Trail of the Pink Panther

Trail of the Pink Panther (1982) is a detective comedy directed by Blake Edwards — watch it online on iFILM. The Pink Panther diamond is stolen again, Inspector Clouseau boards a plane to investigate, and then the plane vanishes without a trace. For once, the bumbling inspector is not the one causing chaos — he's simply gone.

French TV journalist Marie Jouvet (Joanna Lumley) picks up the thread, interviewing everyone who ever crossed paths with Clouseau. David Niven, Capucine, Herbert Lom, and Burt Kwouk step back into their roles, and Peter Sellers himself appears in several scenes — footage shot before his death in July 1980 that Edwards assembled into a kind of farewell.

The film is the last in the original series to feature Sellers on screen, which gives it a quality the earlier entries don't have: it's genuinely a little melancholy underneath all the physical comedy. Edwards turned a difficult production situation into something unexpectedly poignant. Best watched as a companion piece to the earlier films rather than a standalone entry. Stream Trail of the Pink Panther (1982) online on iFILM.