Audient Audit: The Pink Panther

This is the fifth in my 2019 monthly series Audient Audit, where I go back and check whether I actually saw certain films that have made it on to my various lists.

"Dead ant. Dead ant. Dead ant dead ant dead ant dead ant dead annnnt."

That's the punchline to the joke "What did the Pink Panther say when he stepped on an ant?" and it's meant to be sung in the meter and tune of Henry Mancini's famous Pink Panther score. It was a very popular joke when I was in third grade.

And that, my friends, is likely why I have believed all these years that I saw Blake Edwards' 1963 film The Pink Panther.

Having watched the movie in 2019, it strikes me as a very strange property to have achieved the cultural prominence it did. The cultural prominence that allowed it to become a joke among eight-year-olds is why I assumed I'd seen the movie, but that prominence does not seem a very likely outcome for a movie that is more in the style of the May-December romantic comedies that were prevalent at the time than a franchise about an inept detective.

The May is Claudia Cardinale (then 25) and the December is David Niven (then 53), as he's a cat burglar trying to seduce her princess in order to relieve her of the world's largest diamond (which has a flaw that looks like a pink panther, hence the name for a decades-spanning franchise). It put me immediately in mind of Hitchcock's To Catch a Thief, where Cary Grant (then 51) is the cat burglar and Grace Kelly (then 26) is his love interest, though that came eight years earlier so I guess Panther is the pretender in this case.

Sure, there's some inept detective stuff, but the weird thing is that it does not involve very much actual detecting. As Inspector Clouseau, Peter Sellers dons his trademark trenchcoat a couple times, but we see him more often in his pajamas, as much of the comedy related to him seems to revolve around methods of getting his treacherous wife to go to sleep. He's also got an extended bit where his hand is stuck inside a vase. The things we associate most with Clouseau were from later movies, it appears. And it's probably one of those that I might have actually seen some of, though which one, it would be impossible to say. (There were eight films, some of which came after Sellers died, even before the two reboots with Steve Martin.)

It strikes me that there was something going on in the early 1960s where massive franchises were being launched from films that ended up feeling very different from the films that followed them. Just a year earlier saw the release of the first James Bond film, Dr. No, which is quite mild by the standards of the ensuing series, involving comparatively little action. Still, there had to be a germ in these movies that caused so much profitable offspring to blossom. They credit Jaws a dozen years later with the advent of the blockbuster, but things going on in the early 1960s seem to have been paving the way.

Of course, the real reason all of us third graders knew the Pink Panther theme was not this movie, but the fact that they made a Saturday morning cartoon out of the iconic character that appears in the opening credits of Edwards' movie. I'm wondering if this cartoon character itself had more to do with the series taking off even than Sellers.

As for the actual quality of the movie, I must admit I found myself somewhat disoriented within the story in the first 30 minutes, even to the extent that I checked Wikipedia to see if I'd missed something important. (I had.) It eventually rounded out into something for which I bore a small bit of affection, but not as much as I expected. I was kind of surprised at the characterization of Clouseau, who I thought would be a bumbler but maybe not a fool. I found it a bit unsavory that his wife of ten years is cuckolding him to multiple other men, and that the crimes of the cat burglar are ultimately pinned on him. (Oops, spoiler alert.)

June is the next month on the calendar.