A Shot in the Dark (No Rating)
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One of the hallmarks of a Blake Edwards comedy is that the slapstick hurts. This Feydeau-ish farce, made by Edwards in 1964, contrives to kill off a dozen innocent people and fixates on a frustrated police chief (Herbert Lom) who resolves his nervous tension by "accidentally" hacking off parts of his body. The antihero--the pompous, would-be-suave Inspector Clouseau (Peter Sellers)--lacerates his underling (the incomparable Graham Stark) for his own mistakes, struts through fancy rooms with an answer for everything, then undoes himself by catching his finger in the mechanism of a whirling globe or jauntily traipsing through a plate-glass window. There's a beautiful, shiny-blue-eyed maid (Elke Sommer) accused of a murder; Clouseau knows that she's innocent, and uses his investigation to get ever nearer to her ripe Nordic flesh. Edwards doesn't even think in terms of making the movie likable: Beginning with a single-take ballet of Frenchmen sneaking into their mistress' rooms, a scene that climaxes with a wronged wife firing three shots into her unfaithful mari, the master rivals even George Romero for packing mayhem into the frame. A Shot in the Dark marks the point at which the nervy director of Experiment in Terror and Days of Wine and Roses became "Blake Edwards," the manufacturer of Pop Art boulevard farce, a Molière with Playboy Bunny ears. (Matthew Wilder)
Review by Matthew Wilder
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