Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, August 27, 1993 TAG: 9308270070
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JIM GULLO
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
" 'Ow can they make another Pink Panther movie when that Peter Sellers bloke is dead?"
It's the same question many movie fans have been asking recently. Yet it has been done.
Today, "Son of the Pink Panther," written and directed by Blake Edwards, open in theaters nationwide.
"Son," the eighth installment of the Panther series, is being released 30 years after the original - "The Pink Panther" (1964) - was shot.
It's been more than 10 years since the last two Panther movies fizzled at the box office, and Edwards is hoping to reach back two decades and reclaim the audience that fell in love with the amiably inept Inspector Jacques Clouseau.
With a budget of some $25 million, the latest film is a high-stakes gamble that those same audiences will accept a Clouseau who isn't Sellers.
Like its famous ancestors, "Son of the Pink Panther" loosely follows a caper comedy plot that careens from France and Monte Carlo to the Middle East.
A beautiful Arabian princess is kidnapped and held for ransom on the same day that "tout" France remembers its most famous detective. (In a flashback, we see that the famed Inspector Clouseau was killed by lighting a match in a pig farm cum methane plant.)
When Chief Inspector Dreyfus - played by Herbert Lom, who appeared in six earlier Panther films - asks the Nice police chief for assistance in investigating the kidnapping, he is spitefully given Nice's worst gendarme, Jacques Gambrelli (Roberto Benigni).
As the two survive bombings, car wrecks and assassins, Dreyfus discovers that Gambrelli is Clouseau's illegitimate son, with his father's knack for cracking a case despite himself.
For the first time in years, Dreyfus' eye begins to twitch. Violently.
On an unnaturally chilly early-fall morning I arrive at London's Pinewood Studios to find the following mayhem:
Chief Inspector Dreyfus is lying on a hospital bed, his leg elevated in a hip-length cast. He falls onto the floor to avoid an embrace by Gambrelli-Clouseau Jr., who grabs the traction block-and-tackle, ripping the cast off Dreyfus' leg. Then he frantically tries to replace it - on the wrong leg.
"Cut, and print that one," Edwards yells after the eighth take.
At 70, he is heavyset and gray-haired, but he giggles like a little kid as he watches a video replay of the scene, then jumps up to block the next shot, in which Clouseau Jr. unwittingly knocks the Nice police chief out a window.
Why make another Panther movie?
"I think it's principally greed," Edwards says, laughing, "and some small percentage that I hate to see something that has kind of become an institution languish and die."
Will audiences be able to embrace a new actor in Sellers' shoes?
Edwards gestures down the studio's street to the massive "007" soundstage, where the James Bond series was shot. Over the years the films have featured a lead character who metamorphosed from Sean Connery to Roger Moore to Timothy Dalton.
"The Bond films may or may not go on, but they could," he says. "I'd like to see the Panther go on too."
Edwards hopes that a career-long series of casting disasters will stand him in good stead.
He points out that the role of Clouseau was written for Peter Ustinov, who bowed out literally minutes before "The Pink Panther" began shooting. In a panic, Edwards hired Sellers to play the part.
Remember "10," that 1979 hit in which Dudley Moore, so memorable as a man in the midst of a monumental midlife crisis, discovered Bo Derek? George Segal actually began shooting that role before abruptly leaving the production.
Gerard Depardieu was originally cast to play Clouseau Jr. in "Son of the Pink Panther," but he bailed out to make Ridley Scott's "1492."
Enter Benigni, an Italian comic and European box-office star, who at the moment is holding forth about the delights of English cuisine.
"It's revolting, really disgusting," he announces grandly in his dressing room as lunch is about to be served.
A thin, live wire of a man with a comic shock of hair sticking straight up over a friar's pate, Benigni has been called the Charlie Chaplin of Italian cinema. His movie "Johnny Stecchino," which he wrote, directed and starred in, was a smash in Italy last year.
Benigni's only American films have been two low-budget dramas by Jim Jarmusch: "Down by Law" (1986) and "Night on Earth" (1991), in which he played an off-the-wall cab driver.
In person, Benigni is a fast-moving riot. He speaks with operatic grandness, his words booming through a thick Italian accent that makes him come off as Chico Marx interpreted by Luciano Pavarotti.
English is a recently acquired habit, but I got the feeling that conversation with Benigni in any tongue would be a looping affair of puns, crazy associations and grand statements.
"Blake Edwards, he turmoil me," Benigni begins. "The brain, the head and the body of Blake Edwards is the image of freedom. It is like an electrician to work with Edison."
Benigni's character, Jacques Gambrelli, is a police officer in Nice who discovers that his unknown father was, in fact, the great Inspector Clouseau.
A simple man who loves poetry and his mother, Maria Gambrelli (played by Claudia Cardinale, who appeared in the original Panther movie as Princess Dala), Jacques nevertheless possesses genetic traits of clumsiness and mispronunciation.
"My character is completely different from my father," Benigni says. "But sometimes his blood comes out. I am accident-prone, like the son of Donald Duck."
More seriously, Benigni knows that he has bitten off a huge challenge in reprising the role that Sellers made famous.
In his acting he must walk a fine line between playing the same kinds of scenes as Sellers (knocking police chiefs out of beds and windows, getting attacked by Clouseau's loyal butler Cato and wearing disguises created by master disguise-maker Dr. Balls) without making his character an impersonation.
"If I tried to imitate Peter Sellers I'd be lost," Benigni says.
Nevertheless, the spirit of Sellers' Clouseau hovers over the production. There is even an eerie, full-face mask of Sellers in the makeup room that will be used for dream sequences.
"He was a terribly inventive man," Edwards says of Sellers. "I guess the scenes that I remember most are the ones where I had the best times with him and we laughed the hardest."
The collaboration provided dizzying moments of screen comedy.
"Does your dog bite?" Clouseau asks an innkeeper in "The Pink Panther Strikes Again" (1976).
"No," the man replies.
Clouseau bends over to pet the dog and is viciously attacked.
"I thought you said your dog did not bite," Clouseau says huffily.
"That's not my dog," the man replies smugly.
"The Return of the Pink Panther" (1975) ends with Clouseau dining in a Japanese restaurant.
After having cited an organ-grinder ("Does your minkey have a lah-cense?"), survived a number of murder attempts by his own boss and solved the latest heist of the Pink Panther jewel, Clouseau seems entitled to a quiet dinner.
But as he leans over his soup, the air is rent by a horrible scream.
"Sssaaahhh!" shouts Cato, Clouseau's manservant, who has dressed in kimono and white face to attack his boss.
Together they destroy the place.
Fast forward 17 years. Here is Dreyfus in the hospital bed, with Maria and Jacques Gambrelli and assistant Francois (Dermot Crowley) leaning over him.
"No doubt it was a beum," Gambrelli announces in a thick Italian accent with curious Gallic overtones.
"A what?" Dreyfus asks.
"A bomb," Maria says sweetly.
Dreyfus' eye begins to twitch rapidly. The Panther is back. The New York Times Syndicate
\ Jim Gullo is a London-based free-lance writer.
by CNB