Plot
Inspector Clouseau (Peter Sellers) is called to the country home of a Paris plutocrat, Benjamin Ballon (George Sanders), to investigate the murder of his Spanish chauffeur, Miguel. The chauffeur was having an affair with the maid, Maria Gambrelli (Elke Sommer), who claims that he often beat her. Although all the evidence points to Gambrelli as the killer, Clouseau stubbornly refuses to admit that she is guilty, having fallen madly in love with her. For the real culprits to keep the truth hidden from Clouseau's boss, Commissioner Charles Dreyfus (Herbert Lom), they must commit more murders. With the murders of Georges (David Lodge) the gardener, Dudu (Ann Lynn) the maid, and Henri LaFarge (Douglas Wilmer) the head butler, Maria is arrested, and each time Clouseau sets her free. Clouseau is always at the wrong place at the right time and manages to get himself arrested by uniformed police four times in quick succession (first for selling balloons without a license, then for selling paintings without a license, then for hunting without a license, and finally with Maria Gambrelli for public nudity, after they flee from a nudist community without their clothes).
As Clouseau continues to bungle the case, Commissioner Dreyfus becomes increasingly agitated, resulting in his accidentally cutting off his thumb and stabbing himself with a letter-opener. An anonymous figure begins stalking Clouseau, trying to kill him, but accidentally kills a doorman instead, as well as two café customers and a Cossack dancer. Clouseau gathers all the suspects together, and it comes out that Ballon, his wife Dominique, Madame LaFarge, Pierre the driver, and Simone the maid are guilty of murder: each of them having killed one of the earlier murder victims, with Maurice the manservant as a blackmailer, and Maria, who is innocent of any crime. The guilty attempt to escape in Clouseau's car, which is blown up, and the anonymous bomber is revealed to be Commissioner Dreyfus, who has been driven mad by Clouseau's blunders, and, in trying to kill him, has accidentally killed the actual murderers. The film ends when out of nowhere, Kato (Burt Kwouk) pushes Clouseau and Maria into the fountain and Maria and Clouseau fight Kato as the title "The End" appears on the screen.
Read more about this topic: A Shot In The Dark (1964 film)
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““The plot thickens,” he said, as I entered.”
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930)
“Ends in themselves, my letters plot no change;
They carry nothing dutiable; they won’t
Aspire, astound, establish or estrange.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)