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DREYFUS: A mistake?! In a nudist camp?! Idiot! Nincompoop! Lunatic!

By the end of the film Dreyfus is on the ground, dementedly biting Clouseau’s ankles. It is the “lunatic” Clouseau who survives unscathed.

Clouseau’s improbable durability also reveals itself when, in the dim light of Clouseau’s apartment, the door handle turns. An Asian man enters, dressed all in black. He sneaks into Clouseau’s bedroom and, with a piercing shriek, leaps upon the supine detective and begins to strangle him. A desperate fight ensues until the phone rings. The intruder answers it: “Inspector Clouseau’s residence.”

The job of Clouseau’s valet, Cato, includes karate attacks sprung on his boss without warning, the nominal goal being to keep Clouseau’s barely functioning physical coordination from collapsing entirely. Burt Kwouk was the nimble young actor Edwards cast in the role. “Cato is a physically very agile human being,” Kwouk says today. “In those days, so was Burt Kwouk.” Asked about the development of what was to become a recurring character, Kwouk cuts right through it: “Cato did what Clouseau told him. And Burt Kwouk did what Blake Edwards told him.”

Kwouk takes a similarly clear-eyed perspective toward Peter: “Complex people are very difficult to understand. That’s about the size of it, really.” He continues: “Hardly anybody has the same perception of Peter Sellers; hardly any of us saw every facet of him. Possibly only his mother ever saw that. I mean, there’s the view that there was no Peter Sellers—there was just all those characters—[but] that’s just a facile way of putting it.” Kwouk is onto something. Some sociologists consider the self to be relatively stable; postmodernists see it not as it at all, but them—provisional, relational selves dependent on circumstance and changeable over time. Sellers was ahead of the curve on this; postmodern theory is a late twentieth-century construct. As Kwouk puts it, “Like everybody, we present different faces to different people. People in different areas see different angles, different sides of us, and therefore have different perceptions of us. In Peter’s case it was exaggerated.

“He was very complex— more complex than most people,” Kwouk concludes. “This is part of the fascination with the man—twenty years after his death. Very few actors are still interesting twenty years after they die. Most of them aren’t interesting while they’re alive.”

A Shot in the Dark builds to a crucial interrogation scene in which, in radical violation of detective genre convention, reason loses. Chaos reigns, and language slips away. Clouseau mentions to Ballon the fact that his fingerprints have been found inside a closet:

BALLON: Why not? It’s my house. I’ve often been in that closet.

CLOUSEAU: For what reason?

BALLON: The last time was moths.

CLOUSEAU: Meuths?

BALLON: Moths.

CLOUSEAU: Yes, meuths.

It’s infectious. Ballon can’t help but reply: “Maria was complaining of meuths,” after which he winces, perplexed.

Blake Edwards later recalled the difficulty of shooting that scene in particular: “One person would start laughing, then someone else. Sellers was the worst. Finally, I put some money in the center of the room and said, ‘I don’t care who it is that breaks up, they have to match the pot.’ I’ll always remember this because George Sanders was in the scene, and he’s someone who usually just did his role and went to sleep. He didn’t get actively involved. But when Sellers started using these words—a ‘meuth’ in the closet, a ‘beump’ on the head—Sanders fell down and wept like a cocker spaniel.”

But all was not mirth. By the end of the shoot, Edwards and Sellers had stopped speaking. Their communication consisted of little notes slipped underneath each other’s door. Each man was experienced; each knew comedy; each had precise ideas; each was neurotic and disturbed. After all, Edwards’s nickname is “Blackie”—not a diminutive of Blake, but a reference to one of his most frequent moods. In retrospect, it seems inevitable that because Sellers and Edwards shared