Welcome "to Saturday Night at the Movies."
I'm your host, Glenn Holland.
Tonight's movie is "The Pink Panther", co-written and directed by Blake Edwards and released in 1963.
"The Pink Panther" stars David Niven, Peter Sellers, Robert Wagner, Capucine, and Claudia Cardinale.
It also features one of the most famous credit sequences in movie history, featuring an animated Pink Panther and an unforgettable theme by composer Henry Mancini.
The film opens with a brief prologue.
The maharaja of Lugash, a small South Asian nation, presents his young daughter Dala with a fabulous jewel, the Pink Panther, an enormous diamond with an imperfection that looks like the animal that gives it its name.
Years later, a now grown Dala keeps the jewel with her as she travels around Europe.
Since the new military government of Lugash seeks to claim it for the people.
The jewel has also attracted the attention of the Phantom, a gentleman thief and master criminal who has made a fortune pilfering the trinkets of the world's wealthiest jet setters.
The Phantom is in reality Sir Charles Litton, an aging but well-known British playboy who women seemed to find irresistible.
He has followed Princess Dala to the ski resort of Cortina de Pezo with the express purpose of ingratiating himself with her in order to steal the Pink Panther.
Arriving soon afterwards is Sir Charles' American-bred nephew George, who has been living off an allowance from his uncle for years while pretending to attend college with eventual plans to joining the Peace Corps.
In fact, George has been living the life of a wealthy young bachelor in Los Angeles and has now fled to Europe to escape his gambling debts.
Also in Cortina de Pezo was the French detective Inspector Jacques Clouseau and his wife Simone.
Clouseau has been the Phantom's chief adversary for years, chasing him across Europe, from one haunt to the rich to another, but somehow always just failing to catch his man.
This is because his wife Simone is also Sir Charles's mistress.
She keeps him informed about her husband's plans and makes a comfortable living for herself, acting as the Phantom's fence.
But the smitten Clouseau is oblivious and a bungler and his determined efforts to thwart the schemes of Sir Charles, George, Simone, and perhaps Princess Dala herself only add to the chaos surrounding the fabulous Pink Panther.
Blake Edwards was born William Blake Crump in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1922.
His stepfather Jack McEdward, the son of a silent film director, moved the family to Hollywood where Edwards became an actor during the early years of the second World War.
He later said, "I worked with the best directors, Ford, Wyler, Preminger, and learned a lot from them but I wasn't a very cooperative actor.
Maybe even then, I was indicating that I wanted to give, not take direction."
After serving in the Coast Guard during the war, Edwards began directing for television and films, primarily helming comedies, but also directing film noir and dramas.
His best known films before "The Pink Panther" were "Operation Petticoat" in 1959, "Breakfast at Tiffany's" in 1961, and the "Days of Wine and Roses" in 1962.
That same year, Edwards formed a production company with Martin Giro and announced their first production in association with the Mirisch Corporation would be "The Pink Panther" with an original screenplay by Edwards and Maurice Richlin.
David Niven and Robert Wagner were signed early on but several different actresses were considered for the role of Princess Dala, including Audrey Hepburn, Nancy Kwan, and Cyd Charisse.
Initially, Peter Ustinov and Ava Gardner were cast as Inspector Clouseau and his wife Simone but disagreements over Gardner's extravagant prerequisites for accepting the role led to her being replaced by the French model and actress Capucine.
Gardner's departure led Ustinov's wife to urge him to leave the film as well, which he did just his production was scheduled to begin, leaving the movie without an Inspector Clouseau.
Then Edwards said in an interview with the "Los Angeles Times" in January 1964, the happy idea of Peter Sellers came up.
He arrived on a weekend in Rome and we were scheduled to shoot on Monday.
We went over the script together and out of our conference, the entire concept of the character was changed.
Edwards and Sellers shared a love for the slapstick comedy of Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd.
As a result, the French detective, who was originally what Edwards called a straight, sober-sighted, dignified cop, became instead, well, Inspector Clouseau.
Blake Edward's choice of Peter Sellers to play Inspector Jacques Clouseau was a fateful one, not only for the fortunes of "The Pink Panther" but for the subsequent careers of both the director and the actor.
"The Pink Panther" was originally conceived as a sophisticated ensemble heist comedy with a star turn for top bill David Niven who had previously played a gentleman thief in 1939's "Raffles" with Olivia de Havilland.
But as Edwards shot improvised scenes with Peter Sellers, the film focused more and more on Clouseau and slapstick.
"For years I'd been getting bits of what I wanted into films as writer or director," Edwards said, "but I had never had an area which to exploit my ideas to the full.
Then along came Peter, a walking storehouse of madness, a ham with an almost surrealist approach to the insanity of things, and we found an immediate affinity."
Sellers endorsed what Edwards said he had learned from Leo McCarey, who directed Harold Lloyd, Laurel and Hardy, and the Marx Brothers, how to extend tension and comedy scene until the audience became uncomfortable.
What McCarey called breaking the pain barrier.
The movie's new emphasis on Sellers' shenanigans as Clouseau meant the other actors had to step up their game to garner their character's share of the audience's attention.
David Niven, in particular, was unhappy about the attention given to Sellers' Clouseau and what was originally a sophisticated comedy about a charming urbane jewel thief, Sir Charles Litton.
Although he had hoped the film would be the first of a series about Litton, Niven declined to take part in any of the subsequent Panther films starring Sellers.
There were four of these, beginning with "A Shot in the Dark," released only three months after "The Pink Panther."
It was this film that introduced what would become recurring characters of the Clouseau films, including Herbert Lom as Commissioner Dreyfus, Andre Maranne as Clouseau's assistant Francois, and Burt Kwouk as Clouseau's manservant Cato.
It also marked the introduction of Sellers' eccentric French accent, which even other French characters in the film seemed unable to understand.
Sellers then left the series in pursuit of more challenging work, but after some success, his career languished.
Something similar happened to Blake Edwards after the failure of his 1970 romantic comedy spy film "Darling Lili," starring Julie Andrews who had become Edwards' wife in 1969.
Both Edwards and Sellers went back to the series with an appropriately titled "The Return of the Pink Panther" in 1975, followed by "The Pink Panther Strikes" again in 1976 and "The Revenge of The Pink Panther" in 1978.
The plots of the last two film s did not involve the title Diamond but by that time, "The Pink Panther" had come to mean an Inspector Clouseau comedy.
Critic Rob Nixon wrote in 2014 that Sellers returned to his most famous character, which turned out to be both a blessing and a curse for him.
A delight to work with when he was challenged by a role, he became increasingly difficult to handle as Clouseau.
With the worldwide success of the series, it became the one job that sustained him financially but he resented having to portray the same caricature over and over.
Both Sellers and Edwards later found greater success.
Peter Sellers was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar for his 1979 role as Chance the gardener in Hal Ashby's "Being There," a film Gene Siskel called in a review in The Chicago Tribune, "One of those rare films, a work of such electric comedy that you're more likely to watch it in amazement than to break down and laugh."
Blake Edwards had major hits with "10" with Dudley Moore, Julie Andrews and Bo Derek in 1979, and "Victor Victoria" with Julie Andrews, James Garner and Robert Preston in 1982.
Peter Sellers died in 1980 of a heart attack at the age of 54.
Two years later, Blake Edwards made "Trail of The Pink Panther" that included scenes of Sellers cut from "The Pink Panther Strikes again," as well as appearances by David Niven and Capucine.
In 1983, Edwards directed "The Curse of the Pink Panther," starring Ted Wass as a bumbling American detective sergeant attempting to locate the famous diamond.
Like his predecessor, the film was both a critical and commercial failure.
Blake Edwards' final attempt to revive the franchise came in 1993 with "Son of the Pink Panther" starring Roberto Benigni, along with Herbert Lom, Burt Kwouk, and Claudia Cardinale but it too was unsuccessful.
Afterwards, Blake Edwards retired from directing, making this his final film.
Please join us again next time for another "Saturday Night at the Movies."
I'm Glenn Holland.
Good night.
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