Although completed in 1963, the movie was not in wide release until 1964. It received mixed critical reception, although it did very well at the box office, grossing a then impressive $6 million in the U.S.

The film was selected in 2010 to be preserved in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress.

The Pink Panther was nominated but did not place in the American Film Institute's list of the 100 greatest movies of all time. Henry Mancini's music, however, came in at number 20 on AFI's list of top film scores.

Peter Sellers was nominated for a Golden Globe Award as Best Actor-Musical/Comedy.

Sellers was also nominated for a British Academy Award as Best British Actor.

Maurice Richlin and Blake Edwards were nominated for a Writers Guild of America Award for Best Written American Comedy.

Henry Mancini's score was nominated for an Academy Award. It was also nominated for a Grammy.

In 1988, Mancini's Pink Panther theme was recognized by ASCAP as a Most Performed Feature Film Standard.

In 2001, Mancini's score was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.

Time magazine's review of the film was titled "Has Skis, Needs Life" and cited what it saw as a "pervasive air of desperation." The magazine said, "Some of Sellers's sight gags are funny but not funny enough."

Variety, on the other hand, found the movie "intensely funny" and said Sellers's "razor-sharp timing" was "superlative." The publication's January 15, 1964 review went on to say, "This is film making as a branch of the candy trade, and the pack is so enticing that few will worry about the jerky machinations of the plot. The production crams in so many appealing plusses that the whole luscious affair defies mental probing. And it is delivered with such an impudent, tongue-in-cheek elegance by Blake Edwards that there is no inclination to brood over the occasional lapses. ... When memory of the [other cast members] subsides, Panther will be a vintage record of the farcical Sellers at his peak."

"A so-so comedy." - Cue magazine, March 1964

"Even if Peter Sellers weren't lying in a hospital bed recovering from a heart attack said to have been brought on by prolonged overwork, it would give us the willies to see the amount of labor he does in Blake Edwards's farce. ... Seldom has any comedian seemed to work so persistently and hard at trying to be violently funny with weak material. ... Mr. Edwards's and Maurice Richlin's script is a basically unoriginal and largely witless piece of farce carpentry that has to be pushed and heaved at stoutly in order to keep on the move. Mr. Sellers does his part resolutely and so does Mr. Niven in the role of the charming, seductive phantom who is posing as a British peer. But the women involved are too lazy--or perhaps Mr. Edwards has failed to give them any better direction than he has given them a script. ... But there is one thing about this picture that is clever and joyous, at least. That is a cartooned pink panther that runs through the main titles at the start making mischief with the lettering, insistently getting in the way. He is so blithe and bumptious, so sweet and entirely lovable, that he's awfully hard to follow." - Bosley Crowther, New York Times, April 24, 1964

"Director Blake Edwards is about as funny as the instruction on form 1040, and no matter how hard Sellers falls on his prat, there is little he can do to redeem this wearisome film." - Newsweek

"The Pink Panther is a happy concatenation of fresh dialogue and suave variations on old sight gags. ... And Sellers never fails. ... His superb aplomb despite every conceivable disaster become(s) masterful understatements of materials that most comics have been overplaying since the birth of movies." - Arthur Knight, Saturday Review

"Sir Charles has the basis of being a marvelous send-up of all the classy cads in fiction, but neither the star [Niven] nor the director seems to have quite the energy to do it. ... It's the sight gags that work best, and they all belong to Sellers as the hopelessly inefficient detective." - Penelope Gilliatt, Observer

"Clouseau is a classic comic figure, a silhouette as appropriate to mass affluence and its embarrassments as Tati's Hulot." - Raymond Durgnat, International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers (St. James Press, 1986)

By Rob Nixon