Sadly for Steve Martin, the Pink Panther is just one of those jokes that gets lost in translation
It was a normal weekday night at a central London multiplex. There we all were, watching the trailers before the main feature. All at once, Henry Mancini's evergreen theme tune started up, slinky, immortal, immutable. Then the famous opening credits, the skinny Pink Panther waving his pink tail. A re-release of The Pink Panther? Just as we all started marching off down memory lane, we were brought up short. Who was that wearing the gendarme cap? Steve Martin?
Yes, pop pickers. Steve Martin is about to hit your screens in a remake of The Pink Panther, confusingly entitled The Pink Panther. And not as some distant Clouseau cousin, but as Clouseau himself. Rather like a Gallic Doctor Who. Yes, we are now all supposed to believe that, two decades after the last Pink Panther film was made, Martin, he of the cheesy franchised grin and agonised faux-confused shrug, can step into Clouseau's boots without anyone really noticing.
By all accounts, the handover must have involved several dozen tortuous rewrites. Beady-eyed fans will have noticed that Martin was actually announced as heir to Peter Sellers's bumbling French inspector about three years ago. Since when, silence. Or, as Martin might say, "Seeelaance!" Oh yes, there's a giant "comic" French accent going on here, as well as a silly French car and various antics within close reach of la Tour Eiffel.
Martin has said that taking over the role is rather like playing Hamlet. I'm not so sure. As Blake Edwards, director of the original Pink Panther series, discovered to his cost, it was rather tricky trying to resurrect the idea when Sellers was pushing up the daisies.
Apart from Sellers's pratfalls and subtle comic brilliance, the Clouseau joke rested on having an English comedian taking it out of the French. In some subliminal manner, casting an English fool acting a French fool in a British picture played upon multiple layers of suspicion, grudging respect and animosity which have been building up since Agincourt. To put it simply, it doesn't really work letting the Americans in on the Hundred Years War. Probably the only person who could have got away with it might have been Kevin Kline, who excels at cod nationalities. But Kline wasn't available for Clouseau - because here he is, popping up on the other side of the desk in Herbert Lom's role as the hapless Chief Inspector Dreyfus.
One Canadian critic who attended the North American premiere and headlined his review "Pink stinks" said that Kline had been "chewed up and spat out" by the film - some achievement, given his stature as an actor.
To make matters even more confusing, the movie makes a weird, authentically Gallic gesture by casting Jean Reno as Clouseau's sidekick. Except there weren't any real French actors in the original. That was part of the joke. Also, Burt Kwouk was deliberately rubbish at martial arts, whereas Reno has played rather convincingly nasty gangsters in the past.
And just when you thought it was safe to damn the whole enterprise, Beyonce Knowles, that well-known comic actress, arrived as the love interest. So we have a trio of Hollywood names plus a former Destiny's Child, all trying to capture the Pink Panther's sly, urbane comedy. The Pink Panther opens here on 17 March, but frankly I think I'd rather see Steve Martin on the battlements of Elsinore.
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