December 18, 1963: The film The Pink Panther premieres, directed by Blake Edwards. The cartoon character of the same name debuted in the film's opening sequence, with the classic theme song composed and conducted by Henry Mancini. You know the joke: What did the Pink Panther say when he stepped on an ant? "Dead ant, dead ant... "
But, within the film, the Pink Panther is not a character. Rather, it is the thing everyone is chasing, what film director Alfred Hitchcock called a "MacGuffin": A large pink diamond with a "flaw" in the shape of a leaping panther. It is owned by Princess Dala (played by the Tunisian-born Italian actress Claudia Cardinale, with her voice dubbed by Canadian singer Gale Garnett), an exiled royal whose country's new dictatorship wants it back, and the United Nations' World Court has sided with them, and they've offered a big reward for it.
And Inspector Jacques Clouseau (played by Peter Sellers), the incompetent, clumsy, accident-prone Paris police official who was, clearly, named for oceanographer Jacques Cousteau, isn't the hero of the movie. The hero is actually a criminal, a "gentleman thief" named Sir Charles Lytton, a.k.a. The Phantom (David Niven).
.jpg)
To make matters worse, Clouseau's wife, Simone (the French actress Germaine Hélène Irène Lefebvre, a.k.a. Capucine) is having an affair with The Phantom. He shouldn't be the hero, but he has been treated as such, because, while he often played less-than-moral characters, the handsome, incredibly charming Niven was beloved, as if he were an earlier, English version of Paul Newman. Even my mother, a senior in high school when the film came out, adored Niven. She also liked Robert Wagner, who played Lytton's American-based and even less-moral nephew, George.
The film was successful enough to lead to a series, with A Shot in the Dark premiering the following June, and Inspector Clouseau in 1968. The film also inspired the TV show Get Smart: NBC told the producers to combine Inspector Clouseau and James Bond, because they were the two biggest cultural phenomena in the world at the time. I guess they forgot about the Beatles.
The series resumed a few years later: The Return of the Pink Panther was released in 1975, The Pink Panther Strikes Again in 1976, and The Revenge of the Pink Panther in 1978. Sellers died in 1980. By that point, Niven was suffering from ALS, known in America as Lou Gehrig's disease. That didn't stop Blake Edwards: In 1982, he made The Trail of the Pink Panther, using a brief cameo from Niven and previously unused footage of Sellers, with Clouseau spending most of the film in a body-cast. And in 1983, all kinds of tricks, including the briefest of cameos from a dying Niven, were used for Curse of the Pink Panther.
In a way, in 1983, things came full circle: The cartoon Inspector Gadget premiered, with Don Adams, star of Get Smart, voicing the title role, a well-meaning but incompetent robot cop who dressed much like Inspector Clouseau, with a tan trenchcoat and a trilby hat, the kind also favored by another famous fictional cop, Telly Savalas on Kojak.
In 1993, Edwards tried again, with Son of the Pink Panther, with Italian actor Roberto Benigni as the title character, Gendarme Jacques Gambrelli. As it turns out, he is half of the result of a one-night stand between Clouseau and a different character played by Cardinale, the other being his twin sister, Jacqueline Gambrelli (Nicoletta Braschi).
The one constant through all these films was Czech-British actor Herbert Lom as the original Clouseau's beleaguered boss, Chief Inspector Charles Dreyfus.
Capucine died in 1990, Edwards in 2010, Lom in 2012. As of December 18, 2022, Cardinale and Wagner are still alive. (UPDATE: Cardinale died in 2025.)
In 2006, Steve Martin starred in a reboot, with The Pink Panther 2 released in 2009.
*
December 18, 1963 was a Wednesday. Basketball star Charles Oakley and actor Brad Pitt were born.
Baseball was out of season. Football was in midweek. There were 4 games in the NBA:
* The New York Knicks lost to the Boston Celtics, 133-111 at the Boston Garden.
* The Baltimore Bullets beat the Detroit Pistons, 124-107 at Cobo Hall (now Huntington Place) in Detroit. For the Bullets, Gus Johnson scored 38 points, and Walt Bellamy scored 36.
* The Los Angeles Lakers beat the Philadelphia 76ers, 116-96 at the Los Angeles Sports Arena. Jerry West scored 30 points and grabbed 14 rebounds.
* And the San Francisco Warriors beat the St. Louis Hawks, 104-96 at, sort of, a neutral site: The gymnasium at Sacramento High School, 88 miles northeast of downtown San Francisco. It was just another day at the office for Wilt Chamberlain: He scored 27 points, grabbed 27 rebounds, and had 11 assists. For the Hawks, Bob Pettit scored 29 points. Pettit was the NBA's all-time leading scorer.
And the NHL's entire "Original Six" were in action:
* The New York Rangers and the Detroit Red Wings played to a tie, 1-1 at the old Madison Square Garden.
* The Montreal Canadiens beat the Toronto Maple Leafs, 7-1 at the Montreal Forum.
* And the Boston Bruins beat the Chicago Black Hawks, 2-1 at the Chicago Stadium.
