"When Walter Davis (Bruce Willis, The Sixth Sense) is set up with gorgeous Nadia Gates (Kim Basinger, No Mercy), the perfect Blind Date dissolves into disaster in this sexy comedy caper.

Walter invites beautiful southern belle Nadia to a button-down corporate dinner, expecting to impress his associates with this dazzling beauty. But all hell breaks loose when Nadia has "one too many" and reduces the evening--and Walter's career--to shambles. Bad times turn worse when Nadia's insanely jealous ex-beau David (John Larroquette, TV's "Night Court"), discovers them together and decides to annihilate the unsuspecting Walter.

Can true love blossom amidst this hilarious havoc? Will Nadia and Walter ever get down to courting each other instead of courting disaster? Find out in the zany Blind Date, where first encounters can lead to close encounters of the worst kind." --Blind Date's DVD liner notes

After he and Peter Sellers parted ways, hyphenate Blake Edwards was revealed for the hack that he is. Prior to Sellers' death, talks between the two to make one last "Pink Panther" film together had crumbled because both strutted around like peacocks claiming ultimate responsibility for the success of the franchise. Sellers wore the tallest feathers, in the studio's eyes: when United Artists realized they could put a sixth Clouseau film into production with either/or, they stuck with Sellers, hiring him to not only star in the project but also write it. (Edwards had scripted or co-scripted all of the Pink Panthers up to that point.)

Buy the BLIND DATE poster at Moviegoods (click on image)

Sellers died shortly after turning in his first draft; his competition out of the way, Edwards proceeded to direct three more franchise entries: Trail of the Pink Panther, a patchwork quilt of Sellers outtakes; Curse of the Pink Panther, in which Ted Wass (who would go on to play the father of TV's "Blossom"), of all people, inherited Sellers' mantle; and Son of the Pink Panther, which proved that even someone as talented Roberto Benigni could not elevate Edwards' tentative sense of farce the way Sellers had. Edwards was the adept assistant to the comedy magician Sellers: he never blocked our view of the gifted performer and was always ready to say, "Ta-da!"

Striking out on his own, Edwards' techniques fell flat. He has shot in anamorphic Panavision almost exclusively throughout his career, and seems to enjoy working against the width of the frame by filling it up with stiff, vertical subjects--people are always standing up in Blake Edwards movies. This gave the lanky Sellers some legroom for slapstick--if you saw Clouseau on one side of the screen and a delicate object on the other, you knew there'd be trouble--but in a film like Blind Date, his actors just swim around with their hands in their pockets waiting for "cut" to be called.

One of the reasons I wanted Blind Date on DVD was to see it letterboxed, as many of the sight gags stutter in pan-and-scan, but although the jokes are more fluid in widescreen, such as Kim Basinger (who's resolutely terrible here) sneaking a forbidden sip of champagne while a waiter distracts Bruce Willis (this is just one shot at 2.35:1 but a few at 1.33:1), the choreography between the actors and the roving camera is often ill-timed, regardless. About halfway through Blind Date, after the titular rendezvous has passed, Edwards stops pulling literal De Palmas (or Hitchcocks, as it were: there's an homage to Vertigo when Walter meets Nadia that's very close to clever) on the material. The film becomes blander for being suddenly overedited, settling into the quick-react rhythm of modern sitcoms. And boy, is Blind Date a late-eighties relic, full of swipes at Japan and sporting a canine character named Rambo.

If you must endure this sexist door-slammer with Willis muting his comic charms, hold out for Columbia Tri-Star's DVD release. It offers 16x9-enhanced widescreen and fullscreen options on the same side of a dual-layer disc. The transfer is actually first-rate, despite occasional edginess and inconsistent patterns of grain. A Dolby Surround track avoids the tinny quality of audio from films of the era, managing marginally full sound in a discotheque sequence (a scene that proves, if nothing else, that Edwards has never set foot inside a dance club). The only extra is Blind Date's trailer, featuring Walter on the telephone with his brother (the dearly-departed Phil Hartman) from jail, a framing device that apparently wound up on the cutting room floor.-Bill Chambers