THE FADED SPOTLIGHT

The Duke Brothers (Ralph Bellamy, Don Ameche) are a pair of crusty millionaires who decide one day to ruin a man’s life. For sport, for science, or just because they can. They decide to completely upend two people’s lives—like cats toying with half-dead spiders. One of their subjects is wealthy and over-privileged, while the other broke and desperate. They—as the title of the movie already tells us—trade places.

Their subjects: Louis Winthorpe III (Dan Aykroyd) and Billy Ray Valentine (Eddie Murphy). Louis is a blue-blood snob with a townhouse, a butler (Denholm Elliott), and a fiancée (Kristin Holby) who might as well have come shrink-wrapped with a trust fund. Billy Ray is homeless, faking a disability while hustling for coins. The bet is to see if you can pluck someone off the street and turn them into a success. Or alternately, if prosperity is in the blood and the well-born will always find a way to claw themselves back.

Murphy and Aykroyd are like a switchblade and a silk tie. Murphy plays Billy Ray smooth and grinning like a salesman—motormouthed and fast. He suddenly finds himself dressed to the nines and surrounded by champagne and caviar, hardly believing what is happening to him. Aykroyd, meanwhile, unravels into a filthy mess—homeless and destitute—screaming to anyone who will listen that a Black man has stolen his life. He might not even have made it out alive if he wasn’t able to find shelter with a pragmatic prostitute named Ophelia (Jamie Lee Curtis). She’s skeptical of Louis at first but eventually sees him for what he is—damaged, but salvageable. She considers him an investment.

The third act swaps gags for a commodities trading scheme—involving frozen concentrated orange juice futures, of all things. The film’s iconic scene being Murphy and Aykroyd on the floor of the Wall Street trading floor with their pockets stuffed with trading slips. The mechanics of their scheme don’t always track, but the momentum certainly does. And the ending is not only a satisfying way for their respective character arcs to conclude, but it exposes the bootstrap myth for what it is. A rigged game. Usually no laughing matter. But at least with this movie, you get a chance to laugh at its expense.

Trail of the Pink Panther was always going to be a dicey proposition. A Pink Panther sequel made after Peter Sellers’ untimely death that nonetheless puts him in the starring role. How he did it wasn’t so much necromancy as stitching together footage that previous Pink Panther entries had left on the cutting room floor, then framing it with a few freshly shot scenes.

The new narrative is centered around the bumbling detective’s absence. He’s gone missing, and a journalist (Joanna Lumley) tries retracing his footsteps. She does this by interviewing former friends, acquaintances, and enemies. It amounts to a mystery, but it’s half-hearted at best. The real point of the film was to unearth this previously lost footage and bring back a few guests from the old films. Most notably, David Niven shows up, though he’s visibly very frail and—apparently—unable to speak. His voice was dubbed in post-production by celebrity impressionist Rich Little.

What emerges isn’t a continuation so much as a cinematic holding pattern. It stalls, it reminisces, and hopes that nostalgia and your goodwill toward the series is enough to sustain it. Unfortunately, it isn’t.

The new material meanders aimlessly. The repurposed Sellers clips—while they can be amusing in places—don’t feel like lost treasures as much as bits that were cut for good reason. One such scene is between Sellers and Harvey Korman, cut from The Pink Panther Strikes Again. There’s something gratifying about seeing these two comedians share a frame. Two masters of fluster. But their scene doesn’t work. They come across like two dueling nervous systems who are playing the same note, in the same register, and at the same time as each other. That’s not interplay. It’s overlap. It goes to show that without the right chemistry, even the best comic instincts can cancel each other out.

While Trail of the Pink Panther isn’t offensive, it’s mournful. A horribly misguided studio-backed séance. A search in desperation for one last laugh. The character of Jacques Clouseau didn’t necessarily need to die with Peter Sellers. But this film decided it was going to bury him alive.