Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [56]
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Peter continued to appear in film comedy shorts in the twenty-minute to half-hour range. Even more than Mukkinese Battle Horn, these were steps backward in terms of artistic adventure, but they provided exposure, they occupied his mind, and they paid.
Dearth of a Salesman, from A.B.-Pathé, was released in early summer. Hector Dimwittie (Sellers) attempts to become the best salesman in Britain, tries vainly to sell toilet supplies and moves quickly on to washing machines and tape recorders, suffering all the while the gross indignity of a too-successful brother-in-law. “Peter Sellers works hard,” Today’s Cinema opined; “handy footage appeal”—in other words, there was enough celluloid to keep the audience awake before the feature began. Insomnia Is Good for You, running roughly the same length, was released shortly thereafter. Typically for the businessman culture of the fifties, it featured salesman Hector again, now unable to sleep. “A normal, lazy, married man,” is how the film describes the newly successful Hector. His boss has demanded a meeting on Monday morning for reasons Hector can’t fathom. Unable to stop spinning fantasies of his boss’s fierce temper, Hector fails to sleep for sixty-two hours. Unlike the avant-garde comedy Peter did with Spike or Michael Bentine, the material practically writes itself, to its detriment. Hector tries to remember cherished verse; he can’t. He worries about his job; that he can do. And, in the end, the reason for the meeting? His boss wants him to take a client out for a night on the town. “Falls very flat,” Monthly Film Bulletin scoffed.
And there was Cold Comfort, from C. M. George Film Productions. Today’s Cinema’s review, in toto: “Gentle thumbnail lecture on how to catch a cold and keep it. Radio star Peter Sellars (sic) illustrates it, mainly in pajamas, and the homely domestic touches will strike a responsive chord anywhere.”
This was all very well as far as it went, but it hadn’t gone nearly far enough for Peter. Nightclubs, cabarets, radio, stage, television, big roles in short films, short roles in big films, and one sizable role in a masterpiece. Peter Sellers saw himself as stuck.
He had his toys, his cars, his friends, his wife, his son. He had his mother.
What he felt was lack.
PART TWO
IN WONDERLAND
1957–64
SEVEN
“ ‘Curiouser and curiouser!’ cried Alice,” as she finds herself growing to enormous proportions after having simply followed the directions given to her.
She eats the cake, grows larger and larger, and discovers that she is unhappier than ever.
Soon she is swimming in a pool of her own tears.
Peter Sellers’s cinematic stock rose again in 1957, paradoxically in a film called The Smallest Show on Earth (1957), in which he plays a loyal if drunken film projectionist. The film’s director, Basil Dearden, had been one of Ealing’s most prolific—twenty-one films in fifteen years, the most commercially successful of which was the 1950 drama The Blue Lamp, which caused a great stir thanks to its radical portrayal of British law enforcement. (For once the copper wasn’t a bungling boob.) But like Alexander Mackendrick, Dearden had had enough of Michael Balcon’s regimentation at Ealing, and by 1957 he’d left the studio. He made The Smallest Show on Earth, a surprisingly bitter comedy, for British Lion.
The story: Matt Spenser and his wife, Jean, inherit a movie theater in the North. They’re a cute 1950s English couple—a pretty, sharp-chinned blonde cheerfully married to a beefcake husband. She’s good-natured, a great gal; he’s a little dim but not without a certain magnetism, a British Tab Hunter with lovehandles and a slightly higher IQ. A screwball couple updated to the 1950s, Matt and Jean are played by Bill Travers and Virginia McKenna, who went on to star in the wildlife movie that inspired the Oscar-winning song “Born Free” (1966).
They’re looped when they arrive at their destination,