Verdict
Summary
It’s all in good, silly fun, and the movie has some inspired moments, with Sellers in peak form in the role that defined his career. Blake Edwards wrote and directed, and the film works even better than its more well known predecessor due to its shorter and tighter run time, eliminating a lot of the fluff that made the first film so bloated.
Plot:
A bumbling police inspector refuses to accept that a cute maid is guilty of multiple murders.
Review:
By mistake, Inspector Clouseau (Peter Sellers reprising the role after The Pink Panther) is assigned an important case: A murder! His superior, Dreyfus (Herbert Lom), is furious that Clouseau is on the case because it’s not just one reputation Clouseau is representing, but his too, and with Clouseau’s terrible track record, who knows what calamities will be accrued due to his ineptitudes? When Clouseau arrives at the scene of the crime – a mansion full of snobs and rich jerks – the prime suspect of the murder is the cute blonde maid Maria Gambrelli (Elke Sommer) who has no motive, but was found standing over the man’s body with the murder weapon (a gun) in her hand. Carted off to the station for detainment, Gambrelli insists that she’s being framed, and no one believes her … except Clouseau, who is absolutely smitten with her. With the little authority he has, Clouseau has her released (much to the ire of Dreyfus) so that he can follow her, and when he trails her to a nudist colony for more questioning, she is found (again!) standing over a nude corpse, while holding the murder weapon (garden shears). This does not bode well for Gambrelli, but Clouseau is certain she’s innocent despite the evidence to the contrary, and after releasing her from detainment a second time, he takes her out to dinner (while Dreyfus seethes in rage), leading to several more murders intended for them. With bodies stacking up and the clueless Clouseau on the case, who’s to know if the true killer – or killers – will ever be caught?
The second of eleven official Pink Panther movies, A Shot in the Dark gets a shot in the arm thanks to the addition of the Dreyfus character, played by the increasingly twitchy Lom who goes completely insane by the end (but his sanity is reset with each successive entry in the series), no thanks to Clouseau’s stupidity. It’s all in good, silly fun, and the movie has some inspired moments, with Sellers in peak form in the role that defined his career. Blake Edwards wrote and directed, and the film works even better than its more well known predecessor due to its shorter and tighter run time, eliminating a lot of the fluff that made the first film so bloated. No extended musical numbers or stretches where nothing is happening. Henry Mancini did the score, and there’s an animated sequence at the beginning (as they all have).
Kino Lorber brings A Shot in the Dark to home video in a two-disc 4K Ultra HD / Blu-ray combo pack, and they present the film in a new 4K scan that out sparkles all previous releases. Special features include an audio commentary by a Peter Sellers specialist, a featurette, archival interviews, and bonus trailers, plus a reversible sleeve and a slipcover.
