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it took to shoot in three-strip Technicolor, resulted in multiple takes of almost every scene. Peter was used to cheaper productions, of which the one-take, two-week Penny Points to Paradise was only the most extreme example. And he was quite unnerved by the careful and methodical Mackendrick’s demand that he—and Guinness, and Katie Johnson, and everybody else—play the same scene over and over again in front of fully loaded, softly humming cameras. Mackendrick simply wanted to use the best of a variety of takes; Peter kept assuming that something had gone wrong each time, but he never could tell what it was.

From Peter’s perspective, Alec Guinness was a soothing influence as well as a generous performer with whom he could share a scene. During the production of The Ladykillers, Guinness offered Peter a piece of advice: “Don’t ever let the press know anything about your private life.” Peter told the press later that Guinness had been “patient enough to listen to me for hours as I spoke about my problems and aspirations.”

Peter also claimed that Guinness was so impressed with his performance that he sent a note to a prominent English film critic, Cecil Wilson: “If you want a hot tip for the future,” Guinness is said to have written, “put your money on Peter Sellers.”

But in private, Guinness grew concerned about Sellers’s influence on him. According to the critic Kenneth Tynan, during the production of The Ladykillers, and for a long time thereafter, Peter “sought Guinness’s advice at every opportunity, so assiduously that Guinness began to be worried, and even to suspect that his own personality was being absorbed by some process of osmosis into that of Sellers.”

A dogged apprentice and a paranoid master: Sellers’s relationship with Guinness played perfectly into the film. Like so many of his performances, Guinness’s rendition of Professor Marcus is one of exquisite gestures and exacting timing: an insinuating tilt of the head, a jaunty hip jiggle to the tune of the string quintet, all with an air of suspicion toward everyone around him. Sellers’s Harry is much less flamboyant. Peter lets his face and body go absolutely slack when Harry listens to Professor Marcus’s instructions. Enthralled to the point of stupefaction, Harry is a stylish Teddy Boy, but not a particularly smart or hammy one.

Mrs. Wilberforce inadvertently ruins the criminals’ scheme from the start, but the old bat’s suspicions are aroused only after she closes the front door too soon on One-Round, who, with the strap of his cello case stuck in the door, gives a hard yank and money flies out, all over the street. She has got to be killed:

MARCUS: It ought to look like an accident.

HARRY: (with a dawning inspiration) How about suicide?! (The other crooks gaze in amazement at his stupidity while Harry eagerly moistens his lips.) Get her to write a note, you know? “I just couldn’t stand it no more, signed Mrs. Wilberforce,” and then somebody goes down and hangs her! (He jerks enthusiastically on his own black Teddy Boy tie.)

But one by one the men kill each other instead. Mrs. Wilberforce survives. Because the police know she’s batty, she gets to keep all the money for herself. Peter’s Harry meets his end in a farcical chase during which he emits pipsqueaky sounds of panic until his final line: “Where’s your sense of humor, One-Round?” at which point One-Round clobbers him to death with a plank.

• • •

“He struck me as a very charming, chirpy little spiv with a big car—a red Bentley—prominently parked every morning,” Herbert Lom says, looking back on his first film with Peter Sellers. “He was very nice. We struck up a friendship.” Lom makes a particular point about working with Peter. As an actor, Lom declares, Peter “was very generous,” meaning that he didn’t find ways of upstaging his colleagues, stealing their thunder with distracting tics and gestures of his own.

There were offscreen pranks. Lom, his fellow actors, and some members of the crew couldn’t help but notice Peter’s ostentatious devotion to the big red Bentley, so they thought they