Trail of the Pink Panther

The Pink Panther diamond has been stolen from Lugash once more, and Chief Inspector Jacques Clouseau of the French police is assigned to recover it. He boards a plane, but the aircraft goes missing en route, and no one knows what became of him. A French television journalist, Marie Jouvet, takes up the story herself, interviewing the people who knew Clouseau and those who worked alongside him, among them his superior, Chief Inspector Dreyfus, whose feelings toward his subordinate are far from warm. The search becomes a reconstruction of Clouseau's life as much as an investigation into his disappearance.

Blake Edwards directed and produced, and wrote the screenplay with Frank Waldman and Geoffrey Edwards. It followed Victor/Victoria in 1982 and was the eighteenth of the twenty-seven films he directed, with Curse of the Pink Panther arriving the next year in 1983. Peter Sellers appears as Clouseau through archive footage; the cast also includes David Niven, Capucine, Herbert Lom, Richard Mulligan and Joanna Lumley, with thirty-four credited performers in all. Released in December 1982, it took about nine million dollars worldwide. Audience scores sit at 4.8 on IMDb from roughly twelve thousand votes and 5.1 on TMDB from a few hundred, while critics' reviews average 4 out of 10.