Son of the Pink Panther

(Blake Edwards, USA, 1993)

Blake Edwards often seems like a filmmaker caught in a particularly vicious time warp.

Yet, as one of the more devoted Edwardians on the face of the planet, I am perfectly willing to forgive almost all of these sins almost all of the time.

Edwards is a special director; his dramatic and semi-comic films have a poignant wistfulness which speaks depths, while his outright burlesque comedies bring what Leonard Maltin once disparagingly referred to as "pain and destruction gags" to new heights of madness.

The ongoing attempts to keep the extremely successful Pink Panther series alive after the death of star Peter Sellers show off Edwards' inventiveness at its most desperate.  First there was Trail of the Pink Panther (1982) built around Sellers off-cuts, and then Curse of the Pink Panther (1983), showcasing Ted Wass in an Inspector Clouseau-like role.

Ten years later, Edwards hit upon a much better idea: casting the Italian comic genius Roberto Benigni (Johnny Stecchino, 1991) as Clouseau's long-hidden son.

It is a fairly flat film, far from the director's best. The straight scenes of glamorous gangsters undertaking magnificent heists and kidnappings, which take up much of the movie, are pure '60s nostalgia. Most of the actors familiar from previous films in the series (Claudia Cardinale, Herbert Lom, Bert Kwouk) mug and flail about without any decent gag-lines to utter.

But whenever Benigni steps in – stabbing himself inadvertently with surgical instruments or dodging cars and trucks on his police bicycle – the screen lights up with the sheer joy of pain and destruction.

Postscript: Although the Pink Panther franchise franchise was (unwisely) revived in 2006 & 2009 with Steve Martin as Clouseau, Son of the Pink Panther turned out to be Edwards’ final theatrical feature; he died in 2010.

MORE Edwards: The Man Who Loved Women, The Return of the Pink Panther, Blind Date, S.O.B.

© Adrian Martin November 1994