Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [40]
Then again, this was never meant to be art. On the first day of shooting, Peter cornered the director, Maclean Rogers. “I feel,” he began, “that the character I am playing has certain undercurrents of repression, which I might best express by having a noticeable twitch.” Maclean was blunt: “I’ve got eight minutes of screen time a day to shoot. Do it quickly.”
It’s a caper. Spies try to steal a secret nuclear formula. They fail.
Harry Secombe cuts the back off a woman’s skirt with a pair of scissors. Michael Bentine pulls Harry’s apron down. The best comedy bit is taken by Spike and Harry: “Guerrilla warfare? I know that!,” at which point they both begin doing a chimp routine. There’s a laughing-gas/crying-gas sketch that would have made even Shemp blush.
The chorus girls, corralled into an earlier Army-camp-workout-turned-dance-number, reappear toward the end of the movie in an ENSA-like evening’s entertainment for the camp. Backstage, Carole Carr turns to Spike and Harry. “I’m on next!” she tells them. “As soon as I’m through I’m going over to get the formula back before my second number!”
Inanely—and not in a good way—Colonel Bloodnok takes the stage after Carr’s song and proceeds to amuse the audience with an impersonation of an American army officer from a Hollywood movie he saw the week before. It’s Peter, not Bloodnok, and it makes no sense, especially since the whole point of the beloved Bloodnok is that he has little talent for anything but intestinal distress. Forced by circumstance, however—the circumstance being that the producer, E. J. Fancey, needed to pull this bit of cheap taffy into a feature-length thread—the bumbling Bloodnok reveals himself to be a cabaret star of exquisite skill. The routine is just an excuse to let Peter shoehorn in an impression routine: a Midwestern American army man and his fast-talking, Brooklynesque subordinate.
Osric Pureheart comes on next with an equally misplaced nightclub schtick. It’s Bentine and his old chairback routine.
More disturbing, and consequently a lot funnier, is the fact that Down Among the Z Men provides a rare chance to see Bentine’s Pureheart as well as hear his voice. In addition to Bentine’s ridiculous hairiness and drastic British underbite, he gives Pureheart a truly wacky bandy-legged walk, the ghastly gait of a madman with testicular issues.
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The Goons’ main focus (for good reason) remained the BBC radio, where The Goon Show was evolving artistically from its initial run. It wasn’t necessarily better yet, as the Goonographer Roger Wilmut notes. It was increasingly popular with audiences, but it remained relatively unrefined.
Musical numbers by Max Geldray and the Ray Ellington Quartet continued to break each program up into discrete episodes, even as the plots (or what passed for them) became more or less coherent. These interruptions became a standard part of the show for the duration of its long run. They served to regularize the chaos, and they did so in a familiar sort of music hall way that the absurdist Goon Show’s rather less-than-intellectual listeners could hook into whenever the senseless noises and bizarre jokes got to be too much. Ying tong iddle I po, and here’s Max Geldray with “I’m Just Wild About Harry.”
Even Goonish senselessness hadn’t quite hit its stride yet. Spike, it comes as little surprise to learn, was a more or less undisciplined writer. And the Goons were all anarchic as performers. They did what they pleased, and what pleased them included mumbling and stepping on each others’ lines. The producer, Dennis Main Wilson, was tolerant of their unpredictable behavior as well as their