The Inspector is reinstated to the Ballon case and immediately orders Maria Gambrelli's release from prison, as he is convinced she is shielding the real killer, who Clouseau suspects is Ballon himself.Ī series of additional murders of the Ballon staff follows.
In order to keep his senses sharp, Clouseau has instructed Cato to attack him when he least expects it. When the phone rings, the life or death struggle ceases and it becomes apparent that his assailant is his valet, Cato ( Burt Kwouk). He is awakened early in the morning by an apparent attempt on his life by a Chinese assassin. Realizing Clouseau has been inadvertently assigned to a high-profile case, Commissioner Dreyfus ( Herbert Lom) has him removed and personally takes charge of the investigation.ĭejected, Clouseau returns home. All evidence points to Maria as the killer, but Clouseau is convinced of her innocence because he is immediately attracted to her. Miguel was shot and killed there and Maria was found with the smoking gun in her hand, but claims no knowledge of how it got there as she maintains she was knocked unconscious. It is the country home of millionaire Benjamin Ballon ( George Sanders), and Inspector Clouseau ( Peter Sellers) of the Sûreté, the French national police, is called there to investigate the murder of the chauffeur, Miguel Ostos, who was having an affair with one of the maids, Maria Gambrelli ( Elke Sommer), and attacked her in her bedroom after she broke off with him. The film was released only a year after the first Clouseau film, The Pink Panther.Īt night in the servants' quarters of a grand house, several men and women are moving about: surreptitiously climbing upstairs and down entering rooms and leaving hiding from, and spying on, one another. The film was not originally written to include Clouseau, but was an adaptation of a stage play by Harry Kurnitz adapted from a French play L'Idiote by Marcel Achard. Graham Stark, who portrays police officer Hercule Lajoy, would reprise this role eighteen years later, in Trail of the Pink Panther (1982). The character of Gambrelli would return in Son of the Pink Panther (1993), this time played by Claudia Cardinale, who appeared as Princess Dala in The Pink Panther (1963). Elke Sommer portrays the murder suspect, Maria Gambrelli. The film also marks the first appearances of Herbert Lom as his long-suffering boss, Commissioner Dreyfus, as well as Burt Kwouk as his stalwart man servant Cato and André Maranne as François, all three of whom would become series regulars.
It is the second installment in The Pink Panther film series, with Peter Sellers reprising his role as Inspector Jacques Clouseau of the French Sûreté.Ĭlouseau's blundering personality is unchanged, but it was in this film that Sellers began to give him the idiosyncratically exaggerated French accent that was to later become a hallmark of the character. A Shot in the Dark is a 1964 British-American DeLuxe Color comedy film directed by Blake Edwards in Panavision.