The Pink Panther (1963)

The Pink Panther arrives from 1963, a caper comedy assembled by Blake Edwards around a diamond, a ski resort, and Peter Sellers toppling over furniture with the grim determination of a man late for a train. The plot concerns wealthy people attempting to steal from other wealthy people while on holiday, and a score by Henry Mancini that has comfortably outlived every performance inside the frame. It was nominated for an Academy Award for that score, lost, and has since been preserved by the Library of Congress for being culturally significant, which is the sort of honor a film earns by being the template for everything that followed it.

On the matter of representation, the ensemble is a predominantly white European and American affair, and Claudia Cardinale's exiled princess registers as 1960s continental glamour, not any deliberate agenda. The women are plainly the most competent people on screen: Capucine's Simone runs a fencing operation under her husband's nose, and the Princess outmaneuvers two generations of thieves by hiding the jewel where nobody thinks to look. That earns a faint nod for female cunning. It does not constitute an argument about anything. The film has no interest in persuasion. It wants the audience to laugh at a man walking into a door.

Beyond that, the ledger is blank. No LGBTQ+ currents. No commentary on race, with the fictional kingdom of Lugash serving as exotic set dressing and nothing more. No climate anxiety, no indictment of the idle rich who populate every frame, no body positivity, no framing of Clouseau's clumsiness as anything but slapstick. History goes unrevised. Nobody lectures the viewer. The closest the film comes to moral instruction is a traffic warden beneath the wheels of a police car, and even he gets back up.

A cleaner specimen of pure farce would be difficult to locate, and we should say so plainly, without romance. Its cultural awareness is nil. Its timing remains immaculate.