Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [197]
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In late April 1979, when Peter viewed his next film, The Prisoner of Zenda (1979), in a screening room at Universal Studios in Burbank, he had a strong, sour reaction. The lights came up, he told Walter Mirisch, “You’ll be hearing from me,” and then he departed.
The next morning, he sent Mirisch a thirteen-point memo that described in excruciating detail how much he detested The Prisoner of Zenda. Halfway through the screening he began sweating and swearing; by the end he was in a blind rage. “I don’t know how I held myself in check that evening,” he told the durable British journalist Roderick Mann. “The version I saw was so bad! Mirisch has tried to turn it into a sort of poor man’s Pink Panther and shot extra scenes using doubles which I knew absolutely nothing about. I’m so upset and disappointed. I even thought of renting a billboard to voice my protests, or hiring the Goodyear blimp and putting a message on it. Don’t see it. It’s a disaster.
“I’m just not going to sit back and be clobbered. After all, I do know something about comedy.”
Stan Dragoti had originally been slated to direct The Prisoner of Zenda, but he was replaced by Richard Quine, the director of such slick and commercially successful pictures as My Sister Eileen (1955), The Solid Gold Cadillac (1956), and The World of Suzie Wong (1960). The film features Peter in three roles; his costars are Lionel Jeffries (with whom Peter had appeared in Two-Way Stretch, Up the Creek, and The Wrong Arm of the Law), Elke Sommer, and Lynne Frederick.
The story: King Rudolph IV of Ruritania (Peter as a sort of Bavarian Methuselah), floating high above his domain in a balloon filled with hot air, opens one too many bottles of champagne, pops a hole in the balloon, and stands in befuddled terror at his sudden descent. He lands in a tree in a faraway village and promptly falls into a well.
Meanwhile, in Ruritania, plots are afoot as General Saft (Jeffries) moves to subvert the monarchical process; meanwhile, in London, the king’s debauched son (Peter doing a particularly jaded Terry-Thomas) is amusing himself in a gambling hall when he’s told of his father’s demise. “The king is dead. Long live me,” Rudolph V pronounces.
Ruritanian ministers then hire a look-alike carriage driver named Syd (Peter doing a fairly standard Cockney) to impersonate the new king; he eventually falls in love with Princess Flavia (Lynne) and, in the end, assumes the throne himself. The Prisoner of Zenda is an expensive, flabby dud.
Peter’s Terry-Thomas voice is a bit florid, especially since he combines it with a speech impediment— ws serve as rs—which renders many of Rudolph’s lines unintelligible. Some are quite funny—“The cwown is mine!”—but all in all it’s still not one of Peter’s better efforts.
With Peter flush with cash and fame again—Revenge of the Pink Panther was the tenth-top-grossing film of 1978—he was firmly back in the groove as far as on-set antics were concerned. In some cases, he was probably right; the script was terrible, Quine’s direction indecisive, Walter Mirisch’s meddling unproductive. The film may legitimately have seemed to him to be headed for failure. But in other cases, Peter was just being Peter at his worst. Lionel Jeffries told (the real) Terry-Thomas privately that Peter’s behavior had been truly dreadful on the set one day, and that Peter had telephoned Jeffries about it later that night. “Was I really awful today?” Peter asked. “Well, yes,” Jeffries said, at which Peter laughed and hung up.
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The cut of The Prisoner of Zenda Peter had seen with Walter Mirisch was not the final one; the picture still required some dubbing on Peter’s part. He refused to do it.
A few days later, under threat of legal action, he did it.
Then he flew to Barbados for a month. Lynne stayed in Los Angeles. He rented the theater designer Oliver Messel’s old place by himself. From Barbados he flew to Switzerland