Movie Log: The Return of the Pink Panther

I'm still introducing my two sons to the great silly movies of yesteryear through our Friday Family Movie Nights, and we hit The Return of the Pink Panther a couple of weeks ago.

From my cursory Internet researches, I deduced that this was the first of the big silly Pink Panther movies (after the first two funny-but-still-trying-to-be-serious-mysteries movies and that oddball one without Sellers), and so the best place to start with two slapstick-loving boys. It proved to be the case, and I expect we'll move on to the next one within the next few weeks.

The plot is generic Pink Panther movie: that title diamond is stolen, the authorities think it was done by the famous cat burglar the Phantom, and so both the actual Phantom (Christopher Plummer) and bumbling Inspector Clouseau (Peter Sellers) investigate the theft in their own way. By this point, Sellers's scenes often had very little to do with the rest of the movie -- at least twice, I assume his script said something like

INT. DAY

Clouseau enters and does something funny with {item}

Luckily, Sellers is funny, often screamingly so. My sons were doubled over a number of times, and went back to watch the best parts through the rest of the weekend. So I count this as a definite success as a funny movie. It's a very loose bag of characters, certainly, but what a comedy needs to do more than anything else is make people laugh, and Return of the Pink Panther delivers that in spades.