Movie Quote of the Day (‘Revenge of the Pink Panther,’ With Clouseau in Disguise as Toulouse-Lautrec)

[Chief Inspector Jacques Clouseau, disguised as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, explains why he can't tip the postman.]

Clouseau [played by Peter Sellers]: “I'm a little short.”— Revenge of the Pink Panther (1978), screenplay by Frank Waldman, Ron Clark and Blake Edwards, directed by Blake Edwards

The French painter, printmaker, draughtsman, caricaturist and illustrator Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec died 120 years ago today at only age 36, from the combined effects of alcoholism and syphilis, in Château Malromé, Saint-André-du-Bois, France.

There are all sorts of reading materials for anyone interested in finding out more about the life and art of this consummate artist of Parisian nightlife, including this post, from the blog of the Milwaukee Art Museum, by Christa Story.

But non-art majors may have encountered his work already, in John Huston’s 1952 film Moulin Rouge, with Jose Ferrer as the artist, bringing Oscar nominations to both star and director. Though not particularly accurate as to the facts of the artist’s life, the movie is usually considered, along with Vincente Minnelli’s Lust for Life (1956) on Vincent Van Gogh, as among the great artistic biopics of the Fifties.

It is the indelible image created by Ferrer that Sellers and Edwards are sending up in the above quote. At roughly six feet tall, Ferrer had to subject his body to all manner of contortions to simulate the diminutive Lautrec (unable to grow beyond five feet because of a congenital bone disease).

Sellers may not have found this process quite as agonizing as Ferrer, for this was the second time he dressed up as the chronicler of the Parisian demimonde, following his appearance in in the 1967 James Bond spoof Casino Royale. But his inimitable detective Clouseau donned several other disguises, too, in Revenge of the Pink Panther: priest, Mafia don, even the boss he literally drove insane, Inspector Dreyfus.

You don’t have to press too hard to get me to confess that it’s Sellers’ Lautrec, not Ferrer’s, that I remember. But that’s because comic genius carries everything before it.

Except for Trail of the Pink Panther, a collection of outtakes from the earlier The Pink Panther Strikes Again that were released after Sellers' death, this was the final collaboration of the actor and Edwards. The writer-director was frustrated, and sometimes alarmed, by his star's mental deterioration (e.g., displaying increased difficulty in coordinating his lines with his physical bits, calling Edwards overnight to say that God had just told him how to solve a problem with a scene). 

But the two men brought enough to this last time together to produce some of the most laugh-out-moments of the series, and to intrigue viewers like me in researching further into the objects of their humor.