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The shot—which begins when Hoffman escorts Miss Smith back into the bedroom after she attempts to flee—was complicated to design and treacherous to execute. According to Rakoff, there were 118 camera positions for the cameraman and tracking crew. But they only had to do several takes, and Rakoff believes they used the first or second; Peter’s fears of brain damage from the heart attack were certainly given the lie by his ability to remember all the lines, gestures, and movement cues. Rakoff remains impressed by the social aspect of it as well. “Peter wanted to do a long take, so he put his teeth into it. It helped pull the unit together because they thought it was a remarkable achievement that, as a film crew, they could do this. Everyone kept saying it was impossible. But Peter liked the idea; he liked going for broke. I kept saying, ‘Okay, we’ll stop there,’ and he’d say, ‘No, let’s keep going.’ Sinead was in awe of him, of course, so she, too, was motivated.”

He wasn’t always in such control in front of the camera, the worst problem being a certain unreliability. “He was an actor who giggled a lot—that’s an endearing quality,” says Rakoff. “Once, right after lunch, he got a fit of the giggles, as actors can do. Anything we tried doing, he couldn’t stop giggling, and he had to leave the set—and the studio. That’s another thing—I’d never know if he’d ever come back. I said, ‘Okay, Peter, we’d better call it a day,’ and he was just giggling, and said, ‘I’ll try to come back tomorrow. I can’t be sure.’ ”

Rakoff recalls that Peter “arrived on the last day of shooting with gifts for everybody. He gave the camera operator a color television set—that was pretty rare in 1969. He gave Leica cameras, tape recorders, small portable radios. . . . His factotum, Bert, distributed them. When he came to Ben [Arbeid, the film’s producer] and me, he put his arm around both of us and said, ‘You two guys—I didn’t know what to get you, so what I want you to do is to take your wives, go on a trip to anywhere that you’ve wanted to go—anywhere in the world! And send me the bill.’ I looked at Ben, and Ben said, ‘Oh, that’s lovely—that’s a terrific gift!’ And I said, ‘Please, Peter, can I have a color television set?’

“He just laughed and went away. Ben said, ‘Why did you say that?’ I said, ‘Because it will never happen.’ He was like a bouncing ball. You know things are going to go wrong. Sure enough, Ben did go on a trip and sent Peter the bill. Peter ignored it.

“He meant it,” Rakoff is convinced. “At the time he absolutely meant it. He wanted us to go—that day.”

• • •

Rakoff always thought Hoffman’s pace was too slow: “It does have faults. I am to blame for some of them because I couldn’t cajole, applaud, whip Peter to play it faster. I couldn’t get it out of him, and that, I think, is the principle felony. But character-wise, it works. Sellers-wise it works.”

Actually, the film’s chief fault lies not with its pace but with its sound track, where an easy-listening 1970-vintage score belies both the cruelty and the poignancy of the drama. Hoffman treats Miss Smith abominably, and yet the musical score is that of a light romantic comedy. Even when their emotional tenors begin to shift, the slight and forgettable music sets the wrong tone.

Commercially, the film was a failure that never had the chance to be a critical flop. According to Bryan Forbes, Peter “entered into one of his manic depressive periods” during the production and demanded, upon completion, “to buy back the negative and remake it. . . . I had to take the blame.” According to Rakoff, Forbes’s own disputes within Elstree led to the film’s exceedingly poor distribution—so poor, in fact, that Hoffman waited until 1982 to be screened in a New York repertory house.

• • •

His faulty heart was necessarily on his mind, and together with his declining cinematic fortunes, Peter’s thoughts turned morbid. At the time, according to Rakoff, Peter talked about dying quite a bit. He told the director that he was planning to be cryogenically preserved. “He told me