The bumbling French policeman Inspector Jacques Clouseau, played by Peter Sellers, was introduced in The Pink Panther (1963). Although he stole the film, the character was not the focus of the story but only a supporting player to the suave jewel thief played by David Niven. It wasn't until the second film featuring Clouseau, A Shot in the Dark (1964), that he moved front and center, and stayed there for 45 years through eleven films and three actors. But for fans of the series, the greatest – and some would say, only -- Clouseau is his originator, Peter Sellers.

A Shot in the Dark is one of only two Inspector Clouseau movies not to have "Pink Panther" in the title (the other is 1968's Inspector Clouseau, in which neither Sellers nor Edwards was involved). That's because A Shot in the Dark was ostensibly based on both a French play, L'Idiote (1960) by Marcel Achard, and an American version by Harry Kurnitz which had opened on Broadway in 1961. The basic story of a maid who is accused of killing her Spanish lover was kept from the play, but not much else. When A Shot in the Dark went into production in late 1963, The Pink Panther was in post-production. Sellers was unhappy with the script for A Shot in the Dark and his character, so United Artists brought in his Pink Panther director, Blake Edwards. It was Edwards who had the brainstorm of putting Inspector Clouseau into the mix. He and William Peter Blatty (who would later write a novel that was made into the 1973 blockbuster The Exorcist) threw out the script and wrote a new one tailoring it to Sellers' talents. A Shot in the Dark opened just three months after The Pink Panther premiered.

The relationship between the famously neurotic, perfectionist Sellers and his director was tense. They battled constantly for supremacy. Sellers biographer Alexander Walker quotes an unnamed "friend of both men," who said that their differences "led at times to violent scenes of recrimination, and one suspected each of going out of his way to annoy the other. Blake needled Peter by his emphasis on 'A Blake Edwards Production,' and Peter persuaded himself it should be 'A Peter Sellers Film.'" Each vowed he would never work with the other again, but they made four more films together, three of them Pink Panther movies. For many fans of Sellers' Clouseau, A Shot in the Dark, made while Sellers and Edwards were still inventing and exploring the character, is the best of them.

Critics loved A Shot in the Dark and Sellers' comic inventiveness. "Blake Edwards and William Peter Blatty have fashioned an out-and-out farce that puts no tax at all on the mentality but just plunges from gag to gag," wrote Bosley Crowther in the New York Times. "And they have got Mr. Sellers to plunge with it in the joyously free and facile way that he has so carefully developed as his own special comedy technique....It is mad, but the wonderful dexterity and the air of perpetually buttressed dignity with which Mr. Sellers plays his role make what would quickly be monotonous enjoyable to the end." Time magazine agreed. "Even though the inspector occasionally palls...most customers will have reinforced a general conviction and a popular hope: that Peter Sellers is one of the funniest men alive and that the dear fellow will please get well quick." Sellers had suffered a near-fatal heart attack soon after completing A Shot in the Dark. It would be the first of several attacks, one of which ultimately killed him in 1980. At the time of his death, Sellers was 54 years old, and he and Edwards were preparing another Clouseau film, The Romance of the Pink Panther.

Producer: Blake Edwards
Director: Blake Edwards
Screenplay: Blake Edwards, William Peter Blatty, based on the play L'Idiot by Marcel Achard & Harry Kurnitz
Cinematography: Christopher Challis
Production Design: Michael Stringer
Music: Henry Mancini
Film Editing: Bert Bates, Ralph E. Winters
Cast: Peter Sellers (Jacques Clouseau), Elke Sommer (Maria Gambrelli), George Sanders (Benjamin Ballon), Herbert Lom (Charles Dreyfus), Tracy Reed (Dominique Ballon).
C-103m. Letterboxed. Closed Captioning.

by Margarita Landazuri