A Shot in the Dark

A chauffeur is found shot dead at the estate of the millionaire Benjamin Ballon. Inspector Clouseau takes the case and insists the maid Maria Gambrelli is innocent, even though she is standing next to every new body. In the end there turn out to be four separate murderers in the house. Blake Edwards directed. It is the second Pink Panther film, out a year after the first. The interesting part is that the story was not written for Clouseau. Edwards was adapting Harry Kurnitz's Broadway play, itself drawn from a French original. When the script was rewritten to bring Clouseau in, Walter Matthau and Sophia Loren left the project. Elke Sommer took the female lead. Two characters who became fixtures of the series appear here for the first time: Herbert Lom's Commissioner Dreyfus and Burt Kwouk's martial-arts-trained manservant Cato. Sellers's exaggerated French accent settled in here too; it was less pronounced in the first film. Critics praised Sellers, one reviewer summarising the film as all variations of falling down. It was a commercial success and Rotten Tomatoes now sits at 94 percent. Who it is for: fans of physical comedy and of Sellers. Who it is not for: anyone who will take the mystery seriously. The solution is deliberately absurd and the film does not pretend otherwise.