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By PAUL BRENNER
The sad-eyed British master comic Peter Sellers once said of himself, "There used to be a me
behind the mask but I had it surgically removed." In the world of film comedy, Sellers was the man who never was. With a
genius for immersing himself into his character inventions to the point where a consistent Sellers was unrecognizable
from film to film, Sellers was, at heart, was a complete cipher, a real film comedy Zelig. But although the "me" behind
the mask was blank, the ever-changing masks were not simple-minded caricatures but full-blown portrayals of emotional
depth. Sellers' film work divided between his smaller budgeted British productions, which were more character driven
("I'm All Right Jack," "Heavens Above!"), and American and international productions, where Sellers played more broad
and farcical ("The Pink Panther," "The Party"), culminating in his quiet and subtle Oscar-nominated performance in
"Being There," a few years before his death at age 54, a film that melds the two strains.
Today when one thinks of Sellers, one recalls his high-octane comic turns for Blake Edwards ("The Pink Panther" series)
and Stanley Kubrick ("Dr. Strangelove" and "Lolita"). And it is the large shadow cast by those films that obscured his
British work of the late fifties and early 1960s. At least until now. Now with the Anchor Bay release of the six-disc
series, "The Peter Sellers Collection," Sellers' more provincial British work can be assessed and appreciated.
The six films in the collection carry Sellers through from small supporting roles to international comic star. "The
Smallest Show on Earth" from 1957, finds Sellers as a member of a blue-ribbon stock company of British second bananas
(Margaret Rutherford, Barnard Miles, Sidney James) but the stars are Virginia McKenna and Bill Travers, as a young,
perky couple who inherit a run-down cinema. Sellers, at the time in his early 30s, plays an elderly film projectionist
in an effective, British repertory fashion.
In the Boulting Brothers satire, "Carlton-Browne of the F.O." (1958), Sellers is a sleazy and corrupt prime minister of
a fictitious island country called Gaillardia, but the film is essentially a Terry Thomas vehicle, with Sellers a
trifling speck of food between Thomas' gapped teeth. The minor roles would become things of the past after the Boulting
Brothers' 1959 labor and class satire, "I'm All Right Jack," with Sellers in a career-making performance as Socialist
shop steward Fred Kite (the role garnered him a British Academy Award). This time Thomas is relegated to the supporting
cast and while the film begins as a vehicle for Ian Carmichael, as a simpleton Oxford graduate working as a day laborer
in a missile factory, once Sellers arrives, the film belongs to him and he takes no prisoners.
"Two-Way Stretch" of 1960 is a minor league incarceration comedy in the manner of "We're No Angels" and the later,
dreaded, television comedy series "Hogan's Heroes." Sellers is Dodger Lane, an inmate in a British prison, living large,
who concocts of jewelry robbery with the help of obsequious priest-in-disguise Wilfrid Hyde-White. Sellers is a priest
himself in The Boulting Brothers' 1963 satire of religious hypocrisy "Heavens Above!" By now a true superstar, Sellers
is the whole film, playing the beaming, idealistic Reverend John Smallwood, whose insistence on following the Bible and
tending to both rich and poor brings on a governmental crisis. Brock Peters, alone among the supporting cast, manages to
hold his own against Sellers in a delightfully angelic comic turn.
Fast forward to 1970. In the intervening seven years, a series of bad, post-Panther film choices put Sellers' career in
a holding pattern (it will be only a few before Sellers -- along with Blake Edwards -- in an act of career desperation
is forced to revive Inspector Clouseau in "The Return of the Pink Panther") and Sellers ended up returning to his
British roots in the disturbing drama "Hoffman." In this film, Sellers, unmasked, plays a middle-aged businessman who
blackmails a young typist to spend a week with him. Perhaps channeling the emptiness within himself, Sellers delivers a
bitter, cynical, and, in the end, poignant performance in this weird amalgam of "Two for the Seesaw" and "The
Collector." In a more just world, this small film would have won Sellers an Oscar. But with the world as it is it is
justice enough to have "Hoffman" back in circulation. With this role, the sad-eyed Sellers now had a "me" behind his
mask.
The extras in the collection are minimal. A well-written Peters Sellers biography appears on all six DVDs and there are
also trailers for "Hoffman" and "I'm All Right Jack" on the two discs. |
