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| A Shot In The Dark |
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  (7/10)
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Runtime: 102 |
| Public Rating: 9.50 (8 votes) |
Director: Blake Edwards |
MPAA Rating:  |
| Genre: Comedy |
Year: 1964 |
| Writer(s): William Peter Blatty, Blake Edwards |
| Distributor: 1 |
| Reviewed by: Vadim Rizov |
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The first Inspector Clouseau movie (The Pink Panther) had a great deal of footage involving David Niven and Claudia Cardinale, and not enough with Peter Sellers. And it felt, the marvelous Sellers notwithstanding, like a normal, mid-60s comedy. The second Inspector Clouseau movie, A Shot In The Dark, is something entirely different: if it weren't for Peter Sellers, you might not be able to tell that this is a comedy. Blake Edwards plays this movie totally straight; his shots are mainly unmoving, and the environment is oddly charged: Antonioni by way of Buster Keaton. It sounds pretentoius, but ennui is the right word here. And through it all moves Sellers, a great actor and comedian single-handedly making this movie the uprorious work it is.
Clouseau is a notoriously bad policeman, hated and feared by commanding officer Dreyfus (Herbert Lom, the other series regular). The great mystery of why Dreyfus never fires Clouseau is destined to always go unanswered. Instead, Dreyfus is urged by higher powers to investigate a potentially scandalous murder in a rich family (headed by George Sanders, who's given very little to do besides react to Sellers). The murder, incidentally, is depicted, for the most part, in one very long tracking crane shot, showy but cool all the same (though not nearly as effective as Jean Renoir's much tauter shot in The Crime Of Monsieur Lange). Clouseau stumbles through a series of escapades and interviews which do nothing for evidence, but allow Sellers a wide range.
A typical scene works like this. We're watching an average scene from any policier movie. Suddenly, Clouseau gets up and starts moving around. Disaster strikes. He continues, oblivious to the carnage. The people around him, though disturbed, don't actually curb his movement. This continues until it's time for the next scene. What I'm trying to convey is that, although there are many laughs, this doesn't really feel like a comedy: even the music is serious.
Towards the end, Edwards goes in for black comedy, and finishes off with an audacious, very effective solution to the mystery which has been ignored for so long. It's his commentary, I guess, on why he thinks detective movies are stupid. In the process he kills off something like 17 people. And through it all moves the hilarious Sellers. Watch this with friends or an audience; otherwise, the humor might slip by you, and then you'd be really bored.
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