The production and creation of the Pink Panther series is a pretty good reflection of its most famously bumbling character, Inspector Clouseau. There are several competing stories as to who conceived the prideful and accident-prone French detective. Director Blake Edwards claims it was based on a French concierge he had met in a Parisian hotel. A friend of Peter Sellers claimed that Clouseau was based on one of Princess Margaret’s hairdressers. Sellers himself suggested his behavior was based on the uprightness of Capt. Matthew Webb, the first man to swim the English Channel. Webb also happened to have a rather ornamental mustache, which influenced the (very) fake mustache that adorns Clouseau’s face.

Interestingly, no one imagined that Inspector Clouseau would become a breakout character. In fact, The Pink Panther (screening July 2) was devised as a vehicle for David Niven. But almost by accident, Sellers (who filled in at the last minute for Peter Ustinov, originally cast as Clouseau) stole the spotlight—in a big way. Less than a year after The Pink Panther hit the screens, A Shot in the Dark (July 9), Edwards’ and Sellers’ second Clouseau comedy, was released. In the mid-’70s, the director and star teamed again for another trilogy of very funny and hugely successful “Panthers”: The Return of the Pink Panther (July 16), The Pink Panther Strikes Again (July 23), and Revenge of the Pink Panther (July 30).

The “Pink Panther” itself is actually a reference to a diamond in the first film, and not the main character, but it became such a popular phrase that it stuck with all subsequent films, regardless of whether a diamond showed up or not. With the help of the catchy Henry Mancini score, the animated panther who appears in the credit sequences for each of the films ultimately became the star of his own cartoon series, sold a million plush toys, and endorsed a line of fiberglass insulation.

Inspector Clouseau is an enduringly entertaining character that lights up just about any type of audience. Biographer and film historian Ed Sikov noted that Sellers’ comic value came from his “bedrock dignity in the face of his own buffoonishness,” while Sellers himself said that he had “a certain pathetic charm that the girls found seductive.” On Wednesdays in July, join us as we stumble through the best of the Pink Panther movies.

–Michael Neault, Associate Programmer, Motion Picture Department

As a follow-up to last summer’s popular series of films featuring the music of the great composer Ennio Morricone, you’ll be able to see five more Italian productions each boasting one of the maestro’s finest scores. Morricone’s most famous collaborator, Sergio Leone, is represented by the uncut versions of Duck, You Sucker (screening August 5) and Once Upon a Time in America (August 9 & 10). Morricone has also remained loyal to director Giuseppe Tornatore, and the composer earned his most recent Oscar® nomination for Tornatore’s Malena (August 12). Their newest collaboration is The Unknown Woman (August 16, see “Summer Rochester Premieres” section on this page), and the movie offers another memorable Morricone main title theme. Concluding this small lineup is the uncut Italian version of Burn! (August 19), directed by Gillo Pontecorvo (The Battle of Algiers) and showcasing particularly rousing music by Morricone and an equally effective performance from Marlon Brando.

Join us in July as we celebrate the directorial career of Milos Forman, one of our most famous and versatile contemporary filmmakers, and a two-time Academy Award® winner. A certifiable humanist, Forman’s work is marked by a defiantly anti-authoritarian attitude and a fascination with individual behavior demonstrated by a naturalistic handling of performers, both professional and non-professional. The lineup includes a complete selection of Forman’s Czech features, including his earliest film, the semi-documentary Audition, and three of his most celebrated American releases.

Forman studied screenwriting at the Prague Academy of Dramatic Arts, and emerged in 1963 with Audition and his first full feature, Black Peter (both screening July 1). His two subsequent features, Loves of a Blonde (July 8) and The Fireman’s Ball (July 15), were enormous international successes, but in Forman’s homeland of Czechoslovakia, the films were heavily criticized, and The Fireman’ Ball was even banned. Facing an increasingly oppressive situation, Forman left for the United States at the time of the Soviet Invasion in 1968. In these early days, Forman established strong collaborative relationships with fellow screenwriter and director Ivan Passer and cinematographer Miroslav Ondrv ícv ek, both of whom also emigrated to the US.

Forman soon brought his techniques to big-budget Hollywood features, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (July 22) was an astounding international success largely due to the director’s impeccable handling of an extraordinary cast that included Jack Nicholson, Louise Fletcher, and in some of their earliest film appearances, Brad Dourif, Danny DeVito, and Christopher Lloyd. For what was only his second American movie, Forman earned a Best Director Academy Award®, and the film also won Oscars® for Nicholson, Fletcher, and Best Picture.

Forman next set his attentions to bringing the ’60s Broadway milestone Hair (July 29) to the big screen. Gerome Ragni and James Rado’s “Tribal Love Rock Musical” was given a more formally structured story, and the director seamlessly moved between loose, sometimes improvisatory scenes of dialogue and enthusiastically performed musical numbers (brilliantly choreographed by Twyla Tharp) that in many cases completely re-imagined the original stage production. Adapting another Broadway smash, Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus (showing in the director’s cut on July 12), Forman won his second Oscar® for the story of the bitter rivalry between composers Antonio Salieri and Wolfgang A. Mozart. Amadeus also won Oscars® for Best Picture and F. Murray Abraham’s performance as the haunted Salieri.

While in his career Forman has moved from stories about his average fellow countrymen to iconic historical figures, he always finds a way to tell the story of an individual struggling to express himself in an oppressive situation.

The touring retrospective was organized originally by Jytte Jensen, Curator, Department of Film, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, with the kind collaboration of the Czech Center New York; the NationalFilm Archive, Prague; and Irena Kovarova, Independent Film Programmer and Tour Manager.

(Giuseppe Tornatore, Italy 2000, 92 min., Italian/subtitles)

A 12-year-old boy during the Italian fascist period develops a crush on the village outcast, a mistreated war widow (Monica Bellucci) who’s become the victim of cruel gossip. Another piece of bittersweet nostalgia from the director of Cinema Paradiso, Malèna is highlighted by an Oscar®-nominated Morricone score.

Program Notes

Malèna is based on a story by Luciano Vincenzoni, who is best known for co-writing the screenplays for some of the most savored Sergio Leone films, For a Few Dollars More, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and A Fistful of Dynamite, also known as Duck, You Sucker (all of which also happen to have Morricone scores). According to director Tornatore, he read the story of Malèna around 1990 and just put it in the back of his mind. In the mid-90’s, he met the ravishing Monica Bellucci while making a perfume commercial, and she reminded him of the story. At that time Bellucci was already famous in Italy, but she was known principally as a model; however, she impressed Tornatore as interested in serious dramatic acting. After about another five years, he wrote the part with Bellucci in mind and made the film. For the other leading role, that of the 15-year old boy Renato, Tornatore initially gathered some 3,000 Sicilian boys, eventually narrowed it down to nine, and then picked Giuseppe Sulfaro after full-blown screen tests. Sulfaro was a complete novice, with no acting experience.

Morricone has described his rapport with Tornatore as even greater than what he shared with Sergio Leone, who apparently could be somewhat stiff in his communications. As is Morricone’s habit, he composed most of the themes for Malèna in advance of filming based on his ruminations about the story, and then scored them for the final image. Morricone achieved the restrained melancholy of the Malèna character’s theme through the sheer economy of using of only three pitches. As is also Morricone’s custom, he provided all the orchestrations of his work for the film. And, as always, through his music the composer is clearly at least as much in charge of the audience’s emotions as the director.

Malèna was co-produced by an Italian company, Medusa Film, and by Miramax Films, with Miramax’s head at the time, Harvey Weinstein, taking a full producer credit. As such, the film is part of the extended story of Miramax’s major role in creating greater access for American audiences to not only what are broadly called independent films, but also to contemporary foreign cinema. It had in fact been Weinstein who had picked up for distribution the floundering Cinema Paradiso, reportedly unwanted by anyone else at the 1989 Cannes Film Festival. A shortened version of Tornatore’s eventually much beloved film did tie for the Grand Jury Prize at that festival, but previous to that, the film’s nearly three-hour original version had been a stone plummeting toward commercial oblivion in Italy. There are conflicting accounts of whether it was a brutal Weinstein who imposed the deep cuts on an agonized Tornatore, or his Italian producer, or the harsh economic facts themselves, but in any case, Miramax soared with a svelte two-hour American release out of the art houses, across suburban multi-plex screens, all the way to the Oscar stage and the 1990 statuette for Best Foreign Language Film.

Whatever the exact truth of the shortening of Cinema Paradiso, by the time of Malèna ten years later, Miramax’s exertion of final artistic control by cutting films was known far and wide, and had earned Weinstein the redoubtable moniker of “Harvey Scissorhands.” In the case of Malèna, Miramax was involved from the production stage onward, and distribution in both Italy and the United States was planned from the start. However, Tornatore’s finished film included 17 minutes of the under-aged Renato’s explicit sexual fantasies regarding Malèna. Miramax, at times a seeming champion of strong film content, but at this point owned by the conservative Disney Studios, did not consider this material suitable for American distribution—and to be fair to Miramax, perhaps no other mainstream American distributor would have touched it either. The longer version of the film still remains, for all practical public exhibition purposes, unavailable in the U.S. (and mind you, in Turkey the film is another eight minutes shorter). This time a seasoned Tornatore asserted publicly that he made the cuts himself, and otherwise acknowledged that there are cultural differences between countries. He also made somewhat oblique allusions to his own willingness to compromise with statements such as “I say it’s worth it, because your thought, your idea stays,” followed by a laughing “What can you do?” Not all parties have waxed as philosophic as Tornatore about Miramax’s practices under Weinstein; if you are interested in a witty, but withering, narration of the company’s history through 2002, try Peter Biskind’s Down and Dirty Pictures.

This film is most frequently identified as being about an adolescent first love, and the Sicilian Tornatore, who started out as a wedding photographer, is often identified as an unabashedly sentimental filmmaker. Nevertheless, the story is perhaps most powerful as a tale about some pretty unsentimental adult feelings and the corrosive capacity of negative expectations.

~Alexandra Terziev, Volunteer, Motion Picture Department

FOR FURTHER READING

(Fred Zinnemann, US 1959, 149 min.)

Audrey Hepburn (in an Oscar®-nominated turn) stars as young Sister Luke, assigned to a hospital in the Belgian Congo. The novitiate must endure rigorous conditions that test her devotion to her calling. But it’s at the outbreak of World War II, when Luke must obey an edict not to take sides in the conflict, that the nun finds her vows at odds with her personal beliefs.