ARTS
Cinema
Comic cameos
Kenneth Robinson
The Return of the Pink Panther Director: Blake Edwards. Stars: Peter Sellers, Catherine Schell, Christopher Plummer, Herbert Lom. 'IJ' Leicester Square Theatre (115 mins) Lucky Lady Director: Stanley Donen. Stars: Liza Minelli, Gene Hackman, Burt Reynolds. AA' Coming to Studio One (105 mins) Scoundrel in White Director: Claude Chabrol. Stars: Jean-Paul Belmondo, Mia Farrow, Laura Antonelli. 'AN Studio One (107 mins) I could do without the very last scene in The Return of the Pink Panther. A French policeman is seen writhing in a strait jacket and hacking slogans on the wall of a padded cell With his feet. He has been reduced to this by the Ineptness of Inspector Clouseau. This is a bad ending, not because it is a sad rounding-off to an otherwise funny film. It is bad because it is not convincing and is not meant to be. It is added as an irrelevant joke and it leaves a nasty taste.
The rest of the picture is very funny indeed. I didn't see the first film about the Pink Panther Which is, as everyone must know by now, a rare gem preserved in a museum in an unnamed country. I can't begin to tell you who steals it and who is suspected of stealing it. The plot is ingenious to the point of obscurity. I would have been irritated to find I was grasping only bits of the story, here and there, if Peter Sellers had been less funny. The character he plays, the ndiculous Inspector Clouseau, is a mixture of Chaplin, Tati and Robert Benchley in his inability to cope with everyday machinery and Inanimate objects. He pushes a door bell and When it doesn't stop ringing, pulls out yards and yards of flex, and then cuts the flex so he can get through it into the house. And there is a good sequence where he tries to be a lounge lizard and lounges so nonchalantly that he falls Into the lap of his victim, Catherine Schell. The acting and the direction (by Blake Edwards) of all Sellers' cameos are so well done that the lulls In between, like those in the Marx Brothers' films, almost need to be slightly boring, simply to give us a rest. For the first time for several inonths I Could bring out all the cliches it is ;Usually easy to avoid, about 'ribs aching', rolling in the aisle', and so on. It is that rare thing, a film worth seeing again just to watch one comic performance — a performance that is ecluallY good in wild slapstick and in tiny details, like, for instance, the curious brokenEnglish Sellers has assumed for the role. Very funny in a different way is the picture I ucbed on last week, in my sketchy review of llins of the year. Lucky Lady is an even better nirn, now I look back at it a week later, than it seetned at the time. It has some gorgeous :Prohibition-period sets, which owe more to Art than Nostalgia, and a period plot about runi-running. Again the plot is a trifle complex almost Wodehouseian at times. But it is the Panache of the film that carries it along, rather `hall individual performances. Though Liza
Minelli, Gene Hackman and Burt Reynolds all do well, as we were accustomed to saying on The Croydon Advertiser. Stanley Donen's real touch of inspiration in this mad film is the way he uses light-hearted music as a counterpoint to violence on the screen. This was something I noticed again when I saw a trailer of the film this week. There is an extraordinary blending of Zez Confrey novelty piano-numbers with blazing guns and exploding boats. Again it is a film I should like to watch once more, if only to see how the director achieved the effects that were such a surprise on a first viewing. And to enjoy again the beautifully-framed settings. A film like this and other films from arty directors, like Kubrick's Barry Lyndon, makes you wonder at first what you are missing in the Panther picture. After looking at films where the scenery is meant to be dominant, it is disturbing at first to see very ordinary sets intruding, when you are meant to be concentrating on the actors. The decor in Panther is at its bet when it is exploding. ItTsn't the scenery that is wrong in Chabrol's picture, Scoundrel in White.lt is the dreadful dubbing. I suppose this is quite a clever story about a man who likes to love ugly women, marries one, has a child by his sister-in-law and is put into hospital by his wife's lover, who makes him believe he is a paraplegic. Are you following me? The essential part of the story is that the randy husband, who is a doctor, is drugged and encased in plaster and then given injections to make him paralysed. He believes he will never be 'a man' again. He is, in fact, fairly lucky compared with many screen characters. He is neither eaten by sharks nor burned alive. But he is certainly made to suffer, before his final happy ending, by having an inappropriate voice dubbed over his own. Both Belmondo, who plays the doctor, and Mia Farrow, as the wife, use phrases so clumsy that you begin to think the dubbing is worse than usual. But the trouble is it is better than usual. As a rule the English words coming from French lips are very obviously different from the original. In this film somebody has worked hard to Compose phrases which look as if they are actually being spoken. The resulting sentences are often truly terrible.
I cannot think of anything to recommend about this picture. Except that it might give you a little privacy. When I saw it I had the whole of the circle to myself. And I found an unexpected frisson. The back row at Studio One is so high that even a six-footer like me finds his feet dangling off the floor. In such circumstances I was soon blowing through my orangeade straw as well as sucking it. Childlike, no doubt, but the sound made quite a useful comment.
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