THE PINK PANTHER STRIKES AGAIN (1976) **1/2 In which it is revealed that the inspector's full name is Jacques Clousseau. By this point in the series the plot has nothing to do with the Pink Panther diamond, though the credits continue to do a good job with the cartoon. Frank Waldman takes a lot longer to set up his punchlines (or better, punch visuals) than he did in Return, it's almost like a Tom Robbins novel they go so far to set things up. Waldman continues to write visually though, and Peter Sellers delivers some of the funniest sights in Clousseau history: the scene where his humpback suit over-inflates as he speaks on the telephone hovering above the river and is jettisoned across the cathedral, and the scene where he's clammoring around the Dracula castle in a knight suit trying to save the world from the invisibility ray jump to mind. While Sellers is brilliant as always in the lead role he loses a lot of lines and laughs to Herbert Lom, now criminally insane and intent on arranging the evil masterminds of the world into formation for the specific, if not sole, purpose of exterminating Clousseau. It wouldn't seem to hurt to recruit the twelve (or was it sixteen?) largest governments to the cause, the caricatures of President Ford and Henry Kissinger are funny and engaging evil only because it's convenient. As Jonathan Swift noted you can tell a great man because the dunces all unite in confederacy against him. Clousseau is that man who unites the evil, boring, dull witted, media and power hungry, and badly dressed.
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