Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [191]
His accent worsens further; now even his own name verges on unintelligibility. (“Yes, this is Chief Inspector Clyieuzaeauh.”) The disguises go just as far: Clouseau purchases a new “Quasimodo Hunchback Disguise Kit” with an inflatable helium hump and ends up floating over the rooftops of Paris and past Notre Dame until he shoots off the helium release valve in his crotch and plops into the Seine. (“Feurtunately zere was sufficient air still left in my heump to keep me afleut until the rescyeau.”)
There’s an anachronistically eerie moment when the evil Dreyfus causes the United Nations Building in New York City to disappear. It’s violent insanity as a response to gross stupidity:
DREYFUS: What do you suppose they will call the crater? “The Dreyfus Ditch”! (He laughs maniacally.)
KIDNAPPED PHYSICIST: There shall be no crater.
DREYFUS: No crater? But I want a crater! I want wreckage! Twisted metal! Something the world will not forget!
But the laser beam Dreyfus sets off only makes the building disappear from the Manhattan skyline without a trace.
“What kind of a man are you?” the physicist asks Dreyfus. “A madman,” Dreyfus replies.
• • •
The Pink Panther Strikes Back contains the most purely ghastly comedy sequence in Peter Sellers’s career. The comic tone is beyond baroque:
Dreyfus has a toothache. Clouseau, dressed with a frizz of white hair, a sort of Alpine Einstein, administers laughing gas to himself and to Dreyfus and extracts the tooth—the wrong tooth—with a pair of pliers while, because of the excessive heat in Dreyfus’s lair, Clouseau’s latex-laden geezer makeup begins to melt off his face. To the sound of the two men’s incessant spastic laughter, Clouseau’s face dangles in great, pendulous globs from his nose. The laughter becomes shriller and more mirthless as Clouseau, physically disintegrating, frantically grabs handfuls of his face and packs them back onto himself. Following through perfectly on Clouseau’s philosophical trajectory all through the Panther series, his disguise decays at the same pace as rationality. It’s ugly to watch, as it was clearly meant to be.
“How’s this?” Clouseau asks Dreyfus of his own badly reconstructed head. “Grotesque!” Dreyfus shouts, both of them laughing in agony.
Peter Sellers’s innate ability to sustain such a complex and peculiar tone has rarely if ever been matched. Attempts by others to play Clouseau—Alan Arkin in Inspector Clouseau (1968), Roger Moore as Jacques Clouseau in Curse of the Pink Panther (1983), Roberto Benigni as Jacques Clouseau, Jr., in Son of the Pink Panther (1993)—necessarily ended in dull failure. One of the world’s foremost Peter Sellers fans, Maxine Ventham, makes a crucial point when she observes that “Clouseau would be unbearable—and is unbearable when played by other actors—if he didn’t have those sad, vulnerable, dark eyes peering out at the world.” Look at Peter’s melancholy eyes as Clouseau’s face falls off in globs and you will see precisely what she means.
• • •
It wasn’t a happy shoot. Lesley-Anne Down was not a happy trouper. Each day, she says, “There would be at least an hour of doing absolutely nothing. It would just be Peter being very silly. Little by little we would start working on an idea. And it would be just one shot. Very often, that’s all we would get in a day—one shot. A film that had a schedule of eleven or twelve weeks ended up taking twenty weeks to do.”
“He had terrible feuds with other people,” Herbert Lom recalls with a certain distaste, “for instance, Blake Edwards. They were not on speaking terms. He used to send messages to Blake about the scene, and Blake used to send messages through his assistant to Peter, and we all stood around looking at the ceiling till they stopped playing their game.” Moreover, Lom adds, “Blake showed me telegrams he had received: ‘You are a rotten human being.’ ‘You are a shit and I can afford to work without you.’