Great Character: Inspector Jacques Clouseau (The “Pink Panther” series)

How else to honor writer-director Blake Edwards who died this week than to shine a spotlight on a great comedic character he created (along with Maurice Richlin): Inspector Jacques Clouseau:

Played brilliantly by Peter Sellers (let’s set aside Alan Arkin and Steve Martin’s reprisals of the role), Clouseau is a slapstick tour du force. The Wikipedia entry is enlightening:

Clouseau is a bumbling and incompetent police inspector of the French Sûreté, whose investigations are marked with chaos and destruction that he himself largely causes. His clumsy attempts at solving the case frequently lead to misfortune for himself and others; in the 1976 film The Pink Panther Strikes Again, he cannot even interview witnesses to a crime without falling down stairs, getting his hand caught in first a medieval knight’s gauntlet and then a vase, knocking a witness senseless, destroying a priceless piano or accidentally shooting another officer in the backside. Clouseau is also not particularly intelligent, and will frequently follow a completely idiotic theory of the crime, solving the case only by accident. His incompetence, clumsiness and stupidity, with the fact that he is usually right, are enough to eventually transform his direct superior (former Chief Inspector Dreyfus) into a homicidal psychopath — to such a degree that Dreyfus even goes so far as to construct a doomsday device and threatens to destroy the world in a desperate attempt to kill Clouseau.

Regardless of his rather limited ability, he successfully solves his cases and finds the correct culprits, even if this success is achieved entirely by accident. As such, he is even promoted to Chief Inspector over the course of the series, and is regarded by many other characters who presumably have not met him as France’s greatest detective; those characters he actually encounters, nevertheless, are quick to realise his incompetence and limitations. He is immensely egocentric and pompous; despite his many failings, he is seemingly convinced that he is a brilliant police officer destined to succeed and rise through the ranks of the Sûreté. Despite this, Clouseau does appear to show some awareness that he is not the most competent or intelligent person, as he is notably embarrassed by and quick to brush aside his more extreme acts of clumsiness with phrases such as “I know that”, and attempts to appear elegant and refined regardless of what calamity he has just caused.

Bumbling as in here:

And here:

And here:

Then there’s the dialogue:

[after Clouseau accidentally reduces a piano to a pile of splinters]
Mrs. Leverlilly: You’ve ruined that piano!
Clouseau: What is the price of one piano compared to the terrible crime that’s been committed here?
Mrs. Leverlilly: But that’s a priceless Steinway!
Clouseau: Not anymore! 

Clouseau: A woman is like a… artichoke; you have to do a bit of work, before you get to her heart.

Clouseau: There is a time to laugh and a time not to laugh, and this is not one of them.

It’s interesting to think about Inspector Clouseau as a Protagonist figure as he is one who does not change, but changes others. Most notably the above-mentioned Dreyfus:

Yet despite being a pompous, walking disaster, Clouseau always gets his man. And sometimes even a woman. Unfortunately I can’t find an embed of the ending bedroom sequence from The Pink Panther Strikes Again, but you can see it here.

Inspector Jacques Clouseau: This week’s Great Character.