Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Pink Panther
1963 · Blake Edwards · The Pink Panther on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the doors in the hotel suite and who goes through them. (staging)
Edwards runs lovers and intruders through one set of rooms, each of them blind to the others. He holds the whole floor plan in a single wide shot so you see the geography the characters cannot.
Payoff: You hold the map. The comedy comes from watching people miss each other inside a space only you can see whole. In the reading: the mental-image / relation-image. Comedy built from connections only you are holding is what the reading calls the relation-image: meaning that lives in the web, not the shot.
Notice that Sellers stays whole in the frame while he falls. (camera)
Edwards uses the wide anamorphic frame as a stage. Full bodies, several players, one continuous space. He refuses to cut away and lets the catastrophe build so you see every cause and every effect.
Payoff: Nothing is saved in the cutting room. You watch a body lose its war with the furniture in real time.
Watch what Clouseau does with his coat after each disaster. (performance)
Sellers plays total incompetence married to unshakable self-regard. Every fall is timed and every recovery is a small ceremony of restored dignity. He straightens, adjusts, resumes, and never concedes that anything went wrong.
Payoff: The joke is not the fall. It is the posture he insists on afterward, the majesty of the office worn by a man wrecking a room. In the reading: the gest. A bodily attitude that exposes an entire social relation is what the reading calls a gest: the office of Inspector worn by this man.
Listen for the saxophone line and notice whose scenes it follows. (sound)
Mancini's slinking chromatic tune, played by Plas Johnson's tenor, belongs to the thief rather than the detective. The rest of the score is early-sixties lounge jazz, cool and sly across resorts, furs, and champagne.
Payoff: The music tells you what the production thought it was selling. Notice how rarely the funniest man on screen gets any of it.
Look at the white glove left where a jewel used to be. (setting)
The Phantom leaves one at every robbery. A glove is nothing on its own. Left behind it becomes a signature, and Clouseau can recite the dossier attached to it.
Payoff: The film trains you to read objects the way a detective does.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Keep the floor plan in your head. You can see the whole hotel and Clouseau never will.