[3] The newly shot material in the film stars Joanna Lumley as journalist Marie Jouvet searching for the missing Clouseau – and running afoul of the inspector's enemies who do not wish to see him return.

Travelling to the airport, he accidentally blows up his car trying to fix a pop-out lighter, but mistakenly believes it an assassination attempt, and disguises himself in a heavy cast on the flight, which causes complications in the air and on land.

Clouseau's flight disappears over the ocean en route to Lugash, and Marie Jouvet, a television reporter covering the story, sets out to interview those who knew him best.

Among the people she interviews are Dreyfus; Hercule Lajoy; Cato Fong; and former jewel thief Sir Charles Litton, who is married to Clouseau's ex-wife Lady Simone.

The shooting in Valencia was guarded by the Spanish National Police Corps and the United States Secret Service due to the involvement of President Ronald Reagan's daughter Patti Davis.

[3] Niven was in the early stages of ALS, and his voice subsequently proved too weak to loop his own dialogue during post-production; as a result, his lines were dubbed by impressionist Rich Little.

Other returning series regulars include Herbert Lom as Chief Inspector Dreyfus, Graham Stark as Hercule LaJoy (last seen in the 1964 Pink Panther film A Shot in the Dark), Burt Kwouk as Clouseau's faithful man servant Cato and André Maranne as Sgt.

The reason the question of outtakes being used had come up in Sellers's lifetime was that Edwards had shot and edited a two-hour version of Strikes Again, hoping to recapture the zany spectacle of The Great Race, with Dreyfus as the melodramatic villain in the fashion of Jack Lemmon's Professor Fate.

A London court subsequently ruled that the use of footage was illegal and awarded Frederick $1.475 million in damages but declined to bar the release of the film.

Using outtakes was, according to Edwards, a brilliant idea (shooting scripts for Return, Strikes Again, and Revenge demonstrate a great amount of comedic material from the three films that was left on the cutting room floor).

Edwards had originally hoped to construct a Citizen Kane-esque narrative, with Clouseau having gone missing at the very beginning of the story, whilst the memories of the supporting characters would showcase the deleted or unused content.

Unfortunately, MGM/UA refused to pay ITC the fee they were asking for the use of the Return outtakes, and Edwards fell behind schedule on shooting Trail/Curse (MGM/UA also ended up cutting both films' budgets considerably), with the result being that Trail failed to live up to its potential.

Edwards's wife, Julie Andrews, has an unbilled cameo as a cleaning lady, dressed as her friend Carol Burnett's charwoman character.