This Coleslaw Archives: Mrak! reviews A Shot in the Dark



Movie Review: A Shot in the Dark (1964)
by Mrak!

Peter Sellers plays Inspector Jacques Clouseau in this first and arguably best sequel to The Pink Panther, although there's plenty to be said about the others. The filmmakers made the likable mistake of not including the words "Pink Panther" in this title, so some people don't even realize this movie exists, which is a shame because it's in this film that the character of Clouseau is the funniest and most fresh.
The movie opens with a fun, gimmicky single-take sequence in which we watch through the windows as a mansion full of privileged deviants skirt from one room to another, narrowly missing each other as they conspire to commit indiscretions of all kinds. The sequence ends, of course, with a shot in the dark. Enter Clouseau (alright!). From the first moment you see him, you can sense how funny this movie is about to be, and all he does is ride in his car to the crime scene and narrow his eyes slyly, as if preparing himself for what he believes will be a battle of wits (though of course he has none).
A murder has been committed by someone in the mansion, and Clouseau spends the movie piecing together a completely nonsense version of events, making wild assumptions that bewilder everybody including his reasonably competent colleagues, all the while tormenting Commissioner Dreyfus (Herbert Lom) with his own epic incompetence and trying to get laid by the sexy, naive young temptress, who, if you look at the evidence, is obviously the murderer.
I'm not sure how many murders take place, but there are quite a few, and by the end of the movie, with nearly everyone a suspect in one murder or another, there is a serious mess of events to clean up. But this movie doesn't even try, which is one of the many things that makes it great. Instead, we get one of the best mystery resolutions ever in which Clouseau's hair-brained plot to catch the murderer(s) goes awry and the film ends in an oddly violent, but very funny and satisfying way.
So much hysterical stuff happens in this film, and most of it, for me, comes from Sellers' superb, casual characterization and his ability to sell the littlest jokes and turn them into belly laughs. The way Clouseau accidentally sucks ink from his pen or can't get rid of his hat... his silly accent that causes him to mispronounce simple words... his militant confidence... and of course his incredible lack of awareness and coordination. Sellers' Clouseau set the bar for all future characters of similar ilk, and he's at his best in A Shot in the Dark.

Grade: A
Entertainment Value: A+