SON OF THE PINK PANTHER
With Roberto Benigni, Claudia Cardinale, Herbert Lom, Debrah Farentino, Robert Davi, Shabana Azmi, and Burt Kwouk.
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To the best of my knowledge, neither of these postmortem productions performed nearly as well commercially as the preceding five features. Yet as Edwards himself has indicated, hopes of striking paydirt again after a string of relative flops persuaded him to reanimate the series.
Benigni’s comic persona (volatile, excitable, polymorphous-perverse, and generally infantile) is quite different from that of Sellers (passive, poker-faced, aphysical), which leads one to reflect on what exactly a Pink Panther comedy is. In Son of the Pink Panther Benigni plays Jacques Gambrelli, a gendarme living with his Italian mother (Claudia Cardinale) in the south of France–a holy fool with a romantic soul and a passion for quoting poetry who proves to be the illegitimate son of Clouseau (though he becomes aware of this only belatedly) and helps to defeat a band of kidnappers who are roughly equivalent to the villains of the earlier pictures. Unfortunately, the mechanics needed to keep the standard kidnapping plot turning take up too much of the movie; most of the gags seem to take place around the edges of this complicated nothingness.
As a onetime fan of early and middle-period Clouseau, I regret the degree to which the public’s identification of Sellers with this part eventually narrowed and limited his later roles–in contrast to his earlier expert mimicry of daft and demonic American and German types in Kubrick’s Lolita and Dr. Strangelove. Even though there were good reasons to admire his last performance, in Being There–as a passive, illiterate TV addict who unwittingly becomes a national hero and even, in the final shot, a Christ figure–one could still lament the fact that playing Clouseau, an ineffectual blob who figured like a bemused sun at the center of a chaotic solar system, led to this culminating part.
