The year is 1964, and whenPeter Sellerswasn’t starring as three different characters in the biting Cold War satire Dr. Strangelove: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, he cemented the unorthodox and silly Inspector Jacques Clouseau as a cinematic jewel in one of the best sequels ever made. A Shot in the Dark is a sparkling follow-up movie and should be on any cinephile’s list of top ten sequels. It seems almost impossible to equal, or even improve upon, the greatness of The Pink Panther made just a year prior, but Sellers is so damn spot-on as the bumbling Clouseau that his unapologetic physical buffoonery became the gold standard that many of the comic actors that followed would seek to duplicate. Sometimes, because Dr. Strangelove was such a brilliant collaboration between the actor and the auteur Stanley Kubrick, it feels like A Shot in the Dark gets slightly overshadowed, and it shouldn’t. Some 50 years later, it holds up marvelously because Sellers was so ahead of his time as a slapstick performer.
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