Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [68]
Peter himself didn’t find the Conservatives’ landslide victory in the fall of 1959 a complete coincidence to his film’s extraordinary popularity: “I heard the Tories liked it. It probably did more good to them than it did to Labor.”
Ironically, Peter didn’t want to do the film at all. It wasn’t because he didn’t approve of the film’s politics, which never seem to have crossed his mind. (“I don’t vote,” he later said. “Never have. There are things about the Tories I like, and things about the Socialists. I suppose the ideal would be some kind of Communism, but not Soviet Communism, so what could I vote for?”) It was because he didn’t think his part was funny.
He later claimed to have been offered the role after playing on the director John Boulting’s cricket team in a charity match, but there was a bit more struggle behind it. As Roy Boulting, the film’s producer, describes Peter’s response to the offer: “He read it. And he didn’t want to do it. So we asked him, ‘Why, Peter?’ He said, ‘Where are the laughs? Where does one get a laugh?’ We had to explain to him as best we could that we didn’t regard him as a Goon for this film—that he was going to be playing a real character.”
Peter grew more interested in the role, but he was also attracted by the complete package the Boultings were offering. In January 1959, Peter and the Boultings announced their new five-picture nonexclusive deal. (A nonexclusive deal permits an actor to appear in other producers’ films.) “It’s worth £100,000,” Peter declared; an American newspaper put the figure at $280,000. I’m All Right, Jack would be the first made under the new terms. “For an actor,” Peter explained, “a term contract is a bit like a marriage. You’ve got to have confidence in your partner.”
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I’m All Right, Jack was not Peter’s first picture with the Boultings. In 1958, he’d filmed a supporting role—Terry-Thomas was the lead—in a weak foreign-policy satire called Carlton-Browne of the F.O. (1959), though that film had not yet been released when I’m All Right, Jack began shooting in January. Terry-Thomas plays the title character, the bungling head of an obscure subsection of the Foreign Office. He’s sent to the remote and ridiculous island nation of Gaillardia, a former colony granted the privileges of self-government fifty years before, but nobody in either Britain or Gaillardia has yet been informed of the decision. Peter plays the slimy Amphibulos, who sounds disconcertingly like a Greek waiter.
Gaillardia is a mix of burro-driven carts, unbearable heat, assassinations, and a Baroque palace enjoyed by its handsome, young, British-educated, British-looking king (fine-featured Ian Bannen under brownish makeup). The rest of Gaillardia is treated to fairly harsh satire, though the conquering Britons are scarcely more competent. Peter, clad in a rumpled, ever-damp, and ill-fitting white cotton suit, and wearing boot-black hair and a matching droopy mustache, provides a precise blend of obsequiousness and contamination as the king’s greasy-palmed minister. His best moment in the film is a simple one: Conferring on the Gaillardian crisis on a beach with Carlton-Browne while being fanned and rubbed by two nubile native girls, Amphibulos, who has been lying on his back, rolls himself over (with some labor) and says, gesturing toward a nipple, “Over heeere, dar-leeng.”
According to Roy Boulting, I’m All Right, Jack’s Fred Kite was based on the Electricians Trades Union shop steward at another studio: “He was a very funny little man—unintentionally funny, but he was funny.” Peter, who took the Boultings’ word for it that his role would certainly pull laughs if performed realistically, received confirmation when the Shepperton Studios Works Committee, which represented the various filmmaking trade