MoltenThought Film Festival: "A Shot in the Dark"
Wordgirl and I are deep in the throes of the first-ever MoltenThought Film Festival.
Unlike the hoity-toity Sundance Film Festival, we're watching strictly good movies.
The theme of the first festival is "The Ten Best Movies Ever Made" with a strong tendency toward underappreciated gems.
We arrived at our list by separately picking our ten favorites, then applying a weighted ranking to each list based on how much we wanted to see the movie again. We drew a line at the top ten weighted scores and incorporated these films in our final list. We're watching them in reverse order.
The first of these films is Blake Edwards' classic farce, "A Shot in the Dark" (1964). It is the first sequel to "The Pink Panther" and features the inimitable Peter Sellers reprising the role of bumbling French policeman Inspector Jacques Clouseau.
Whereas the first film was more of an ensemble cast, with strong performances and plenty of screen time from Robert Wagner and David Niven, "A Shot in the Dark" is a Sellers vehicle, pure and simple, although at a few points Herbert Lom as the deteriorating Inspector Dreyfus and Burt Kwouk as Clouseau's sidekick Kato steal their scenes and quite nearly the movie.
The whodunnit is of minor importance as the investigation into a murder at a VIP's mansion is merely the trigger of a cascading series of outrageous scenes showcasing Clouseau's bumbling good fortune. Rowan Atkinson clearly cribbed much of "Mr. Bean" from this movie, which revels in placing the silly but dignified Clouseau in awkward situations. My favorite of these is Clouseau's tracking a lead to a nudist colony, and having to "go native" to continue his investigation.
The "Pink Panther" movies open a window onto the 60s as few other films managed to accomplish. The shifting cultural mores, the colorful locales, the tension between the old cool and the new cool are evident in every scene. Indeed, Sellers' over-the-top slapstick (leavened by his hilarious attempts to rein it back in) is itself revolutionary in that the laughs are steeped in irony---we're mocking the silly Frenchman who insists on taking himself deadly seriously.
Taken as a whole, I prefer this movie to the first film, which dragged in spots as it lavished screen time on scenery and hewed a little to closely to James Bond-style conventions. The laughs are bigger, and the payoff larger, than in the original.
The only downside is Elke Sommer's performance, which I thought was awful, if not inappropriate for a woman who is simply popular for her beauty. Fortunately, her screen time and lines are limited.
All in all, this was a great, lighthearted romp with which to kick off the proceedings.
Recommended.
Unlike the hoity-toity Sundance Film Festival, we're watching strictly good movies.
The theme of the first festival is "The Ten Best Movies Ever Made" with a strong tendency toward underappreciated gems.
We arrived at our list by separately picking our ten favorites, then applying a weighted ranking to each list based on how much we wanted to see the movie again. We drew a line at the top ten weighted scores and incorporated these films in our final list. We're watching them in reverse order.
The first of these films is Blake Edwards' classic farce, "A Shot in the Dark" (1964). It is the first sequel to "The Pink Panther" and features the inimitable Peter Sellers reprising the role of bumbling French policeman Inspector Jacques Clouseau.
Whereas the first film was more of an ensemble cast, with strong performances and plenty of screen time from Robert Wagner and David Niven, "A Shot in the Dark" is a Sellers vehicle, pure and simple, although at a few points Herbert Lom as the deteriorating Inspector Dreyfus and Burt Kwouk as Clouseau's sidekick Kato steal their scenes and quite nearly the movie.
The whodunnit is of minor importance as the investigation into a murder at a VIP's mansion is merely the trigger of a cascading series of outrageous scenes showcasing Clouseau's bumbling good fortune. Rowan Atkinson clearly cribbed much of "Mr. Bean" from this movie, which revels in placing the silly but dignified Clouseau in awkward situations. My favorite of these is Clouseau's tracking a lead to a nudist colony, and having to "go native" to continue his investigation.
The "Pink Panther" movies open a window onto the 60s as few other films managed to accomplish. The shifting cultural mores, the colorful locales, the tension between the old cool and the new cool are evident in every scene. Indeed, Sellers' over-the-top slapstick (leavened by his hilarious attempts to rein it back in) is itself revolutionary in that the laughs are steeped in irony---we're mocking the silly Frenchman who insists on taking himself deadly seriously.
Taken as a whole, I prefer this movie to the first film, which dragged in spots as it lavished screen time on scenery and hewed a little to closely to James Bond-style conventions. The laughs are bigger, and the payoff larger, than in the original.
The only downside is Elke Sommer's performance, which I thought was awful, if not inappropriate for a woman who is simply popular for her beauty. Fortunately, her screen time and lines are limited.
All in all, this was a great, lighthearted romp with which to kick off the proceedings.
Recommended.
1 Comments:
One of the funniest movies ever. If you get a chance, look around for "I'm Alright, Jack", the movie that first made Sellers an international star. It's funny, features a revealing look at Britain under the first Labour government, and yes, it even has a scene at a nudist colony. Not as over the top hilarious as ASItD, but definitely worth the watching.
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