"A Shot in the Dark is the funniest of all the free-form Pink Panther movies and the high point of Edwards' deadpan, stutter-step style. The director started out with a Peter Blatty adaptation of a long-running French parlor farce on Broadway, but junked the project in favor of reintroducing Sellers' recently invented Inspector Clouseau...a holy idiot of preternatural ineptness... In the collaborative process, the punning verbal crackle of Sellers' mongrel Anglo-Gallicisms are reinforced by the cold, heartless, inhuman slapstick style, and the insane irrelevance of it all is redeemed by a feeling of utter unrealness. Probably no other American director could have gotten big laughs out of 14 corpses-material too gruesome for most horror films." Andrew Sarris, Tom Allen, Village Voice