frustrations I suffered as a result of a lack of priorities in love-making.” Still, one must never forget that Clouseau is first and foremost a moron, and that audiences all over the globe love to laugh at anyone so fiercely idiotic.

Peter took to the role, but then he usually took to the roles he played to an alarming extent. While filming a Pink Panther scene on location, an onlooker accosted him. “Aren’t you Peter Sellers?” the man asked, to which Peter replied, “Not today.”

The Pink Panther’s plot, like those of The Goon Show, is more or less irrelevant. It concerns a gentleman thief (Niven), whose partner in love and crime (Capucine) happens to be the wife of a hapless Parisian detective (Sellers). A fine gem goes missing in Rome. It belongs to Princess Darla (Claudia Cardinale). She wants it back. The gentleman thief’s playboy nephew (Robert Wagner) romances the inspector’s wife as well. Everyone goes to Cortina.

What makes The Pink Panther work is Edwards’s comic style and tone, which is given its most acute embodiment by Peter. Like Spike Milligan, Edwards finds comedy to be profoundly painful, and Peter generally agreed. Edwards had worked with Leo McCarey early in his career, and he credits McCarey—the director of such comedies as Ruggles of Red Gap (1935) and The Awful Truth (1937)—for teaching him the essential truth that humor can hurt. McCarey had a knack for extending tension-provoking comedy routines way past the audience’s initial discomfort. “He called it ‘breaking the pain barrier,’ ” Edwards recalls. Peter Sellers’s Inspector Jacques Clouseau may be the pain barrier’s apotheosis.

At the same time, Peter’s performance in The Pink Panther is remarkably restrained. His accent is pronounced but not asinine, his physical comedy likewise. That would come later.

• • •

The Mirisch Company, in association with United Artists, didn’t open The Pink Panther until February and March 1964 (in Britain and the United States, respectively),