See Naples and Die

GIALLO NAPOLETANA isn’t a giallo in the usual, Dario Argento sense, being more interested in detective mystery than drawn-out setpiece assassinations — all of the murders are committed by defenestration and seen from outside, so they’re unusually brief. It’s also as much of a comedy as a thriller, with Marcello Mastroianni as a humble mandolinist, legs disabled by polio, who has to contend with his gambling-addict father, played by popular Italian comic Peppino de Felippo (like many comedians from Italy, very much a local/acquired taste), before getting embroiled with gangsters, the police, and a serial killer.

I guessed during the movie that it might be adapted from a book, but it isn’t: it does however have a separate credit for story, which ties in which the strange disconnect I was feeling as I watched: the tone is just OFF. Mastroianni is playing a low-status loser, like Jim Rockford, pushed around by all the other characters, so we’re sympathetic, but the movie seems to want us to laugh AT him, or at his Job-like travails. Mastroianni does his best with a typically spirited turn, topped off with a ludicrous hairstyle.

There’s also tacky jokes about the insane asylum where some of the action takes us, though this wasn’t as bad as I feared, and then the story turns out to have an unexpected Holocaust connection, which jars so badly with the would-be jaunty manner of the movie that I would probably have bailed on it in disgust if it wasn’t virtually over by that point.

On paper, the best joke may be the way everybody keeps falling from windows/high places, but this plays out in a slightly weary way. The very last moments before the final freeze-frame are laugh-out-loud funny, which is saying something because by then we were feeling pretty hostile to the movie. one the whole, a serious giallo from this director — Sergio Corbucci of DJANGO and THE BIG SILENCE fame — would have been a more attractive proposition.

This is a shame because the movie looks quite nice, despite it being almost the eighties, and its twisty narrative unfolds in a genuinely intriguing way — you have to find out what happens next, or Fiona and I did. Plus you get Ornella Muti, Michel Piccoli, and Capucine (but the movie wastes her beauty and comic talent).

So, only occasionally funny, not a proper giallo, likely to leave a bad taste in your mouth… but perhaps worth seeing as a lesson in slick mystery plotting. And also it’s a Christmas movie! Watch it in a month and feel bad.

Posthumous Panthers #2: Curse of The Curse of the Pink Panther

“Ladies and gentlemen, tonight the role of Inspector Clouseau will be played by an empty coat. Called Ted Wass.”

My purpose is not to claim that there is a curse on THE CURSE OF THE PINK PANTHER, as there is supposedly on SUPERMAN and THE EXORCIST and PETER’S FRIENDS – though quite a few of the principals involved have suffered mishaps and tragedies which come to mind dispiritingly as one watches. But no, my intention is to demonstrate that the film is itself the embodiment of a curse, visited upon its director and transmitted by him to all who have the misfortune to watch.

(The Curse Of PETER’S FRIENDS — the most dreaded of all showbiz curses — states that each principal actor in Kenneth Branagh’s 1992 country-house dramedy must direct a superhero movie derived from Norse mythology. It has only just begin to come true. The waiting is the worst part.)

The later PINK PANTHER films – and by “later” I have to mean pretty well anything after A SHOT IN THE DARK – are more compelling as psychopathology than as cinema, dark portraits of a talented filmmaker somehow compelled to revisit what was far from his favourite creation, working with a difficult, tormenting collaborator (Peter Sellers) again and again, and then repeating the experience after his star’s death as if attempting some inconceivable combination of exorcism and resurrection.

After THE TRAIL OF THE PINK PANTHER, in which Joanna Lumley, sporting a frankly unacceptable French accent, roved around the world dropping in on guest stars from previous episodes in order to “motivate” a series of flashbacks and outtakes from those same episodes, it seems unlikelythat the world was crying out for another instalment in the Clouseau necrology, but Blake Edwards goes to the well once more and duly fills his bucket with sand. Sand played by Ted Wass.

It’s hard to assess Wass as a Sellers replacement, other than to say that he’s obviously no replacement. He has, it seems, a certain gift for physical comedy, and is a good bit more athletic than Sellers ever was, so that he requires less stunt doubling. He seems affable enough. But the gags are almost as weak as the plot (Wass, as Detective Clifton Sleigh, has to hunt the missing Clouseau, a blind alley of a comedy narrative idea unless the film’s going to end up at Sellers’ grave) so we get little sense as to his abilities. The script makes him a kind of bumbling Clark Kent nice guy, complete with glasses, which is a good deal less interesting as a concept than Clouseau’s mixture of arrogance, bigotry, intransigence, self-delusion and gnawing self-awareness – Sellers insisted that Clouseau deep down knows he’s an idiot, but must keep up this frantic pretence of competence, which is what makes him a grand figure. Sleigh is a nice guy and a failure and he knows all of this. If we feel a little sympathy for him and want him to make good, that’s fine, but there’s no exciting tension to our relationship.

But back to the psych ward stuff. The cheaply executed, poorly designed and interminable opening titles provide a clue to the Edwards mindset, as the Panther gets chained at the ankle to a cartoon Ted Wass which gets spat out of a computer. The two hobble off together, chained for life like the Hilton sisters. Since Edwards had the original Panther character based on himself, the sense that he’s been forcibly partnered up with a synthetic ghost is inescapable, as is the synthetic ghost itself. (In the similarly nasty-looking titles in TRAIL, the screenplay credit is literally pissed onto a page by the cartoon Clouseau. A more pointed auto-critique could not be imagined.)

Every sequence in the movie seems to revolve around mannequins, puppets, clones and travesties. Wass visits the Clouseau Museum, which features dummies of Clouseau in his various disguises. In the most outright uncanny moment in a film full of unwelcome chills, a dummy of “oriental assistant” Cato gets replaced by the real Burt Kwouk – but only its reflection in a mirror. The black-eyed masklike mannequin remains in position.

A visit to the boutique of Hubert Balls, manufacturer of disguises, now transformed into the personage of Harvey Korman, provides more masks and body parts, and Wass picks up both an inflatable dog on castors and an “instant companion”, basically a blow-up woman who can be produced upon the instant to serve as cover in tricky situations. Cue deflation gags in which the rubber “Shirley” sags into a likeness of the ageing Dietrich as the air escapes from her, and the film.

To Valencia, where the streets are full of carnival floats, bobbing about rather horrifyingly. And so it goes…

David Niven, of course, is less than he was and somehow more, a dying man with his croak of a voice replaced by impersonator Rich Little (he sounds a little American). After an interminable hour, a romantic interest is procured in the perky form of Lesley Ash (who has suffered horrible mishaps since which can’t even be detailed in this piece less despair take over). Clouseau was always funniest with women, I think, since his attempts to put on a front were apt to collapse with the most embarrassing consequences. Wass barely gets a chance to fluff it, since Ash falls into his arms so readily.

Robert Wagner’s curse is that he’s Robert Wagner, I guess.  Not an actor I like to think of on a yacht, so here he is, on a yacht. Capucine, who showed such physical comedy flair in the original, and in WHAT’S NEW PUSSYCAT, is required to sit in a chair and mouth some exposition. A few years later she would be dead too.

Also included: Herbert Lom repeatedly fracturing his skeleton. Graham Stark demoted to waiter. Michael Elphick (another tragic one: remember how good he was in THE ELEPHANT MAN?) as a Spanish police chief.

Astonishingly, the quest for Clouseau does actually pay off, in what I have to admit is a kind of demented coup de cinema. Spoiler alert, here, because I was actually kind of impressed by the temerity of Edwards solution. Clouseau has undergone plastic surgery so as to spend his latter days in peace with Joanna Lumley, as who among us would not like to do? This plastic surgery has transformed him into Roger Moore. The actual Roger Moore, doing a very terrible Peter Sellers impersonation. Ted Wass meets Roger Moore and you have a scene of two bumblers and one Lumley, which surprisingly doesn’t destroy the entire set. And then it trundles on for ten minutes with some guff about the diamond. You remember, the diamond.

So, Peter Sellers becomes Roger Moore, Graham Stark has become Harvey Korman, David Niven became Christopher Plummer then back to David Niven but with Rich Little’s voice. Claudia Cardinale seems to have become Joanna Lumley, but will be Claudia again in SON OF THE PINK PANTHER.

And poor Ted Wass has become a footnote¹.

¹ This one, in fact.

Posthumous Pink Panthers #1: The Talking Cure?

It’s not exactly Richard Williams, is it?

The beginning of a mini-series looking at the PINK PANTHER movies made by Blake Edwards after the death of star Peter Sellers, one of the more remarkable and misbegotten cycles in cinema history. It’s almost as if Jean-Pierre Leaud had fallen under a bus and Truffaut had resolved to carry on the Antoine Doinel series with a glove puppet; or as if Akira Kurosawa had decided to make a third YOJIMBO film after his catastrophic bust-up with Mifune, and deployed a photographic enlargement on a stick as leading man. Edwards’ various solutions are inventive, in a tortuous sort of way, but what’s really interesting is the psychopathological underpinnings of these ventures — if one discounts the perennial lure of shekels, how, exactly, can we account for such ventures?

First shot of Clouseau: a horribly unconvincing stand-in. The macabre tone is set.

The necrology begins with TRAIL OF THE PINK PANTHER, which crept into empty theatres two years after Sellers’ death. I saw it with my big brother Sean at the Odeon, Clerk Street, I believe. We were almost the only ones there. The original series of films was the most profitable comedy series ever, but the public can, upon occasion, smell desperation the way dogs are said to smell fear. How do you make a PINK PANTHER film when Sellers is dead? Dismissing the idea of hiring Alan Arkin, who had played the role of Clouseau in 1968, Edwards announced that he had a stash of unseen Sellers outtakes which he was going launch upon us, cunningly edited into a wraparound story and with some highlights from earlier entries.

The vehicle that’s supposed to tie all this together is Joanna Lumley as a news reporter investigating Clouseau’s disappearance. But her “narrative” can only get underway once the movie has somehow packaged together all its leftover footage, which it does by way of a few phone calls from Herbert Lom to STRIKES AGAIN cast survivor Colin Blakely (who would shortly follow Sellers into eternity). This also drags in footage of the great Leonard Rossiter, who was wasted in STRIKES AGAIN and was about to perish prematurely in real life. It’s a death-haunted movie.

It’s generally obvious why most of the deleted scenes were deleted in the first place — the main thought they inspire is “Oh, so REVENGE OF THE PINK PANTHER STRIKES BACK could have been even longer?” They’re not exactly terrible, but not exactly very funny. And of course they don’t connect to any real story, being bits painlessly excised from two or three different stories, so they create the vivid impression of a movie in a holding pattern. When the trunk items are exhausted, Edwards moves on to a series of interviews, where Lumley gathers the thoughts of various Clouseau associates. This is a transparent device to justify copious flashbacks: Clouseau fights Cato; Clouseau exchanges exposition with David Niven and Capucine. And of course, the barely-alive David Niven we meet is dubbed by Rich Little, since the actor had lost his voice to the cancer that would shortly carry him off. The dubbing is quite well done — better than the strange, helium voice that’s been dubbed over a Sellers stand-in in long shots. And the sight of Niven grinning and tugging his ear, as he always seemed to do, is poignant.

But what’s actually interesting is what’s said in the interviews. “When you’ve been doing something for twenty years, sometimes you miss it, even if it’s painful,” muses Burt Kwouk’s Cato, a ventrilogist act for Edwards himself. And Herbert Lom as the long-suffering Chief Inspector Dreyfus is REALLY interesting, collapsing in hysterics while trying to give a tribute to his old colleague. It’s an Edwards self-portrait! Watch Edwards talking about Sellers, and you may see his eyelid tremble as he says stuff like, “Peter was a very complicated man. He believed he was in communication with his dead mother. Very complicated.” ANd you can see he’s trying to telepathically communicate to US: “By ‘complicated’ I mean ‘batshit crazy’, okay? But I’m not allowed to say so because of Hollywood’s Standard Operational Bullshit, which governs my every move, and because Sellers is dead and I’m alive, damnit.”

Having churned through supporting players Lom, Kwouk, Robert Loggia and Graham Stark, Edwards then invents one more, Richard Mulligan as Clouseau’s father. In this way he can argue that the film contains original material with (a) Clouseau, I guess. And some of the material is… passable. At least it’s not totally filler, like the Loggia scenes — Edwards has a purpose in mind here, other than padding his running time — he actually wants to get some laughs. And, by more or less plagiarising the business with the old servant in “10”, he comes close. Though Mulligan is no Sellers, he does some decent physical stuff, using his lanky, limber frame to suggest extreme old age.

This interview frames flashbacks to original material showing Clouseau’s youth, so for once Edwards can cut loose and do some slapstick sequences without his dead actor being a problem. But replacing Sellers with a variety of kids and juveniles and stuntmen in no way makes up for the film’s missing centre, and the gags here are really pitiful. It’s looking like Sellers’ contribution to the series was bigger than just performing — when he was on form, he made this stuff funny.

And then, eventually, it ends, with a shit joke about bird shit. A Sellers stand-in, indicating that Clouseau has survived the actor who played him, transforms into an animated Panther in Clouseau drag. Actor/Clouseau and creator/Panther have become one. And Edwards runs a montage of highlights from the series through the end titles, getting more laughs than any of the new footage seen thus far. I miss the way REVENGE ended with shots of Sellers and company corpsing at their own material, though. In the absence of any actual jokes, I think it would have been a bold move for Edwards to have played footage of his actors simply WAITING for their cues, looking puzzled, impatient, dyspeptic or sleepy. Or he could have filmed a script conference and included that, showing himself and fellow culprits Geoffrey Edwards (Executive Son) and Frank & Tom Waldman (Associate Brothers) frowning at sheets of paper.