Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [176]
Gene Gutowski took an option for the film rights. “I had a deal with MGM—a very quick one I made when the book was a bestseller. Kosinski gave me the rights because he thought I had done such a good job with the Polanski pictures, and he trusted me. Through a social friendship with Kirk Kerkorian, I was able to get it right through the management of MGM, and very quickly I had an okay to go ahead with the picture. It was then on the basis of Gore Vidal writing the screenplay. Gore was happy to do so. It all happened in forty-eight hours. Then Kosinski changed his mind under the influence of a friend of his, a Polish cameraman who wanted to direct the picture and said to Kosinski, ‘Look, with Gore Vidal writing the screenplay, you’ll never have full control.’ It was very self-serving, because he wanted to direct the picture. The project disintegrated, and of course MGM stepped out.”
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What Peter made instead was another filmed production of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1972), which consisted entirely of famous featured performances with lots of animal heads. Peter plays the March Hare. He filmed his rather short sequence at Shepperton in June 1972.
Despite its all-star cast—including Michael Crawford, Spike Milligan, Dudley Moore, and Ralph Richardson—Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland turned out to be, in Peter’s words, “a lousy film.” He was publicly enthusiastic about the movie’s prospects while it was still being shot, but as he announced to the press after seeing the thing, “We all feel—I’m speaking on behalf of all the actors because we all spoke about it—that it’s a poorly constructed piece of movie.” Fortunately for Peter, or at least for Peter’s art, he left London soon after completing his work on Alice and went off to the Channel Islands to film one of the best but least-known movies of his career.
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The Blockhouse (1973) is about a group of Allied prisoners of war who happen to be building fortifications on the northern coast of France when D-day hits. With bombs falling all around them, their Nazi guards flee, leaving the prisoners unsupervised. They dive into a well-stocked bunker, where a perfectly targeted Allied bomb seals them in, and they die, one by one, over time.
“It’s based upon a true story,” the director Clive Rees explains. “Actually, they were German soldiers who were looting a warehouse when the Red Army was coming. The entrance was blown up by the Germans, who trapped their own people inside. Years later the place was opened up. Two people were found alive, four or five dead and bathed in flour, and of the two people who came out alive, one died ten minutes after rescue, the other thirty-six hours later, blind and insane.”
Sellers plays the Frenchman, Rouquet, a quiet former teacher. There was little difficulty in piquing his interest in the role. “Oddly enough, we just rang him up,” says Rees. “Anthony Rufus Isaacs, who was the producer, knew him greatly. He was in Ireland and married to Miranda, who was a bit ill—she was recovering from meningitis—and we went over to see him. She liked it a lot and told him to read it, and he should do it, and we talked briefly, and he said yes.
“Dennis Selinger then got on to us, and said that Peter had changed his mind and wouldn’t do it at all, because obviously the kind of money we had would only be enough for a bit part. So we rang Peter up and said, ‘You don’t want to do it?’ He said, ‘That’s rubbish. I do want to do it. I will do it.’ So he did it.” Always a Goon at heart, Peter evidently appreciated the ultimate absurdity of being buried alive by the greatest liberation army in human history.
“William Morris told us that Charles Aznavour (who plays Visconti) didn’t want to do it either,” Rees adds, “and yet he did want to do it. We flew over to Paris, where his