THE PINK PANTHER FILM COLLECTION: THE PINK PANTHER, A SHOT ...

THER FILM COLLECTION: THE PINK PANTHER, A SHOT IN THE DARK, THE PINK PANTHER STRIKES AGAIN, REVENGE OF THE PINK PANTHER, TRAIL OF THE PINK PANTHER DIRECTED BY BLAKE EDWARDS MGM/UA VIDEO

WITH THE REMIXED saccharine cocktails of Henry Mancini released under the Pink Panther's Penthouse Party CD, it's now the perfect moment in which to relive the most famous creation of director/writer Blake Edwards and actor/eccentric Peter Sellers. Not the funniest, mind you. That credit (I'm in the minority here) goes to "Hrundi V. Bakshi," the socially awkward character played as an Indian stereotype in their dated comedy-of-manners, The Party. Within the framework of a 60s Hollywood "happening," this Sellers character comes off as a put-upon, Cold War-era misfit amongst other sadly swinging (Gavin MacLeod!?) dysfunctional sorts.

Yet, in playing to those same Hollywood moguls' obsession with the French four years earlier—why did America find the French so fascinating as opposed to, say, Belgium or Trinidad?—Edwards and Sellers came up with a bungler who had to be as righteous by film's finale as he could be wrong throughout, a model of staunch American superiority and ogling Francophile worship: Inspector Jacques Clouseau. What's odd about the the highly physical slapstick of the unintended series' first two installments (The Pink Panther, A Shot in the Dark) is that they came out in 1964. That same year, Sellers embraced, with dastardly silly subtlety, several equally clipped roles for Kubrick's bleak Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb as well as The World of Henry Orient—the latter, an odd joke on pedophilia directed and written with sly spryness by, respectively, George Roy Hill and Nunnally Johnson.

Though fortunate for the protean Sellers to have found an international smash filled with deliciously timed slapstick, in terms of movement and wry-dumb dialogue (too few of Sellers' films after Edwards would benefit from such timing, other than the hammy, cocksure After the Fox and the weirdly subdued poli-comedy Being There), the Panther series took auteur Edwards into a flashier hemisphere, one that put him off (sadly) to the stark, dusky, drunken dramas of stirring classics Days of Wine and Roses and Breakfast at Tiffany's. (Please don't count The Tamarind Seed). Revived again throughout the 70s and 80s, starting with 1975's The Return of the Pink Panther (not included in this six-DVD box set due to legal wrangling), the Panther series, even in its eventual cartoon format, showed off a dedication to the potential of physical comedy finesse, one whose heyday was lost amidst the pained silent soliloquies of the loose-limbed Buster Keaton, rarely to be found again. Make that never again.