Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [34]
“It was an awful film,” Harry Secombe once said with a hearty laugh, and he’s probably right, though Secombe’s claim is difficult to prove. Only snippets of the movie have ever been screened since its brief release in the late spring of 1951 to no attention whatsoever.
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More noteworthy if only by degree is Let’s Go Crazy (1951), a short-subject cabaret show with Peter in the center spotlight. He does five good impersonations in the course of the half-hour film, but singers, tumblers, and a comico-musical group called Freddie Mirfield and his Garbage Men keep breaking in. “Moderate variety filler” was Today’s Cinema’s seen-it-all-before assessment, though Peter’s subsequent superstardom now provides the spark the film lacked when Peter actually made it. It’s riveting to see brilliance in the making. In one characteristic skit he’s Giuseppe, the cabaret’s broadly Italian maître d’, who sports a huge handlebar mustache. Giuseppe laboriously attempts to talk a wealthy diner into ordering something Italian, but all the man wants is boiled beef and carrots. Giuseppe weeps.
Even better is Peter’s delightful Groucho Marx—not a caricature at all but an appreciative and subtle rendering. Groucho asks the waiter (Spike) if the restaurant serves crabs. Receiving an affirmative response, he hands over a crab and introduces it as his friend.
It’s not the gag itself that makes it work; Let’s Go Crazy’s writing is about as inspired as an elbow. (The waiter appears a little later and bumps a diner. “That was a close shave!,” the diner says, whereupon the waiter begins to shave him—a Loony Tunes shave complete with seltzer in the face.) It is instead the warm precision of Peter’s style that connects, the odd sort of painterly quality he lends to what is essentially a cheap burlesque. Countless other mimics have been drawn irresistibly to Groucho routines over the years—the stooped, leggy walk; the black Brillo eyebrows; the inevitable cigar incessantly flicked—but, being lesser talents, they tend to out-Groucho Groucho. Peter underplays him, and out of it emanates the essential spirit of Marx.
Peter’s Groucho is an aficionado’s pleasure, but he could also play to the raucous mob. Toward the end of Let’s Go Crazy there’s an all-too-brief appearance by the proud and robust Crystal Jollibottom. Wearing an absurd boa, she sits on a flaming celery stick. It’s the best moment in the film.
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May and June 1951 were bustling months for Peter Sellers. On Monday, May 7, Peter began an eight-week run at the Palladium. Since his last Palladium gig he’d played several other London houses—Finsbury Park, Balham, the Prince of Wales, the Hippodrome. He was by that point a proficient stand-up comedian, impressionist, and crowd pleaser. But as the theater management report pointed out, his audiences’ responses were largely if not entirely dependent on their familiarity with radio characters—others’ as well as Peter’s own—because those were the voices upon which Sellers played.
The manager also noted a certain tendency in Peter’s onstage demeanor, one that his friends had been noticing in his private nature: “I think that this act is getting better with each visit and could be exceptionally good if only there was a little more personality.”
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On Sunday, May 27, 1951—less than halfway through his run at the Palladium—Peter, along with Spike, Harry, and Michael, showed up at a small studio on Bond Street to record the first official episode of Crazy People. It aired the following day at 6:45 P.M. Sixteen more programs followed in the first series, one per week, over the course of the next four months.
As disjointedly manic as Goon Shows were in the years to come, the first year