Blake Edwards' film based on Marcel Achard's stage play L'Idiote may have been a challenge to make with comedic genius Peter Sellers as accident-prone Inspector Jacques Clouseau and Herbert Lom as his long-suffering but equally ineffectual police superior, Charles Dreyfus. But it was worth it.
For an Englishman who was six or seven years of age when the film was released, it's not hard to remember an England that I was growing up in which is strangely mirrored in this Hollywood bedroom farce.
At this time England was as remote from France as the surface of the Mars was to Hollywood. That is why the realistically-shaped cars of the Paris constabulary are painted in correct period livery but captioned 'Police' instead of 'Gendarmerie'. France was just another planet in the solar system from which aliens wearing berets periodically escaped on bicycles across what is affectionately called The English Channel , and straying into Kent before being arrested and deported for selling garlic and onions to an unready local population.
After several charcters in nightwear obvously involved more in bedroom-swapping than wife-swapping set the scene - Clouseau is called in when gunshots ring out at the large country house where the nocturnally active millionnaire Benjamin Ballon (George Sanders) seems as integral a part the the bedroom-swapping as any other supect.
After promptly falling into the ornamental pond, Clouseau arrives to begin his investigation accompanied by his dull-witted but compliant assistant, Hercule LaJoy (Graham Stark).
Bewitched by the beauty of Maria Gambrelli (Elke Sommer) Clouseau reliably gets the wrong end of every stick that comes his way including ignoring an early admission by Maria that she had the smoking gun in her hand when found in a room containing the dead body whose door was locked from the inside; a fact corroborated by eyewitness testimony from Maurice (Martin Benson).
You may fail to grasp the comedic stereotypes who populate this ancient age of film-making, from before even I was born.
Enjoy this great and hilarious film in a dramatic tradition that pre-figuredVaudville in an idiom verging on the early silent films (including an homage to The Keystone Cops as gendarmes cling perilously on the back of the French paddy wagon).
For an Englishman who was six or seven years of age when the film was released, it's not hard to remember an England that I was growing up in which is strangely mirrored in this Hollywood bedroom farce.
At this time England was as remote from France as the surface of the Mars was to Hollywood. That is why the realistically-shaped cars of the Paris constabulary are painted in correct period livery but captioned 'Police' instead of 'Gendarmerie'. France was just another planet in the solar system from which aliens wearing berets periodically escaped on bicycles across what is affectionately called The English Channel , and straying into Kent before being arrested and deported for selling garlic and onions to an unready local population.
After several charcters in nightwear obvously involved more in bedroom-swapping than wife-swapping set the scene - Clouseau is called in when gunshots ring out at the large country house where the nocturnally active millionnaire Benjamin Ballon (George Sanders) seems as integral a part the the bedroom-swapping as any other supect.
After promptly falling into the ornamental pond, Clouseau arrives to begin his investigation accompanied by his dull-witted but compliant assistant, Hercule LaJoy (Graham Stark).
Bewitched by the beauty of Maria Gambrelli (Elke Sommer) Clouseau reliably gets the wrong end of every stick that comes his way including ignoring an early admission by Maria that she had the smoking gun in her hand when found in a room containing the dead body whose door was locked from the inside; a fact corroborated by eyewitness testimony from Maurice (Martin Benson).
You may fail to grasp the comedic stereotypes who populate this ancient age of film-making, from before even I was born.
Enjoy this great and hilarious film in a dramatic tradition that pre-figuredVaudville in an idiom verging on the early silent films (including an homage to The Keystone Cops as gendarmes cling perilously on the back of the French paddy wagon).