A murder has occurred at the mansion of wealthy man-of-the-world George Sanders. Sanders lives there with his beautiful but unhappy wife Dominique (Tracy Reed) and several servants, the most significant among which is hottie maid Maria (Elke Sommer). Maria, a promiscuous dumb blonde, is the obvious suspect, but because inspector Clouseau develops a crush on her, he concludes the murderer is someone else.
This sets in motion a repetitive cycle that has Maria sent to jail, then released from jail on Clouseau's order, then returned to jail when another body is found in her presence. Clouseau attempts to seduce the willing Maria, but their romance is interrupted by Kato (Burt Kwouk), Clouseau's stalking Asian houseboy. Clouseau's assistant is straight man Hercule (Graham Stark). Meanwhile, Dreyfus has a nervous breakdown and attempts to murder Clouseau but succeeds only in killing innocent bystanders instead.
Director Blake Edwards wrote the screenplay, along with William Peter Blatty, better known for The Exorcist. The source play, the long-running A Shot in the Dark, was loosely adapted into a Clouseau vehicle.
How others will see it. A Shot in the Dark received fewer awards and nominations than The Pink Panther but nonetheless was a critical and box office success. Sellers moved on to more significant roles in two Kubrick movies, Dr. Strangelove and the notorious Lolita, but a subsequent career decline led him again team up with Edwards in a return to the Clouseau character by 1975 (The 1968 film Inspector Clouseau, starring a badly miscast Alan Arkin, is best forgotten).
Sellers' untimely death in 1980 elevated him to film legend. His numerous bad movies were discounted, and he was acclaimed as a comic genius. His reputation as perhaps the greatest comic actor ever (Charlie Chaplin and even Cary Grant might have disagreed) has helped many films, including A Shot in the Dark.
Today at imdb.com, the user vote total of 14K suggests continued interest int he film. The user rating is high at 7.5 out of 10, with no gender gap and only a marginal spread between viewer ages. The consensus is that Sellers is exemplary, twitchy Lom is amusing, and Sommer is sexy. No one misses David Niven and Robert Wagner (the Hollywood stars from The Pink Panther) except their agents.
How I felt about it. It is best to regard this movie as slapstick in the tradition of W.C. Fields. Don't worry too much about the plot. What matters are the characters, which are far more consistent.
Clouseau is clumsy and seemingly incompetent, but his instincts are invariably proven correct. Maria likes Clouseau regardless of how much trouble he gets into, and they are an ideal match in that the destruction around them nonetheless leaves them physically unharmed. Sanders is the mannered and overly privileged blue-blood overdue for a comeuppance. If there is a weak link, it is Dreyfus, who becomes a mass murderer in his futile attempts to kill Clouseau, inadvertently fulfilling his own observation "Give me ten men like Clouseau and I could destroy the world."
Given his vanity, pratfalls, accent, and susceptibility to beautiful women, Clouseau could easily be played as a total buffoon. Sellers deserves credit for humanizing the character. He is, perhaps, even more infallible than he believes himself to be, but only because God looks after him with far greater care than he truly deserves.