Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [66]
A bit simplistic but still very funny, The Mouse That Roared did well enough at the box office in England, but it was much more widely popular in the States, probably because its satire struck a more genial note with the benefactors of American foreign relations largesse than it did with the recipients. And while Peter gives one great and two good performances in the film, he hadn’t yet achieved the kind of direct, natural rapport with the camera that eventually made him a superstar. Tully is the weakest of the three for exactly that reason; agreeable blandness barely registers on celluloid unless the actor is a technical genius. The two caricatures, Mountjoy and Gloriana, required much less skill because they were built on excess.
Gloriana XII remains one of Peter Sellers’s greatest creations. With a bust too large and a voice too deep, she’s Margaret Rutherford with testes.
Tully pleasantly introduces her to his American captives:
TULLY: Your Grace, uh, this is General Snippet—he’s a rear general.
SNIPPET: I warn you, Madam, I know the Geneva Convention by heart!
GLORIANA: Oh, how nice! You must recite it to me some evening. I’ll play the harpsichord!
A few years later, Shenson asked Peter if he’d be interested in starring in the sequel, Mouse on the Moon (1963). Sellers was by that point an international star, so he rather loftily turned Shenson down. In fact, by that point Peter had stated in public that he never liked The Mouse That Roared to begin with. Shenson ended up replacing him with two other actors—Ron Moody and, yes, Margaret Rutherford. (Moody played Mountjoy; there was no Tully.)
But Peter did suggest a director for the picture: Richard Lester. “Who’s he?” Shenson asked. “He’s another American—you met him at my house at my Christmas party.” Lester did end up directing Mouse on the Moon for Shenson, after which the producer-director team went on to make A Hard Day’s Night (1964).
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One summer day Peter took his new Paillard Bolex 16mm movie camera into an open field at the end of Totteridge Lane in North London and shot some footage of Spike acting up. Dick Lester added some stuff, and the film ended up getting nominated for an Oscar.
The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film (1959) was a game played by buddies—a way of having fun for about £70. Graham Stark pitched in, along with his girlfriend, Audrey (who later became his wife). Joe McGrath did the titles. Bruce Lacey, a props manager at Granada Television, managed to come up with some props. Johnny Vyvyan and David Lodge appeared, as did the comic Mario Fabrizi.
Milligan missed the second day of shooting, which occurred some time after the initial shoot. Bitterness resulted.
Spike: “Most of the jokes in it are mine. I wrote the jokes, and I directed part of it. Then I had to go to Australia, and I left the film with Peter, and Peter gave it to Dick Lester to edit. And he did something I would never do. He put music on it in the background—what for I don’t know. Some kind of saxophone player. . . .”
Lester insists on the other hand that “it was written in equal parts by Peter, Spike, and myself.”
“We shot only one take for any gag,” Lester explains. “When we got the rushes, we took them to Peter’s house the next Sunday to edit in his study. The editing, which was really just topping and tailing, took two hours,” a process that occurred on a minimal editing machine perched on one of Peter’s drums in the attic of St. Fred’s. (“Topping and tailing” refers to the process of removing the first and last frames of a piece of film footage and leaving the usable center.) “Every gag we shot, every piece of film that we shot, is in the finished film. We showed it to our wives by projecting it onto