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Danischewsky found Peter to be a dependable actor, qualifying his praise with a few sympathetic, sensible observations: “He’s really an absolute sweetie to work with. Terribly sensitive. An easily hurt man—but desperately. Once he knows you’re on his side he’ll do anything on earth for you.”

Filmed on location in Edinburgh and at the Beaconsfield studios in London, The Battle of the Sexes concerns the intrusion of heartless modernity and grotesque feminism into the staid House of Macpherson, makers of fine Scottish woolens. Peter is Mr. Martin, a teetotaling, nonsmoking clerk of indeterminate age. Sellers plays him purposefully vaguely. With his air of resilient beatenness, Mr. Martin could be anywhere from forty to seventy-five. Upon the death of Old Macpherson, the company falls into the inept hands of the son—Robert Morley in a Lane Bryant kilt. The British-educated (and therefore, as his dying father says, “soft”) heir, true to form, swiftly hires a lady efficiency expert, a brassy American divorcee (Constance Cummings), who wreaks havoc with new time clocks, metal filing cabinets, and a confident insistence that the House of Macpherson forgo sheep for synthetics. Mrs. Barrows speaks in italics: “And as for those weavers, well, I mean they can just draw their pensions and take to their caves, that’s how much you need them.” Mr. Martin concludes that he must murder her.

It’s a remarkable performance on Peter’s part, because he lets his audience notice, but only barely, Mr. Martin’s transformation from obedient functionary to noble killer: A well-timed dart of the eyes when Mrs. Barrows speaks. A touch of sarcasm, mild almost to the point of imperceptibility. (Mrs. Barrows demands a time and motion survey; Mr. Martin responds: “We’ve plenty of time here, Mrs. Barrows, but there’s not a great deal of motion.”) The film would play better today if it weren’t for the gleaming, distracting misogyny of the late 1950s, of which poor Constance Cummings is the shrill vehicle.

Mr. Martin’s abortive murder of Mrs. Barrows in her kitchen, said to be mainly improvised while shooting, is one of Peter Sellers’s classic comedy sequences: the hand on the butcher knife, the knife hesitatingly put back in the drawer, the decisive reaching into the drawer when Mrs. Barrows turns her back, the ensuing attempt to stab her to death with a wire whisk. But in comparison to the rest of the film, the key sequence comes off as strangely canned. Because it’s the climactic set piece, the laughs depend not only on Sellers’s having prepared the ground in all of his previous scenes but also on the director’s sense of timing. Peter’s performance is superb throughout; Charles Crichton’s direction isn’t quite up to the task in the key sequence. Still, Peter’s plunging the knife into Mrs. Barrows’s wooden door strikes a rivetingly autobiographical note. Luckily for Peter, contemporary audiences had no way of knowing it.

• • •

His increasing fame brought him into stellar company—and a small controversy. In early January, the British Film Institute set up a lecture series to be held at the National Film Theatre. The proposed guest speakers were an unusual trio: Ivor Montagu, the filmmaker, theorist, associate of both Sergei Eisenstein and Alfred Hitchcock, and winner of the Lenin Peace Prize of 1959; Peter Sellers, the movie star; and Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler’s in-house director, the cinema’s most talented fascist.

Montagu, who hadn’t won the Lenin Prize for nothing, fired off a letter denouncing Riefenstahl. Sellers fired off one of his own denouncing Montagu for denouncing Riefenstahl. The BFI tacitly denounced Riefenstahl by rescinding its own invitation to her, though it used parts of Sellers’s letter to Montagu in its press release announcing the denouncing: “Miss Riefenstahl has presumably been invited to lecture because of her outstanding talents as a filmmaker,” Peter had written. “Alongside her contributions to the art of filmmaking, our efforts, if