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“I auditioned Sinead with Peter, and Peter liked her,” Rakoff reports. “It was essential that there be some sort of chemistry between the two of them.” That there was. As Rakoff describes it, they got along “too well.”

“Peter said, ‘Let’s have dinner tonight,’ and she said yes, so he said, ‘I’ll pick you up.’ About 8:00 o’clock I heard the helicopter Peter had ordered. He took her to Paris for dinner. ‘Let’s have dinner’ became not ‘dinner’ but a love dinner at a very good Parisian restaurant. I would defy any beautiful girl not to fall in love with such a man. He was a very lovable guy when he wanted to be.”

The affair was intense, rather brief, and sequentially joyous and harsh. “Oh, they had terrible riles, those two, but again, who wasn’t riled with Peter Sellers?” says Rakoff.

Miranda Quarry didn’t go entirely missing while Peter was romancing Sinead. According to Rakoff, Miranda “was around all the time. She was around the night Peter said, ‘I don’t think you and I are going to get on.’ She was around then, and I knew it was fairly disastrous then. I told him—‘There’s nothing to this love, Peter.’ He hadn’t had his eye opened. He had certain questions about other women, so it didn’t appear that he was overwhelmingly, passionately single-minded about Miranda Quarry.”

• • •

“Please make yourself look as if you want to be fertilized.”

That’s Benjamin Hoffman (Sellers), leaning up against the bathroom door with a lascivious grin. Miss Smith (Cusack) has locked herself inside in terror. The film is full of such unpleasant lines, but that is its nature; it’s about a mean, lonely, middle-aged man and a mousy, trod-upon young woman. “What you’re doing to me is atrocious,” she spits. “It’s the filthiest thing I’ve ever heard of.” “Yes, I am filthy, yes,” he replies with a smirk, “but there’s no escaping one’s fate.”

“Miss Smith, you are here to be two arms, two legs, a face, and what fits in the middle.”

“There are two people in all of us—the child in the snapshot and the monster the child grows into.”

“Women are always hungry for something—fallopian tubes with teeth.”

He shows her the new flat he’s building for himself:

MISS SMITH: What’s wrong with the old place?

HOFFMAN: Oh, well, you know—treacheries, miseries, failure, despair.

At times, Peter inhabits Benjamin Hoffman so wholly that he appears to be speaking from his own heart:

“You were afraid to go out with me because of my maniac face,” he mentions. “Yes, girls all over the world are afraid of men with my expression—plain, sad-faced men. You look at us, all of you, and you’re right.” (In fact, of course, Peter Sellers rarely experienced this phenomenon in his life. Even before he glamorized himself for Sophia Loren, the actual sad-faced man generally got the beautiful women he sought, and their fear, if any, came later.) As he concludes his speech, he walks past the picture of Daniel Mendoza that happens to be hanging on Hoffman’s wall, glances up at it, and declares, speaking of the millions of melancholy men in the world, “Their day is coming. . . . Hope never dies in a man with a good, dirty mind.”

According to Alvin Rakoff, this was all scripted: “He was certainly capable of any sort of improvising he wanted. All you had to do was tell him to improvise. But the text of the script was there, and that’s the script we did.”

It is an astute, actorly performance on Sellers’s part. He plays Hoffman differently when Hoffman is not in Miss Smith’s presence; when she’s not around he becomes mutedly fidgety and insecure. When he knows she can see or hear him, he acts the cool lothario, spinning each line with insinuating inflection (or infection as the case may be). But even from her perspective it’s a failed performance. She sees through it and falls in love with him.

• • •

Hoffman may be a miniature, but it does contain one striking technical feat. There is a single shot that lasts for about eight minutes. Rakoff explains: “Peter said, ‘Can’t we . . . ?’ He was always asking, ‘Can’t we