Peter Sellers manages his mania with such casual, comic brilliance. In this movie—unlike some of the later Pink Panther films—Sellers constructs an immensely likeable buffoon atop the very unsteady foundation of simple slapstick, clichéd sight gags and green, shag carpet. This film’s greatest fault is that in the scenes without him, you find yourself impatient for his Inspector Jacques Clouseau to retake the spotlight—everyone else is rather drab and two dimensional—he’s the only genuine character, the only focus for empathy and any time that the camera spends away from his antics feels like time misspent. This in spite of the fact that the inspector’s world is framed in an arrestingly vivid, 1960’s, Technicolor kaleidoscope of swirling highlighter hues, white gloves, expensive jewels, exotic locales and stylized wealth. Woven throughout is Henry Mancini’s legendary score, a unifying force that makes it impossible to forget that this is a Pink Panther film. Therefore, when you find yourself watching a fifty-three year old David Niven acting awkward on a tiger-skin rug with a meticulously made-up Capucine, you can’t help but think, “Huh, I wonder what Inspector Clouseau is doing right now… I bet he’s being hilarious.”