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A military sex farce set in an ornate bordello, Soft Beds, Hard Battles is an awful movie—“an almost creepily witless endeavor,” as Vincent Canby wrote in the New York Times—that may have looked even worse on paper. It makes There’s a Girl in My Soup seem like Molière. Men insistently jerk their batons, poke their swords, and tilt champagne bottles up at the crotch. Hitler appears at the bordello to pay his respects to the madam, Madame Grenier (Lila Kedrova), but when an African prostitute comes into view, the Fuehrer is disgusted. “Eine schwartze!” he cries. When the first of Peter’s Frenchmen, General Latour, goes before a firing squad, he slumps forward and his toupee falls off. “The truth cannot be camouflaged,” the narrator intones. Comedy bits include beds that spring up suddenly and hurl hapless Nazis down an air shaft as well as flatulence-inducing elephant pills slipped into glasses of champagne. The Nazis fart themselves to death.

Toward the end, the whores flee to a convent where they masquerade as nuns. That’s where Prince Kyoto comes in—Peter in waxen yellowface, foldless eyes, and an overbite. “Fetch watah an’ towah!” Prince Kyoto barks after a bumbling “novice” spills a tray of food on his pants. It ought to go without saying that she rubs the stains off his groin. It is very sad.

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The pirate comedy Ghost in the Noonday Sun (1973) is even worse. Spike Milligan cowrote the script, based on Sid Fleischman’s successful children’s novel. Spike costarred in the film as well. Peter Medak, who made the successful satire The Ruling Class two years earlier, directed. It was shot in sunny Cyprus, and it’s still ghastly. Peter fought with Tony Franciosa (who plays the Fairbanks-like Pierre) and walked off the set twice. The production team built a tall ship to specifications, but the specs were off; it was too tall and rocked violently and couldn’t be steered.

Peter personally asked Larry Pizer to shoot the film. One day well into the production, Peter invited Pizer to a small, intimate party. Victoria Sellers sat on Larry’s knee. They all sang songs and had a good time. The following day Peter had Larry fired.

Says Pizer, “I had to leave the island that day, like I had the fucking plague or something.” A few weeks later, Pizer got a letter. “Chaos is supreme here,” Peter wrote. “Don’t be unhappy. It has nothing to do with you.”

Even at the time of the firing Pizer knew it wasn’t personal. “He wanted to get at Peter Medak,” is Pizer’s simple explanation; like Peter’s harassing the After the Fox publicist as a way of venting his rage toward Vittorio De Sica, Peter still needed to communicate his desire to get rid of his director by proxy. A year or so later, Pizer ran into Peter at a party. Peter wanted to talk about it and explain, but Pizer turned away and they never spoke again. And yet, Pizer concludes, as so many did, “He was a pleasure to work with in many ways.”

Peter plays a pirate named Dick Scratcher. Spike plays his rival, Billy Bombay. The unpleasant film itself ends in bickering: The last shot is of Dick Scratcher buried up to his chin in the dry ground, with Billy Bombay tied to a tree with rope so thick and plentiful that it verges on mummification, and they’re bickering interminably. On the day it was shot, the production crew of Ghost in the Noonday Sun saw the chance to exact their revenge. They recorded a parody calypso number detailing every rotten thing that occurred during the shoot and forced the helpless Peter and Spike, physically restrained, to listen to it.

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The Blockhouse was brilliant, but it wasn’t released. Neither was Ghost in the Noonday Sun. Nor Hoffman. (The Blockhouse was finally shown in New York in 1981; Hoffman in 1982; Ghost in the Noonday Sun was released later on video.) Where Does It Hurt? made money because it was intensely cheap. The Optimists was dreary, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Soft Beds, Hard Battles were dreadful disasters. With six duds in a row, Peter’s most personal project, Being There, hadn’t a chance of getting made.

Gene