• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Peter began filming another movie. Even after Much Binding in the Marsh and other postwar radio comedies had left the airwaves, British cinema still produced war-inspired comedy-dramas and even outright farces, as did Hollywood. The Boulting brothers, Roy and John, featured Gene Kelly in Crest of the Wave (1954); Billy Wilder had William Holden in Stalag 17 (1953); and John Ford showcased James Cagney in What Price Glory? (1952). Peter Sellers’s next film, Orders Are Orders (1954), is part of the same cycle, though it lands on the far side of Francis Goes to West Point (1952).

Filmed at Beaconsfield Studios (and no, there are no reports of Peter having tried to impress the front gate by signing in as the Fifth Earl), and released in the autumn, Orders Are Orders is a military farce in which an American film company overruns a British army camp in an attempt to film a B-grade, ray-gun–filled sci-fi movie on the grounds. Despite his increasing fame as a Goon, Peter is far from the top of the cast, a position occupied jointly by Margot Grahame, Brian Reece, and Raymond Huntley. Peter plays the subservient but graft-grabbing Private Goffin. Looking purposely dumpy, he’s stuck with an ill-fitting white valet jacket that pulls severely at the bottom button. Corrupt but ineptly so, Goffin takes a conspiratorial attitude with the brash Hollywood director, who wants to pay somebody off to get the camp’s cooperation. This is not high comedy. At the vulgar moment when Goffin first encounters the glamour-puss starlet tagging along with the production he actually licks his lips.

The highlight of this eminently inexpensive exercise is the preposterous fifties Martian Girl costuming employed to outfit the outerspace invaders. Complete with flapping antennae and bodices that resemble Jantzen swimsuits, they’re irresistible getups, especially when Peter ends up in one. His is composed of a sequined, V-shaped top that looks like two gaudy beauty-contest sashes meeting in the middle. It’s paired with a short black skirt. At one point Peter runs onto the makeshift sci-fi set in a little cardboard spaceship powered, like Fred Flintstone’s car, with his feet. The rest of the film is of no interest. Even at Peter Sellers’s bottom-rung position in British cinema, the material was beneath him.

• • •

Peter’s omnidextrous voice was still his best asset, and one day it reached the ears of the European production head of Columbia Pictures. Mike Frankovich was in his car on the way to the airport and, to kill time, he tuned into the BBC. At the end of the radio play that happened to be on, Frankovich was stunned to hear the announcer say, “All the characters were played by Peter Sellers.”

“We were doing Fire Over Africa with Maureen O’Hara at the time,” Frankovich told the Hollywood gossip columnist Sheilah Graham some years later. “I needed English and American voices of all classes. When I returned to London, I called Peter and asked him to do the seven voices and paid him £250 for the lot.” Disembodied movie voices were a fine sideline. According to Peter, by the time he did the voices in Fire Over Africa—and he always claimed that there were seventeen, not seven, and that they were all individuated Spaniards—he’d performed four voices for the sound track of John Huston’s Beat the Devil (1953), including that of the film’s star, Humphrey Bogart, who’d suffered tooth damage in a car accident and couldn’t provide some of his own dialogue. He also went on to perform his chestnut Churchill in the opening moments of The Man Who Never Was (1956), not to mention a drunk, a newsreel announcer, a taxi driver, and a couple of crones later in the film.

Peter also performed a more bizarre audio cameo, uncredited, in a Joan Collins South Seas epic called Our Girl Friday (1954). He’s the voice of a shrieking cockatoo:

Sadie Patch (Collins) is on a ship somewhere in the Pacific. There’s a shipwreck. Everybody piles into a lifeboat, but, in sight of shore, it sinks. Sadie is washed onto the beach, and, with her back to the camera, she removes