Pink Panther, The (Blu-ray)

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New viewers who come to this old movie are in for a surprise, because it's nothing like the Shawn Levy remake that starred Steve Martin as the 24/7 silly and bumbling Inspector Clouseau. In other words, this "Pink Panther" isn't a slapstick comedy.

Clouseau is a relatively minor character in the 1963 classic, but Peter Sellers was so ingeniously funny that the whole tone and focus of the film shifted to Inspector Clouseau for the sequel, "A Shot in the Dark" (1964), and several more. Then it was all about the deadpan, the pratfalls and the slapstick. But for this first "Pink Panther," Blake Edwards combined two movie traditions: the standard caper film and the French bedroom farce, so don't expect nonstop laughs. And don't expect Clouseau to torment his superior. Inspector Dreyfus didn't come on the scene until the sequel, when everyone director Blake Edwards realized that Sellers-as-Clouseau was even funnier if he had someone to drive absolutely crazy. So the first "Pink Panther" seems tame, even sedate by comparison.

David Niven stars as Sir Charles Lytton, an aristocrat by day and by night a jewel thief known as "The Phantom." His target is a gigantic diamond known as The Pink Panther, and the current owner happens to be an Indian princess (Claudia Cardinale) who looks about as Indian as I do. But she's beautiful and she dresses as chic as Jackie Kennedy, who was leaving the White House as this picture was being made, and in a caper flick, that's what counts.

Complicating matters is Sir Charles' nephew, George (Robert Wagner), who has his own sights set on the diamond and doesn't really know about his uncle's avocation. He turns up at the same ski lodge where the princess and his uncle are staying, but what would a bedroom farce be without another female? Enter Inspector Clouseau's wife, Simone (Capucine), who, it turns out, is in cahoots with the man she's having an affair with: Sir Charles. In true bedroom farce fashion there's a revolving door of pajama games and mistaken identities, and everyone but the butler seems to be trying to seduce Princess Dala in order to cozy up to her and get closer to that rare diamond. There are other scenes of mistaken identity as well, including one with men in ape suits that will seem ungodly long for contemporary audiences. There are also long stretches where it's a straight caper flick, with no gags whatsoever. The costume ball is here, and fans of the newer "Pink Panther" can see a number of scenes which Steve Martin decided to parody or expand to make them more riotous--tiny comic episodes that had so much more comic potential, had director Edwards not chosen to play it as subtle as he did.

"The Pink Panther" is a stylish film, and the Italian and Parisian locations make it all the more stylish and exotic--all perfectly complemented by Henry Mancini's Oscar-nominated score. The film's single flaw (and it's a big one) is that Edwards plays it straight for too long in stretches and comes on a little too strong with the comedy in others, so that the film has two gears and at times the shifting isn't Maserati-smooth. It's also slower-moving than film lovers today might expect. But the performances are solid, the script is intelligent, and the whole picture feels like something that was made during the Kennedy White House years, full of style and (apart from those Clouseau moments) grace.