SummaryInspector Clouseau mysteriously disappears and a journalist attempts to uncover the mystery. New scenes are interspersed with old footage of Peter Sellers from the previous films.
Directed By:Blake Edwards
Written By:Blake Edwards, Frank Waldman, Tom Waldman, Geoffrey Edwards
Trail of the Pink Panther
Metascore
Mixed or Average
43
User score
Mixed or Average
4.4
My Score
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Top Cast
Metascore
Mixed or Average
43
25% Positive
2 Reviews
2 Reviews
25% Mixed
2 Reviews
2 Reviews
50% Negative
4 Reviews
4 Reviews
75
Though even Blake Edwards, the director behind the Panthers, could not make the connective material in this film work well, there is so much joy in the vintage Sellers that Trail of the Pink Panther rates as one of the funniest films of this year. Sellers' outtakes are funnier than most of the new material on film today. We shall not see the like of him again soon. [21 Dec 1982, p.C7]
70
The Trail of the Pink Panther is less a conventional comedy than an uproarious retrospective devoted to the particular achievements of the Edwards-Sellers collaboration. Some of the routines seem totally new to me, and others are familiar, but either way, most of them are huge fun, and a couple approach greatness.
50
The plot creaks along reasonably effectively and Sellers' solo sequences - the disguises, the pratfalls and the speech mannerisms - are familiar, but fun. [18 Dec 1982]
37
Recommended only to moviegoers so indiscriminately fond of the Panther series and starved for belly laughs that they consider it a privilege to watch director Blake Edwards sort through his old footage and sweep up after himself. If your indulgence is less than open-ended, this lame attempt to scrape a "new" feature out of a filmmaking backlog is likely to seem more deplorable than diverting. [18 Dec 1982, p.C4]
30
A patchwork of out-takes, reprised clips and new connective footage, Trail of the Pink Panther is a thin, peculiar picture unsupported by the number of laughs one is accustomed to in this series. Stitched together after Peter Sellers' death, this is by a long way the slightest of the six Inspector Clouseau efforts.
20
A sad spectacle: it feels like an advertisement, but what is left to sell? [27 Dec 1982, p.62]
20
While the master is at work, there are laughs galore, but the film nonetheless constitutes cheap exploitation of the memory of a man who convulsed audiences for years.
User score
Mixed or Average
4.4
40% Positive
2 Ratings
2 Ratings
0% Mixed
0 Ratings
0 Ratings
60% Negative
3 Ratings
3 Ratings
Jun 7, 2023
2
For some reason my full review is not uploading, so here is a condensed version: Great first half (a little random, but funny enough to carry the movie). Boring, frustrating, and incoherent second half ruins the film. Was going to give a 4 but given how angry I felt at the end of the movie, I couldn’t. Hopefully my full review decides to cooperate soon, but until then, this is the gist of my thoughts.
Jun 4, 2022
0
What is this?? Let's face it: with the death of Peter Sellers, the Pink Panther franchise is dead, or at least that's how it should have been. There are certain films and characters that are so associated with the actors that they bring them to life that any attempt to continue after their death sounds almost insulting. And that's exactly what happened here. The film is so bad, so negative in its essence, that it deserves little consideration and attention: the plot is extraordinarily confusing, and it was designed to try to articulate in the best way the archive scenes used, where Sellers appears, in a performance almost beyond the grave. , through deleted scenes from previous films, which were reused here and mixed with new scenes, filmed on purpose. Herbert Lom and David Niven do everything they can, but I think even they didn't believe in the project, because the interpretive level is downright bad. On a technical level, it's a poor film: the cinematography limps a lot, can't hide or disguise the file cuts, the colors are washed out and the film looks older than it turns out to be. The jokes often don't work, the film's pacing is exaggeratedly slow, and it stretches the plot excessively. Mancini's music is the only technical element that escapes being a total disaster.
