peter sellers: is he really so good?

Think, man, think! The reverence arises from the very simple fact that Mr. Sellers was a very good comic actor who made movies that made millions upon millions of dollars for their producers. The true source of the reverence is the money, not the talent -- although the talent was certainly there.

But yes, Lom's facial tics etc. = genius.

i hate dr strangelove obv

His performance in Lolita - yikes. So fucking brilliant. Subversive even. Maybe my favorite performance by ANYONE, EVER. Even Pauline Kael agrees with me (a rare event indeed). There's also a movie called Battle of the Sexes from a Thurber short story in which he's very good indeed.

Spike Milligan was probably funnier, but Sellers was the better actor. Most of his performances went downhill after the PP series took off, and he started to turn into a bit of a self-parody. Being There was the one shining moment in the Seventies.

B-but, whaddabout Catch 22?

I think the reason why PS is so good in Dr Strangelove and Lolita is that Kubrick was the only director who actually stood up to Sellers' hissy fits, answered him back and directed him. In his book Lewis speculates how good Sellers might have been as the Patrick Magee character in Clockwork Orange or even as Jack Torrance in The Shining.

The other running theme through the biog is that up until he became an International Star (and the heart trouble started - Lewis essentially argues that he was a walking ghost for the last 16 years of his life) he did good work but afterwards was, with a very few exceptions (I really want to see The Blockhouse), content to settle for caricatures rather than characters. Again and again he rejected offers to do Beckett, Pinter, King Lear, The Alien under Sayjavit Ray (ET 15 years ahead of its time), probably because he feared that if he tried Proper Acting he would be "found out." It's significant that he never even considered doing any dramatic work in the theatre; he probably felt a fake doing that sort of thing and in any case had enough of what he called "fuck you money" not to bother himself with it unduly. It was the same with Kenneth Williams; started out as a legit actor (Saint Joan, Welles' Moby Dick - Rehearsed) but afterwards (with the significant exception of Joe Orton) generally settled for what he termed "low farce." Maybe he just wasn't that good a straight actor - no footage survives of his Dauphin or his multiple appearances with Welles, so we can't really judge. I agree that The Goon Show is notably unfunny, and not just for age/time-related reasons either; after all, Hancock, Round the Horne etc. are still eminently funny and listenable.

Actually, in PP tradition, I remember back in the day, the time a pal of mine nicked one of the huge retort stands and made it onto the bus with it. He had the base under one foot and ran the pole all the way up his trouser leg, under his blazer and up the back of his neck. The teachers just figured he had a limp. What a legend he was, for a time.

Why it was called a retort pouch, I have absolutely no idea.

yeah, it's been my favorite biography ever since it came out, even though I think they cut out about 400 pages when it was published in America. I guess they figured Americans weren't that interested in Peter Sellers. (admittedly I doubt anyone is as interested in PS as RL is)

Really? FUCK. Now I've got to buy it again!

'I'm All Right Jack' definitely one of his greatest performances, and a real late-'50s time capsule to boot. Marvellous.

Hal Ashby!! Wow, mucho mucho drug intake in 'Easy Riders, Raging Bulls'.

And yes, PD, the Lewis biog of Burgess is equally great - it opens with this amazing setpiece of AB visiting Richard Ellman sometime in the mid-80s and carries on in a similar tone (eg loathing and contempt) for the next 400 odd pages - v. bracing stuff, and certainly not another shilling life that will give you all 'the facts'

"Lolita" is his finest performance; I always remember Lewis' description of Quilty's contemptuous air of aloofness - from a normal plane of life - on the dancefloor, when he first encounters Shelley Winters. "Dr Strangelove" and "Being There" are of course highly recommended. "The Naked Truth" is a very interesting early British one; giving PS a chance to show his range with an impressionist, sardonic character. "The Optimists" is quite a maudlin, but a very effective encapsulation of Old London-on-the-cusp-of-change. Sellers plays Dan Leno effectively - who he was obsessed by, for a time.

Also because no one has mentioned After The Fox, which more folks really need to see - if only for Sellers' hilarious riffs on Fellini.

I like some other Cavalanti's as well.

Aargh. Cavalcanti.

Went the Day Well? and even Nicholas Nickelby. David Lean disparaged the latter as how not to do Dickens, but there is some great stuff in it. Among other things, in the cast you will find Stanley Holloway, Bernard Miles, and Sally Ann Howes, along with Michael Balcon's daughter– and Daniel Day Lewis's mother, Jill Balcon.

There's a lot of talk about The Party upthread.

The text I was talking about is A Critical History of British Cinema, by Roy Armes.

Found a review! https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00315249.1980.9944034

And a review of another book that seems more interesting: https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/pdf/10.3366/JBCTV.2006.3.1.172

Anyway, nutshell is that any random British Sellers film is highly likely to be more enjoyable than, say What's New Pussycat?

The first Pink Panther movie is showing before Heavens Above!. I believe it is not as good as A Shot in the Dark but I might try and see it anyway.

Tbh I do think your average old British film is less likely to be enjoyable than your average old Hollywood film - a lot of stuff is pretty stodgy and uninspired. But it's an unfair comparison...Hollywood had the greatest artists of Europe running to its shores and of course SO MUCH MORE money. Is the average old British film less likely to be enjoyable than the average old French film? Can't really say, I still haven't explored sufficiently beyond the big masterpieces and don't have a TV channel showing old French films all day long...

I enjoy the first Pink Panther, more for David Niven and Claudia Cardinale being charming than Sellers. You can make it a RIP tribute screening.

Was thinking something similar. While I am waiting for Girl with a Suitcase to resurface.

Wrt his comedic Indian persona(e): have we discussed that none other than Satyajit Ray considered casting him in a never-made project called The Alien, also notable for having supposedly "inspired" Spielberg to make E.T.?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Alien_(unproduced_film)

Sellers has some nicely-choreographed scenes of buffoonery in the original Pink Panther which are the highlight of the film. As entertainment, it barely moved the needle for me when Sellers isn't there. Cardinale's scene as a drunk was good for the first three or four minutes, but went on far too long.

The Life and Death of Peter Sellers was on TV the other week. odd film, central thesis seems to be that he was an annoying prick.

I thought Sellers was great in the first Pink Panther, he's either doing or setting up some kind of physical comedy in almost every shot it seems. But there is big chunk of the film in the middle - 20 minutes? - where he doesn't appear at all and instead you get to see Robert Wagner skiing or whatever.

Lol

One thing I really like David Niven in is Bonjour Tristresse.

_The Life and Death of Peter Sellers_ was on TV the other week. odd film, central thesis seems to be that he was an annoying prick.

I'll never be able to find the exact quote, but I seem to recall one of his wives saying something like "I wish he was that warm, loving character he is on the screen when he was at home."

Which I found extra amusing and disturbing at the same time since that's not quite how I would characterize his screen presence.

“I tried so hard to understand Sellers,” Ekland says in retrospect. “I related his dark moods to the pressures and ambiguities of his genius. Where was the warmth, humor, and humanity he generated on the screen? There were interludes when he was truly a loving, gentle, and generous human being, but these moments were like flashes of sunshine.”

"The manic, antic, logorrheic crazy man turns out to have some sort of mood disorder/attachment issues etc. Who could ever have guessed?"

"You make it sound like that was a bad thing!"

As with any big star, there were many blanks for every bullet. One of the projects Peter was involved in that year was The Russian Interpreter, to be directed by Michael Powell. They met at the Dorchester on March 4, 1967, at which time Peter told Powell, the director of such classics as The Red Shoes (1948) and Peeping Tom (1960), that he wasn’t the right director for his own project. Powell asked him who he would suggest. Peter replied, “I don’t know, but not you.” When Powell recorded the incident in his diary, the entry was a single word: “Peterloo.”

Based on Lolita and a couple of Pink Panthers, as a film composer Henry Mancini >>>>>> Nelson Riddle.

Burt Bacharach also much better than Riddle.

Robert Wagner is now the only surviving cast member from The Pink Panther. Was he ever actually good in anything apart from It Takes a Thief and the Austin Powers movies?

He always comes across as a dud in this kind of jeune premier role.

Wagner was genuinely creepy in A Kiss Before Dying (1956), that's all I've got.

He was quite funny in the Derek&Clive album

Best book I've read on English cinema is still Durgnat's A Mirror for England, useful introduction to the most recent edition here:

https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/A_Mirror_for_England/S1jyDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PA8&printsec=frontcover

The Life and Death of Peter Sellers was on TV the other week. odd film, central thesis seems to be that he was an annoying prick.

Semi-adapted from the Roger Lewis biography, one of the greatest books about a film star ever written. Lewis's central thesis - Sellers was insane.

Sounds about right.

Ya think?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDz8sQWnC7w

Durgnat's books have typically been impossible to find in the US or else extremely expensive. Did see a new collection of his essays edited by Enrique in the MoMI shop the other day though. Also hadn't known Durgnat studied with Thorold Dickinson. Makes sense.

Heh, just found this:

We have seen already how decisive the 1960s were in fixing a negative view of British cinema. In 1970, Raymond Durgnat attempted to counter this view, with his pioneering survey book A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to Affluence. But it was an uphill struggle. He reported a viewing of Brief Encounter at the Baker Street Classic in London in the mid-1960s, among a crowd ‘convulsed by loathing’. ‘The audience in this usually polite and certainly middle-class hall couldn’t restrain its derision and repeatedly burst into angry exasperated laughter.’

That's from near the beginning of Charles Barr's British Cinema: A Very Short Introduction.

Been thinking that a certain scene in After the Fox is an hommage to something from Hitchcock's second The Man Who Knew Too Much.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Buqs3hLrr0o

One of the big surprises of the retro was ONLY TWO CAN PLAY. With Mai Zetterling!

Don't know where else to continue the discussion of un-septic British cinema (should it have it's own thread? Does one exist already?) but am now curious about a film with Deborah Kerr and Trevor Howard called I See a Dark Stranger.

Done. Launder and Gilliat, the Boultings etc.

In particular this post and beyond:
Post by a ZX spectrum is haunting Europe (Daniel_Rf) from peter sellers: is he really so good?

_Basically feel like I had been taught that there were The Archers, early Hitchcock, the better Kordas and Ealing comedies, steer clear of all the rest._

Some faves that fall outside those borders:

Dance Pretty Lady
Men Are Not Gods
Two Thousand Women
Green For Danger
They Made Me A Fugitive
Snowbound
Good Time Girl
Seven Days To Noon
Home At Seven
The Good Die Young
The Hell Drivers

Cutting this list off at the end of the 50's because after that you get a flurry of activity - Woodfall and the kitchen sink stuff, Hammer, all the groovy 60's films we have a thread for - that I think truly cements the old British star system as a bygone era.

Aargh I forgot the second step of the trick.

I checked A Mirror for England from the library.

Me too!

Feel like there is a line in either the first or second Pink Panther movie which is a quote from Laura but perhaps it originated before that.

Hah, seems like Jim Hutton also said it on Ellery Queen.

I'm loving the hell out of the Durgnat.