D. Albert Ross
Colour
Let’s be honest, ‘The Sound of Music’ has caused more deaths than any other movie.
I know that might sound like a contentious theory at first, but bear with me. There’s something about those nuns singing such terrible sickly songs to those creepy, godawful kids that just makes the blood of hitherto right minded people boil. (The old joke is that ‘The Sound of Music’ is a frustrating story of how the Nazis failed to kill seven revolting children.) ‘Natural Born Killers’ and ‘Dexter’ may get the headlines, but I think if an enterprising criminologist was looking for instances where someone snapped – where some sane and peaceful part of a hitherto upstanding member of the community just broke – he or she would find that in the background was a viewing of Robert Wise’s ‘The Sound of Music’. I speak from personal experience: that shot of Dame Julie spinning around on the hill makes me want to go out and bludgeon kittens.
So it’s interesting that right after that movie was made, Julie Andrews herself seemed to respond with violence.
In this genteel, but bloody, comedy Dame Julie plays the eponymous Mrs Garter, a widow who lives in a delightfully opulent house in Bloomsbury and apart from wearing black every day seems to lead a charmed life. Seeking to seduce this charming bereaved lady is Peter Sellers, as Wilberforce Cartwright-Smyth, a dapper and fake white hunter and the bluebeard of the Victorian age. He intends to marry Mrs Garter and take possession of all her money. So begins an expert seduction, which Mrs Garter seems to find impossible to resist. However Mrs Garter has her own secret – she poisoned her last husband and the husband before that and the husband before that. So both parties have murder on their mind, but who will succeed first and will they fall in love beforehand?
Andrews does nothing here that would be considered particularly funny, but in her prim and proper, no fuss approach to murder, she’s absolutely perfect for this movie and the perfect foil for Sellers. (If she couldn’t sing, she might have found her niche as a counter culture version of Margaret Dumont.) Everything he does becomes funnier because it’s so grounded by her. Indeed she brings him back down from the high moments of excitement and loudness that he was prone to at this point in his career – a mugging desperation in the pursuit of laughs. This was the period of ‘Hoffman’, ‘The Ad Man’ and ‘There’s a Girl in My Soup’ all of which show a somewhat misogynistic star. This movie could have been distasteful in the same way, but Andrews’ charm and strength of her performance negates that. She makes even the most unbearably excited version of Peter Sellers bearable (and funnier).
Apparently the two actors couldn’t stand each other (and Andrews would soon marry another of Sellers’s nemeses [he was a man who had more than one], Blake Edwards), but maybe that helped as well – as much like Alec Guinness and Hayley Mills the other week, these two would be murderers retain a certain wariness to each other even in the wooing, and the whole drips with delicious malice.
Showing posts with label Peter Sellers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Peter Sellers. Show all posts
Wednesday, 19 November 2014
Sunday, 20 July 2014
Mr Hargreaves (1959)
D. John Guillermin
B&W
If ‘Mr Hargreaves’ was green-lit today, it would be as “’Lucky Jim’ meets ‘The Manchurian Candidate’”. Whether that’d work as a pitch today I don’t know, it does rather assume that your average film executive is not only savvy enough to have come across Kingsley Amis, but also capable of dismissing warnings that he isn’t a big draw with the 18-25 demographic. I’m glad though that in 1959 Kingsley was a big enough name to get it into production. ‘Lucky Jim’ is clearly hard-wired into its DNA, right there to the smudges on its fingers. To be fair, ‘The Manchurian Candidate’ was still a couple of years from reaching the box office (the book had been written however); but the fact that Frank Sinatra and Angela Lansbury were still waiting and playing solitaire doesn’t matter. Few places knew as much about cold war paranoia as Great Britain and it’s with sweaty, nervous and anxious palms that the Brits go to the well here.
In an unnamed provincial university a lecturer arrives, he is very polite and ingratiating, but there’s just something not right about him. Gradually fellow faculty members and students become suspicious and after some snooping evidence emerges suggesting that he is in fact a Soviet spy, there to assassinate the Prime Minister on an upcoming visit.
This is a cracklingly tense movie, all shot in the small poky rooms of a regional English town – but those box-like, cell-like spaces edited together to be edgy and claustrophobic. But what really makes this film great is the identity of the mysterious, suspicious professor, as we have here Peter Sellers at the height of his powers.
Still in his chubby phase and not quite as old as his character should be, Sellers excels at creating a great blankness. He later joked that he was all mask, that there had been a real him but he’d had it removed. This is the film which shows that aspect more than any other, presenting a character who is all façade, a moral nothingness hidden by good manners. Yes Mr Hargreaves is polite, yes he’s outwardly pleasant, yes he’s obsequious – but there’s always something absent behind his eyes. It’s a performance of great skill: creating a man who seems to be an inoffensive two dimensional human being, then slowly revealing a moral void underneath.
(Later on, when he was lost to broad comedies, did Sellers not look back and think how brilliant he once was and that he should try and make movies like this again?)
Richard Todd and Janette Scott (as fellow lecturer and student respectively) are the team which work together to expose him, and they’re both perfectly serviceable in their stock roles. But in the background we have Beryl Reid as a soused French professor who seems barely able to speak French; Bill Kerr as the sports mad, loutish, Aussie poetry professor; and William Hartnell looking old and smiling genially as the professor of a subject so ancient it’s been forgotten. It ensures that there’s some colour and comedy in the staffroom in what would otherwise be a very serious, taut and paranoid black & white film.
At the forefront though is Sellers, taking on the kind of role money, fame and madness would soon snatch him away from, and if you’ve ever seen ‘The Party’ or ‘After the Fox’ you’ll know what a damned, crying shame that was.
B&W
If ‘Mr Hargreaves’ was green-lit today, it would be as “’Lucky Jim’ meets ‘The Manchurian Candidate’”. Whether that’d work as a pitch today I don’t know, it does rather assume that your average film executive is not only savvy enough to have come across Kingsley Amis, but also capable of dismissing warnings that he isn’t a big draw with the 18-25 demographic. I’m glad though that in 1959 Kingsley was a big enough name to get it into production. ‘Lucky Jim’ is clearly hard-wired into its DNA, right there to the smudges on its fingers. To be fair, ‘The Manchurian Candidate’ was still a couple of years from reaching the box office (the book had been written however); but the fact that Frank Sinatra and Angela Lansbury were still waiting and playing solitaire doesn’t matter. Few places knew as much about cold war paranoia as Great Britain and it’s with sweaty, nervous and anxious palms that the Brits go to the well here.
In an unnamed provincial university a lecturer arrives, he is very polite and ingratiating, but there’s just something not right about him. Gradually fellow faculty members and students become suspicious and after some snooping evidence emerges suggesting that he is in fact a Soviet spy, there to assassinate the Prime Minister on an upcoming visit.
This is a cracklingly tense movie, all shot in the small poky rooms of a regional English town – but those box-like, cell-like spaces edited together to be edgy and claustrophobic. But what really makes this film great is the identity of the mysterious, suspicious professor, as we have here Peter Sellers at the height of his powers.
Still in his chubby phase and not quite as old as his character should be, Sellers excels at creating a great blankness. He later joked that he was all mask, that there had been a real him but he’d had it removed. This is the film which shows that aspect more than any other, presenting a character who is all façade, a moral nothingness hidden by good manners. Yes Mr Hargreaves is polite, yes he’s outwardly pleasant, yes he’s obsequious – but there’s always something absent behind his eyes. It’s a performance of great skill: creating a man who seems to be an inoffensive two dimensional human being, then slowly revealing a moral void underneath.
(Later on, when he was lost to broad comedies, did Sellers not look back and think how brilliant he once was and that he should try and make movies like this again?)
Richard Todd and Janette Scott (as fellow lecturer and student respectively) are the team which work together to expose him, and they’re both perfectly serviceable in their stock roles. But in the background we have Beryl Reid as a soused French professor who seems barely able to speak French; Bill Kerr as the sports mad, loutish, Aussie poetry professor; and William Hartnell looking old and smiling genially as the professor of a subject so ancient it’s been forgotten. It ensures that there’s some colour and comedy in the staffroom in what would otherwise be a very serious, taut and paranoid black & white film.
At the forefront though is Sellers, taking on the kind of role money, fame and madness would soon snatch him away from, and if you’ve ever seen ‘The Party’ or ‘After the Fox’ you’ll know what a damned, crying shame that was.
Wednesday, 2 July 2014
The World Cup and Saucer (1967)
D. Spike Milliga (and apparently an uncredited Richard Lester)
B&W
No doubt this would have been more successful and better known if it had been released actually during the World Cup in 1966, but since it was made on the fly during the tournament itself by two friends primarily concerned with amusing themselves, then commercial prospects weren’t high on anyone’s agenda. Working with no script and seemingly no idea what to do at the start of each day, the two friends ad-lib their way through the entire 64 minute running length of the film, making silly jokes, putting on ridiculous accents and appearing in ludicrously hit and miss (mainly miss) sketches. It all sounds incredibly tedious, doesn’t it? The kind of movie that would now appear on Youtube, the braying laughter of the cameraman accompanying every moment that’s supposed to be remotely funny. It sounds like the kind of thing most people would rather poke their eyes out with sharpened sticks rather than watch; but then given the old friends in question are Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers, even self-indulgence is not going totally devoid of comedy.
Some of it is, to be fair, almost inspired. The ongoing travails of World Cup Willy – the lion which served as a mascot for the whole tournament – who at various points finds himself stuck outside a palace with his tail caught in the door, attacked by poodles and propositioned by an overly-amorous gay lion, did make me laugh. The highlight though is the insert of a long piece of stock footage of a bus caught in traffic with Sellers dubbed over bus driver trying to explain to the Argentinian team that they are not lost, all the time it being clear they are very, very lost. (“This is the Norwich district of London.”) I also enjoyed Spike Milligan’s Swedish man who clearly is only using the World Cup as an excuse to eat in every restaurant in London. Fifteen years later that character would be called Mr Creosote.
Unfortunately we also get the other side of the Sellers/Milligan dynamic, which is what we would call ‘ethnic humour’. The presence of so many people of different nationalities, of different skin colours, just lets these two white boys crack out the make-up and funny accents. Some of it isn’t bad, I suppose: Milligan’s Mexican footballer and Seller’s Spanish footballer meeting up and just being totally unable to understand each other, for instance. But then elsewhere we have Nazi West Germans and overly lazy Portuguese in skits that don’t start well and don’t get better the longer they go on. Most distressingly though is Milligan’s Pakistani meeting Sellers’ Indian both under the impression that this is a cricket tournament, and the comic misunderstandings that occur as they try to find the game with the bats. Milligan grew up in India and denied that any of this was meant in a racist fashion, but even if we take that at face value it’s incredibly regressive, more than a little unfortunate and a sign that sometimes even comic geniuses have feet of clay.
B&W
No doubt this would have been more successful and better known if it had been released actually during the World Cup in 1966, but since it was made on the fly during the tournament itself by two friends primarily concerned with amusing themselves, then commercial prospects weren’t high on anyone’s agenda. Working with no script and seemingly no idea what to do at the start of each day, the two friends ad-lib their way through the entire 64 minute running length of the film, making silly jokes, putting on ridiculous accents and appearing in ludicrously hit and miss (mainly miss) sketches. It all sounds incredibly tedious, doesn’t it? The kind of movie that would now appear on Youtube, the braying laughter of the cameraman accompanying every moment that’s supposed to be remotely funny. It sounds like the kind of thing most people would rather poke their eyes out with sharpened sticks rather than watch; but then given the old friends in question are Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers, even self-indulgence is not going totally devoid of comedy.
Some of it is, to be fair, almost inspired. The ongoing travails of World Cup Willy – the lion which served as a mascot for the whole tournament – who at various points finds himself stuck outside a palace with his tail caught in the door, attacked by poodles and propositioned by an overly-amorous gay lion, did make me laugh. The highlight though is the insert of a long piece of stock footage of a bus caught in traffic with Sellers dubbed over bus driver trying to explain to the Argentinian team that they are not lost, all the time it being clear they are very, very lost. (“This is the Norwich district of London.”) I also enjoyed Spike Milligan’s Swedish man who clearly is only using the World Cup as an excuse to eat in every restaurant in London. Fifteen years later that character would be called Mr Creosote.
Unfortunately we also get the other side of the Sellers/Milligan dynamic, which is what we would call ‘ethnic humour’. The presence of so many people of different nationalities, of different skin colours, just lets these two white boys crack out the make-up and funny accents. Some of it isn’t bad, I suppose: Milligan’s Mexican footballer and Seller’s Spanish footballer meeting up and just being totally unable to understand each other, for instance. But then elsewhere we have Nazi West Germans and overly lazy Portuguese in skits that don’t start well and don’t get better the longer they go on. Most distressingly though is Milligan’s Pakistani meeting Sellers’ Indian both under the impression that this is a cricket tournament, and the comic misunderstandings that occur as they try to find the game with the bats. Milligan grew up in India and denied that any of this was meant in a racist fashion, but even if we take that at face value it’s incredibly regressive, more than a little unfortunate and a sign that sometimes even comic geniuses have feet of clay.
Wednesday, 15 January 2014
The Caribou Caper (1978)
D. Clive Donner
Colour
Peter Sellers, that gifted and subtle character actor of the 1950s, had truly morphed into a monster of a performer by the latter half of the 1970s. One who was quite happy to crash through all his scenes with as broad a characterisation as possible and carrying a side of ham on a platter the whole way. This was the period where he had just returned to prominence thanks to 'The Pink Panther' movies, never the most understated (or by this point reliably funny) of films and Sellers now seemed to regard any movie he was in as an extension of Inspector Clouseau. Everything he did had to be as loud and brash and hi-hi-hi-larious as possible, except when Sellers is on the screen generally only the first two apply.
And that’s a shame as this is a film that really cries out for a subtler Peter Sellers, perhaps not the everyman performer of the 1950s, but the 1960s model who could glide through the original 'Pink Panther' without deliberately pushing over every apple cart he could find.
Peter Sellers and Michael Caine are brothers, I know it’s difficult to believe when you look at them, but then elsewhere in cinema history Sean Connery played Dustin Hoffman’s dad and a woman named Katy Elder managed to birth two sons with a 36 year age difference. Sometimes you just have to go with these things. They’re not just any brothers mind you, but high-end criminal brothers who have carried out a series of daring jewel thefts across Europe. Now they want one more job, Caine so he can have security on the yacht he plans to sail around the world, and Sellers because it will help him fulfil his life-long dream of buying Napoleon’s underpants. And to do this they target wealthy American movie star, Caribou Curvaluv, (played with her usual levels of bored adequacy by Raquel Welch), but what happens when they each fall in love with her?
First things first, this is a film way out of time. In the sixties Sellers had the original ‘Pink Panther’, Caine had ‘Gambit’ and Welch had ‘Fathom’ – but nobody was making this kind of high-class caper romp in 1978. It’s perversely, ridiculously out of time and no amount of jokes about OPEC, President Carter and the British letting a woman lead a political party is going to solve that. What’s more these are three actors who could easily have made this film ten years earlier, and now seem a bit – well – gone to seed. Sellers, as was starting to be apparent in ‘The Ideas Man’, can’t help but look like a creepy uncle as he ogles young women in bikinis; Caine has that red-faced, sweaty, over-done potato look that he would later wheel out for the likes of ‘Blame it on Rio’, while Welch does shape up well, but one wouldn’t want to leave her in front of a radiator for too long. Let’s be fair, the set-up, the script, the leads would all have appeared better and more fitting in 1968.
It’s an odd film then and that’s before we get to the Peter Sellers factor.
You can really see the importance of collaboration in a film when it isn’t happening properly. Here is a case in point. Sellers and Caine don’t actually have that many scenes together. In the few they do, there is an easy camaraderie between there, a mutual respect. One wouldn’t really believe they were brothers, but they certainly come across as two people who have known each other a long time. When they’re apart though it’s perfectly clear they’re in completely different films. Caine is a likeable cockney, a classy villain, who is looking for one final job to assuage his mid-life crisis; Sellers is a barnpot who speaks constantly in a loud, manic voice and dreams of owning Napoleon’s underpants. It seems that on getting the script for a ‘classy crime comedy’, Caine paid attention to the word ‘classy’, while Sellers blew up the word ‘comedy’ into eighteen foot high letters.
Sellers tramples over everything in his path in his desire to get a laugh. Clearly not listening to Welch’s lines so he can comically leer at her and mug to straight to camera – in addition we have raising of eyebrows, desperate hand gestures and jumping over other actor’s lines, even when they’re seemingly crucial to the plot. It’s clearly the performance of a man out of control. And Caine’s subtler take on his part just makes it look worse.
As such this is a strange out of place, utterly disjointed, film – but one which, I suppose makes you feel like you’re getting two movies for the price of one.
Colour
Peter Sellers, that gifted and subtle character actor of the 1950s, had truly morphed into a monster of a performer by the latter half of the 1970s. One who was quite happy to crash through all his scenes with as broad a characterisation as possible and carrying a side of ham on a platter the whole way. This was the period where he had just returned to prominence thanks to 'The Pink Panther' movies, never the most understated (or by this point reliably funny) of films and Sellers now seemed to regard any movie he was in as an extension of Inspector Clouseau. Everything he did had to be as loud and brash and hi-hi-hi-larious as possible, except when Sellers is on the screen generally only the first two apply.
And that’s a shame as this is a film that really cries out for a subtler Peter Sellers, perhaps not the everyman performer of the 1950s, but the 1960s model who could glide through the original 'Pink Panther' without deliberately pushing over every apple cart he could find.
Peter Sellers and Michael Caine are brothers, I know it’s difficult to believe when you look at them, but then elsewhere in cinema history Sean Connery played Dustin Hoffman’s dad and a woman named Katy Elder managed to birth two sons with a 36 year age difference. Sometimes you just have to go with these things. They’re not just any brothers mind you, but high-end criminal brothers who have carried out a series of daring jewel thefts across Europe. Now they want one more job, Caine so he can have security on the yacht he plans to sail around the world, and Sellers because it will help him fulfil his life-long dream of buying Napoleon’s underpants. And to do this they target wealthy American movie star, Caribou Curvaluv, (played with her usual levels of bored adequacy by Raquel Welch), but what happens when they each fall in love with her?
First things first, this is a film way out of time. In the sixties Sellers had the original ‘Pink Panther’, Caine had ‘Gambit’ and Welch had ‘Fathom’ – but nobody was making this kind of high-class caper romp in 1978. It’s perversely, ridiculously out of time and no amount of jokes about OPEC, President Carter and the British letting a woman lead a political party is going to solve that. What’s more these are three actors who could easily have made this film ten years earlier, and now seem a bit – well – gone to seed. Sellers, as was starting to be apparent in ‘The Ideas Man’, can’t help but look like a creepy uncle as he ogles young women in bikinis; Caine has that red-faced, sweaty, over-done potato look that he would later wheel out for the likes of ‘Blame it on Rio’, while Welch does shape up well, but one wouldn’t want to leave her in front of a radiator for too long. Let’s be fair, the set-up, the script, the leads would all have appeared better and more fitting in 1968.
It’s an odd film then and that’s before we get to the Peter Sellers factor.
You can really see the importance of collaboration in a film when it isn’t happening properly. Here is a case in point. Sellers and Caine don’t actually have that many scenes together. In the few they do, there is an easy camaraderie between there, a mutual respect. One wouldn’t really believe they were brothers, but they certainly come across as two people who have known each other a long time. When they’re apart though it’s perfectly clear they’re in completely different films. Caine is a likeable cockney, a classy villain, who is looking for one final job to assuage his mid-life crisis; Sellers is a barnpot who speaks constantly in a loud, manic voice and dreams of owning Napoleon’s underpants. It seems that on getting the script for a ‘classy crime comedy’, Caine paid attention to the word ‘classy’, while Sellers blew up the word ‘comedy’ into eighteen foot high letters.
Sellers tramples over everything in his path in his desire to get a laugh. Clearly not listening to Welch’s lines so he can comically leer at her and mug to straight to camera – in addition we have raising of eyebrows, desperate hand gestures and jumping over other actor’s lines, even when they’re seemingly crucial to the plot. It’s clearly the performance of a man out of control. And Caine’s subtler take on his part just makes it look worse.
As such this is a strange out of place, utterly disjointed, film – but one which, I suppose makes you feel like you’re getting two movies for the price of one.
Sunday, 12 January 2014
The Ideas Man (1970)
D. Robert Parrish
Colour
So, how will ‘Mad Men’ end? How will Don Draper cope with the final days of the 1960s? Will a swarm of hippies take over Sterling Cooper, lured there by Roger and the promise of LSD? Will Peggy and Joan stage a management buy-out, and guide their new firm in a truly feminist direction with copies of ‘The Female Eunuch’ and ‘Spare Rib’ scattered about the place? Or will the final shot be a close-up of Sally Draper taking a puff of a specially rolled cigarette, the younger generation hailing in the 1970s through a haze of marijuana smoke?
Maybe we can hunt for clues in this neglected 1970 comedy about advertising, one of the many, many, many, many Peter Sellers films which now sit ignored and gathering dust in our collective memory. Much like his friend and sometime co-star, Michael Caine (we’ll cover some of their work together later this week), Sellers seemed to delight in just making total and utter tripe. We all remember ‘The Pink Panther’ films (although we can probably agree there that quality was rarely the watch word), we of course know ‘Doctor Strangelove’ and we have a soft spot for ‘Being There’. But amongst those high points there is masses of crap, a troupe of elephants worth of crap, literally your mind would explode if you tried to visualise just how much crap there is.
What are we waiting for?
Peter Sellers is Simon Harper, a new arrival at a Madison Avenue ad agency. He comes with a big reputation, apparently having done fantastic work in Britain and looking to make it in Manhattan. Unfortunately the ad agency has chosen the wrong Simon Harper, this one has flunked out of every ad agency he ever worked at and is a joke back home. However his guileless self-confidence carries him through and he acts as if he’s earned his position. And of course when he comes up with his simple, childish ideas the yanks love them. They see it as a new wave in advertising, clients are eating out of his hand and before long he’s the wunderkind of New York. (Although ostensibly a satire on advertising, isn’t this scenario really just a swipe at Americans? After all this character was a flop in sophisticated Britain, but in New York his work is apparently infantile enough to be cutting edge). Of course this is the same type of thing Sellers would later do with Chancy Gardner, though probably the reason this film is less well known is that ‘Being There’ doesn’t try to marry it to the occasional Inspector Clouseau pratfall or a disconcertingly rampant libido.
If you’ve seen ‘Mad Men’, then you’ll see all the trappings in their original form. There are the very bright late 60s wall dressings and furniture, there are the girls in miniskirts, there is even a buxom redhead (although nowhere near as swoonsome as Christina Hendricks). And what’s more, once his ‘talent’ starts to show Sellers finds himself fawned over and flirted with by nubile young sweetie after nubile young sweetie. Peter Sellers as Don Draper, before Don Draper even existed. A far-seeing spoof that comments on advertising, work place politics of the time and two nations separated by a common language – whilst also peering forward to one of our finest modern day dramas.
And yet none of it works.
Peter Sellers, the fat boy of 1950s British cinema lost weight and decided he wanted to be a sex symbol. This change from just wanting to make people laugh to wanting to be James Bond had a terrible effect on his career. It’s a basic truism that it’s hard to be funny whilst also portraying yourself as a successful ladies man. The comedy of failure is just too seductive; the comedy of failure in actual seduction doubly so. As a result this film stops being a comedy, and just becomes a fantasy for a randy middle-aged man who wants to cop off with young flesh (while occasionally slipping out of an office swivel chair). There’s actually a pattern of this in Sellers’ career - his randy forty something shagging Goldie Hawn comedy ‘There’s a Girl in My Soup’ has not aged well, nor his attempts to seduce his own wife in ‘The Bobo’. It must have been nice to get the girls, the kissing scenes no doubt boosted his ego – but, seriously, why is this supposed to be funny? Even in 1970 the hand of our middle aged star creeping up the thigh of his just turned twenty secretary, would surely have counted more as ‘ewwww’ creepy rather than ‘roll around on the floor, clutch our sides, piss ourselves with laughter’ merriment.
At the end a cameoing Roger Moore arrives as the real and unbelievable glamorous Simon Harper, the one who succeeded in London. It involves another comic pratfall from our star, but Moore exposes Sellers as a fraud. But here’s the thing, Sellers work was so good he has won the respect of his colleagues and peers, they decide to stay with the idiot savant manqué anyway. Why not? They’re all making money and living the life, so what’s not to like? And maybe that’s how ‘Mad Men’ should end. It turns out the real Don Draper didn’t die in Korea and instead walks back through the doors of Sterling Cooper to claim his place. But the power of consumerism wins out and our Don gets to keep his name and his life and they all live happily ever after.
And I will love the show more than I already do, if in this big revelation, the returning Don Draper is played by – please, please, please – Sir Roger Moore!
Colour
So, how will ‘Mad Men’ end? How will Don Draper cope with the final days of the 1960s? Will a swarm of hippies take over Sterling Cooper, lured there by Roger and the promise of LSD? Will Peggy and Joan stage a management buy-out, and guide their new firm in a truly feminist direction with copies of ‘The Female Eunuch’ and ‘Spare Rib’ scattered about the place? Or will the final shot be a close-up of Sally Draper taking a puff of a specially rolled cigarette, the younger generation hailing in the 1970s through a haze of marijuana smoke?
Maybe we can hunt for clues in this neglected 1970 comedy about advertising, one of the many, many, many, many Peter Sellers films which now sit ignored and gathering dust in our collective memory. Much like his friend and sometime co-star, Michael Caine (we’ll cover some of their work together later this week), Sellers seemed to delight in just making total and utter tripe. We all remember ‘The Pink Panther’ films (although we can probably agree there that quality was rarely the watch word), we of course know ‘Doctor Strangelove’ and we have a soft spot for ‘Being There’. But amongst those high points there is masses of crap, a troupe of elephants worth of crap, literally your mind would explode if you tried to visualise just how much crap there is.
What are we waiting for?
Peter Sellers is Simon Harper, a new arrival at a Madison Avenue ad agency. He comes with a big reputation, apparently having done fantastic work in Britain and looking to make it in Manhattan. Unfortunately the ad agency has chosen the wrong Simon Harper, this one has flunked out of every ad agency he ever worked at and is a joke back home. However his guileless self-confidence carries him through and he acts as if he’s earned his position. And of course when he comes up with his simple, childish ideas the yanks love them. They see it as a new wave in advertising, clients are eating out of his hand and before long he’s the wunderkind of New York. (Although ostensibly a satire on advertising, isn’t this scenario really just a swipe at Americans? After all this character was a flop in sophisticated Britain, but in New York his work is apparently infantile enough to be cutting edge). Of course this is the same type of thing Sellers would later do with Chancy Gardner, though probably the reason this film is less well known is that ‘Being There’ doesn’t try to marry it to the occasional Inspector Clouseau pratfall or a disconcertingly rampant libido.
If you’ve seen ‘Mad Men’, then you’ll see all the trappings in their original form. There are the very bright late 60s wall dressings and furniture, there are the girls in miniskirts, there is even a buxom redhead (although nowhere near as swoonsome as Christina Hendricks). And what’s more, once his ‘talent’ starts to show Sellers finds himself fawned over and flirted with by nubile young sweetie after nubile young sweetie. Peter Sellers as Don Draper, before Don Draper even existed. A far-seeing spoof that comments on advertising, work place politics of the time and two nations separated by a common language – whilst also peering forward to one of our finest modern day dramas.
And yet none of it works.
Peter Sellers, the fat boy of 1950s British cinema lost weight and decided he wanted to be a sex symbol. This change from just wanting to make people laugh to wanting to be James Bond had a terrible effect on his career. It’s a basic truism that it’s hard to be funny whilst also portraying yourself as a successful ladies man. The comedy of failure is just too seductive; the comedy of failure in actual seduction doubly so. As a result this film stops being a comedy, and just becomes a fantasy for a randy middle-aged man who wants to cop off with young flesh (while occasionally slipping out of an office swivel chair). There’s actually a pattern of this in Sellers’ career - his randy forty something shagging Goldie Hawn comedy ‘There’s a Girl in My Soup’ has not aged well, nor his attempts to seduce his own wife in ‘The Bobo’. It must have been nice to get the girls, the kissing scenes no doubt boosted his ego – but, seriously, why is this supposed to be funny? Even in 1970 the hand of our middle aged star creeping up the thigh of his just turned twenty secretary, would surely have counted more as ‘ewwww’ creepy rather than ‘roll around on the floor, clutch our sides, piss ourselves with laughter’ merriment.
At the end a cameoing Roger Moore arrives as the real and unbelievable glamorous Simon Harper, the one who succeeded in London. It involves another comic pratfall from our star, but Moore exposes Sellers as a fraud. But here’s the thing, Sellers work was so good he has won the respect of his colleagues and peers, they decide to stay with the idiot savant manqué anyway. Why not? They’re all making money and living the life, so what’s not to like? And maybe that’s how ‘Mad Men’ should end. It turns out the real Don Draper didn’t die in Korea and instead walks back through the doors of Sterling Cooper to claim his place. But the power of consumerism wins out and our Don gets to keep his name and his life and they all live happily ever after.
And I will love the show more than I already do, if in this big revelation, the returning Don Draper is played by – please, please, please – Sir Roger Moore!
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